NASA's Mars rover driver Scott Maxwell shared all kinds of amazing things about himself when we last spoke in August. He's a cancer survivor, for one. And his father was a railroad engineer, passionate about driving trains, while Maxwell himself has been enthusiastically controlling vehicles on Mars since 2004.
"This is the kind of thing that I, as a kid, grew up dreaming about doing, and I have been unbelievably lucky to be able to do this with part of my life," Maxwell told me.
Given how much he loves working on Mars missions, it was shocking when he revealed on social media that he would be leaving NASA for Google.
"It's a lot like when my 15-year marriage broke up: JPL and I have grown in different directions, and I'm not a good fit there anymore," he wrote on Google+. His last day at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was Friday.
Now wait a minute: What does driving a rover on Mars have to do with working for a massive company best known for its search engine? According to Maxwell, the jobs are not as different as you think.
At Google, Maxwell will be writing high-reliability software - in other words, making sure that everything runs the way it's supposed to. For instance, when you direct your browser to google.com, you should get the Google homepage. It's critical to keep errors rare, just like with software that controls equipment on Mars.
Maxwell helped write the software that has been used for the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and for Curiosity, which landed August 6 and recently got to try out its drill on the Martian surface.
"If it fails even once you maybe don't get your commands up to the rover that day," he told me. "We can't tolerate those kinds of failures. I'm proud to say that never happened, by the way, in nearly 10 years."
From a software-development standpoint, it's not a stretch to launch into highly reliable software that happens to be controlling machines on Earth rather than Mars.
The most fun parts of the Mars rover missions were living on Mars time, he said. For Spirit and Opportunity, the schedule was pretty regular: As the rover "wakes up" 40 minutes later every day, so do you, because a day on Mars is about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth.
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