[music]
0:00:12.0 Chris Ronan: Hello everyone, welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast about what is happening at HQ, in Seattle. I am Chris Ronan, one of the HQ lackeys. My Geocaching user name is Rockchock. We appreciate you having a listen to our podcast. If you are new here, we try to share a new podcast about every month, there has been a bit of a gap since the last one, with the holiday season and with me taking a little bit of vacation, but I am making up for lost time with a fantastic guest for this episode, Dr. Francis McCubbin is the Astro materials curator at NASA’S Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. He is also a long-time geocacher and was pivotal in a project that is so exciting, that the word “exciting” hardly begins to describe it. The first interplanetary geocaching trackable contained on NASA’S Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover, which is scheduled to land on Mars on February 18, 2021. Dr. McCubbin is here to share details of how this milestone came to happen. Let’s get into it.
[music]
0:01:35.1 CR: Well, let’s start by talking about how you got involved with geocaching, going back to when how did you first hear about it and how did you first get started with playing the game?
0:01:45.8 Dr. Francis McCubbin: Yeah, so my friend Alex Smirnov first introduced me to it. In fact, I had bought a GPS for doing fieldwork, ’cause I’m a geologist and was in graduate school, and so I had this GPS to go mark locations where I would find rocks that I would study. And my friend Alex was like, “Hey, I’m going back home to Slovakia, I’m gonna try this thing out I heard of called Geocaching. Can I borrow your GPS?” So I gave it to him, I didn’t think too much about it, went about it. He came back and he’s like, “This Geocaching thing is a lot of fun, I think you would like it.” And so we went out and he kinda showed me geocaching and I was like, “Oh my gosh, there’s these things hidden in plain sight sometimes, or just hidden everywhere, and no one knows about it, and you can just go find them?” And I don’t know, that’s pretty cool. And so I was hooked, like right away. And yeah, it was a ton of fun. And I think that was in late 2006, and so I’ve been caching since then.
0:02:47.6 CR: And what types of caches are you most drawn to?
0:02:52.6 DM: As a Geologist, I love earth caches, that’s for sure. I’m also a big fan of webcam caches, just ’cause they’re kind of a novelty, there’s not that many left, except there seems to be a ton in Germany. And yeah, I really like challenge caches, not so much for the cache, those are usually in light posts and boring places like that, but working up to qualifying for them, using it as a way to track your stats, I find that to be a lot of fun.
0:03:20.3 CR: Now, I will admit, when it comes to Earth caches, sometimes I will read an Earth cache listing and just… It’s Greek to me sometimes. It can be difficult for me. I would imagine, when you look at an Earth cache listing, I don’t know, that must be pretty cool to have that power to be able to look at a list, even to just understand it every time. [laughter]
0:03:41.9 DM: Well, I’ll be honest, I don’t understand it every time, because the quality of the Earth cache does vary. And sometimes I find myself, when I don’t fully understand the question, I don’t answer it. It’s not gonna be clear I’m a geologist from my answer [chuckle], just because I don’t wanna be that guy, where I’m like, “Hey, you got your answer… Your questionnaire should have been worded this way.” No one needs that, it’s a game, it’s fun. And so it’s all part of the fun.
0:04:14.3 CR: So tell us about what you do at NASA. How did you end up there? And what is your day-to-day work like at NASA?
0:04:22.5 DM: Yeah. So I’ve got two roles at NASA Johnson Space Center, I’m a research scientist, where I study meteorites, I do experiments, basically make my own rocks in the lab, and that’s a ton of fun. That’s kind of how I got into this field, doing experiments and studying meteorites. And a lot of our samples that we study come from Johnson Space Center, because it is the curation facility for all of the astro materials owned by the United States. And so every space mission that’s gone out, including the Apollo missions, all that material that they bring back is stored in the curation facilities at JSC, and so it’s where I always got my samples for the most part. There are meteorites kind of scattered about the world in different museums and things, and I’ve studied those as well, but a lot of the sample-centric work comes out of JSC. And so it’s always been on my radar as this really cool place.
0:05:18.8 DM: I had visited the curation facility as a research scientist, to pick out samples and got to know the folks there pretty well, and when the Astro Materials Curator job opened up, which is basically the head curator for all of JSC, I applied. I was fairly junior, I didn’t really have very high expectations of getting the job, but I ended up getting it, which was awesome, and came and joined them in 2015 and I’ve been in the Astro Materials Curator since then. And my day-to-day is a lot, especially right now, a lot of Microsoft Teams meetings. But in general it’s a mixture of meetings, being in a lab and doing research, and then helping plan future sample return missions and how we’re gonna curate those samples and also fulfilling sample requests for scientists around the world, that try to get our samples.
0:06:13.9 CR: I often tell people, because I was a huge Geocacher before I came to work in HQ, that getting this job that I have was a little like Charlie Bucket in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory, it felt a little like that to me, and as I hear you saying, as a geologist, getting to be the Astro Materials Curator at NASA, it feels like maybe that’s a similar thing as to how I feel about my job that, “Wow, you get to work with lunar samples and stuff like that.” That’s super, super cool for a geologist.
0:06:49.9 DM: It’s really awesome, and you’re just… It’s not just the awesome samples, but it’s the awesome history behind everything. Going into the Apollo lab early in the morning when it’s my day to unlock things, and you’re putting on your bunny suit, ’cause it’s a clean lab, and you’re putting in the combinations and getting in and unlocking everything, and it’s just completely… Well, it’s not super quiet ’cause there’s a lot of air-handling and air passages to keep things clean, but it’s certainly serene. And you feel the history of that place every time you’re in there, and it’s a feeling that is just wonderful every time you go into the lab.
0:07:32.9 CR: That’s super cool. So with this project that we’re here to talk about, The Mars Perseverance Rover, you’ve gotten to combine your work life at NASA with your hobby of Geocaching, and that is a super cool thing to do. How did this all start? Let’s go back to the beginning, to the genesis, to use a NASA history term, the genesis of this project and how it all started to come about.
0:08:05.9 DM: So I’ll go back to first when I first heard about the Mars 2020 mission, the Mars 2020 Rover. And so there’s this campaign we call Mars Sample Return, and this is essentially… The main goal of this campaign is to ultimately bring pieces of Mars back to Earth so that we can study them, curate them, and get all kinds of wonderful information about Mars. Doing that is technically challenging, and the strategy that NASA has developed to do this is they’ve sort of broken it into several missions. The first mission, the first leg of this campaign, is the Mars 2020 Rover, and when I first heard about this and I kinda heard their strategy, they were gonna land this Rover on the surface, it was gonna go and drill different samples in different locations and put them in tubes. And then they were gonna cache them on the surface of Mars and put them in these cache depots, and then drive away and keep doing science and maybe they’d set up several cache depots as they traversed through. And then they’re gonna have another Rover come in, right now they’re calling it the “Fetch Rover”, and it’s gonna come and find those sample caches, collect them and then bring them back to a vehicle that’s gonna then launch them and eventually bring them back to Earth.
0:09:27.6 DM: When I heard this, it was like, “Oh my gosh, they’re geocaching on Mars. The rovers are geocaching.” And this is really cool to me. And I know it’s not exactly Geocaching, but it’s right down the alley of that kind of thing. And so I got excited and started thinking about Geocaching in the context of this mission early on. A colleague of mine, Marc Freese, he is on the Sherlock Team, which is an instrument on the Mars 2020 Rover, and he and his son, they’ve dabbled in Geocaching, and they also saw this connection between the rovers are caching, and they came up with the idea initially of how to incorporate Geocaching into this Rover. And mostly ’cause Marc knows about the Geocache that went to ISS, and he thought, “Well, why don’t we try to put a Geocache on Mars? The rovers are caching. This would be pretty cool.”
0:10:25.6 DM: But he didn’t know a lot about… Well, he knows a lot about Geocaching but he wanted someone that could speak the language, someone that knew the sport or the hobby pretty well, and so he brought me in on the project and told me about it, and I was like, “This is awesome.” They asked me to be a collaborator on the instrument team and try to work out how to get a Geocaching component onto this Rover, as one of our ways to do public outreach with the Rover, which we always try to do with all of our missions. And I enthusiastically accepted that role, I had no idea what to do with it or what I was gonna go with it, but I was pretty sure that we didn’t wanna put a physical cache on the Rover because although that would be really cool, it would also be kind of disappointing, ’cause I don’t think anyone’s gonna go there and sign the log any time soon. And to me, it’s the most fun when everyone in the community gets to participate in the activity, and so I thought, “Okay, well, if it was gonna be a cache, it would have to be virtual,” that kinda doesn’t really jive with the guidelines, but this is a geological Rover, Earth caches are a thing, let me talk to Matt Dawson, who’s sort of like the head earth caching guy for the Geological Society of America, and see what he thinks about this.
0:11:44.8 DM: I had already been planning to going to the earth cache event that year, which was actually held in the same location and in connection with the Geological Society of America meeting that I was going for, I was going as a scientist anyway. And so I went there, went to the mega event, tracked down Matt and started talking to him about this, he got really excited about it as well. And he put me in contact with the folks at Geocaching HQ, and yeah once that connection was made we started working out how best to incorporate Geocaching into the Rover, we came up with this… A trackable would be the most straightforward way of doing things, it would be the easiest way to get it through approvals for all the hardware, and that’s kind of how this project came to be.
0:12:31.6 CR: Well, you referenceed approvals just now. So how much of a process is it, on the NASA end, to get something like this done, as far as rules that have to be met or specifications or things of that nature?
0:12:46.0 DM: Yeah. So every piece of flight hardware needs to be built to a very specific set of specifications, and every image and every set of text that goes on has to get approved by public affairs, and NASA headquarters, and so we kinda had some iteration back and forth about what we could actually put on the trackable marker. I’m not gonna say what’s on it because you’re all gonna see it when it lands and the Watson camera takes an image of it, but all of what you’ll see there went through many layers of approval, before it could be on the Rover.
0:13:21.3 CR: So as the days count down to the Rover actually landing and people actually getting to see the trackable, I mean, you’ve got a lot of other projects that you’re working on, as you mentioned to me. I guess I’m thinking if it was me I would just be glued to some monitoring system, I don’t even know what you guys are able to look at, to be able to kind of see the state of this. And I would definitely have that date circled on my calendar. It must just be so exciting to have this getting closer and closer and that moment of it landing and then eventually that moment of that camera focusing on the trackable.
0:14:00.9 DM: Oh, it’s incredibly exciting, and the anticipation is… You know, it’s exciting and terrifying at the same time. I mean we have zero expectation that anything would ever go wrong, but it’s not easy to land something on Mars, and I’m certainly gonna be tuned in the whole time as it is descending towards the surface of Mars and landing. But fortunately there’s not too much to do between now and February 18th when that ultimately happens. Everything with the Rover is nominal, which is NASA-speak for everything’s A-okay.
[laughter]
0:14:42.4 CR: Well, as I’ve heard people in the community talking about this project, everybody’s so excited about it. And I know that when we eventually have the time when events can happen and people can be out gathering and seeing each other more again, you’re probably gonna get a lot of folks coming up and thanking you and I’ll be the first to say that right here, because it… Between you and your colleagues, I mean, as you mentioned, a lot of folks have worked on this, including a couple that are familiar with geocaching, like you are. But this is such a neat thing and it’s so cool to see geocaching having a presence, you know, the interplanetary sense. So, what an awesome thing and thanks for everything that you’ve done on this.
0:15:26.6 DM: Yeah. Thank you very much and I really couldn’t have done it without the backing of the entire Sherlock team. This was truly a team effort and it was a ton of fun. And honestly, for me, it’s just so rewarding to see geocaching going interplanetary. It’s so awesome.
[music]
0:15:43.2 CR: That was Dr. Francis McCubbin, Astro Materials Curator at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. We so appreciate his time for this podcast and of course for everything he and his team and the many folks at Geocaching HQ have done to make the first interplanetary trackable a reality.
0:16:03.6 CR: If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to check out the geocaching blog where we have another interview with Dr. McCubbin, including a few extra details about the Mars Perseverance Rover. Hey, if you have an idea for the podcast or any feedback for us, send an email to podcast@geocaching.com. We always appreciate hearing from you. In the meantime, from me and all the lackeys at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.
