ROCKET MAN

Photo courtesy of Matt Horner

Family Time - The Horners of Anderson gather at the NASA Visitor Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla., during the Thanksgiving week. From left, son Matt, mother Laura, daughter Jamie and dad Richard.

Former Anderson resident Matt Horner, 28, recently traveled to Cape Canaveral, Fla., to watch as a favorite work project — the Mars Science Laboratory — blasted off Nov. 26 into deep space atop an Atlas V 541 rocket.

A 2002 graduate of Anderson Union High School, Horner went to work in January 2007 on the latest Mars rover, dubbed “Curiosity,” when he was hired by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. Just a few short months before, he successfully completed his course work for a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at the University of California at San Diego.

“We were already in the fabrication phase when I came aboard as a member of the Assembly, Testing, Launch and Operations team. My position here at JPL is a Rover Integration Engineer,” Horner said via telephone during a lunch break Wednesday, Nov. 30.

“I started with the back shell of the Rover lander that also serves as a heat shield and a sky crane,” Horner said of his four-year work project.

Like many members of his work team, Horner endured a two-year delay finishing up testing of the Rover when parts suppliers were unable to meet the original 2009 launch window.

Due to the long elliptical orbit of Mars around the Sun, , the best time to fire off a rocket for the 354 million-mile trip to Earth’s closest planetary neighbor happens during a 24-day launch period every two years, according to a Mission Fact Sheet available from NASA, the national space agency.

Joining Horner in the special VIP viewing area at NASA’s Florida visitors center for the 2011 Thanksgiving week launch were his sister Jamie Horner, 24, a member of the U.S. Air Force assigned to Andrews Joint Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., and his parents, long-time Anderson residents Richard and Laura Horner.

“It was just unbelievable. We were thrilled to get an invitation to the launch,” Laura Horner said upon her return home.

“We are just overwhelmed with pride in what our son Matt has accomplished,” his mother stated.

Several times during the last four years, usually when prompted by a phone call or email from her son, Laura Horner has logged into the Jet Propulsion Lab’s web site to view live video feeds of work being done on the Mars Rover.“Of course, Matt is usually dressed in a light blue ‘bunny’ suit because they work in a clean room environment so it is hard for anyone else to tell who he is when I yell, ‘That’s my son working on the Mars Rover,’” said Laura Horner, who works at the Satellite Horse Racing Facility on the grounds of the Shasta District Fair.

When the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasedena hosted an open house last May, Matt Horner invited his favorite Anderson High math teacher, Joe Curiel, and several other faculty members to bring down 20 of the school’s most promising students interested in practical applications of both mathematics and science.

“That was just before we shipped everything out to Florida so it would be ready for the launch,” Matt Horner explained.

Making the trip last spring was Austin Carrell, now a junior at Anderson High.

“It was really cool,” Carrell said of the two-day visit. “We got to go into all the buildings and they showed us all of the machinery and all of the lasers that they used to cut the parts.”

“I am thinking about pursuing a career in engineering so I really enjoyed the trip. We even got to go out to dinner with Matt afterwards and he answered all of our questions about what he did,” Carrell said.

About the launch itself, Matt Horner said, “It was beyond my wildest of dreams!”

“It was awesome to be able to see it launch and to be a small part of history. Being there with my family was an experience that was beyond words. We all had a good cry and a group hug afterwords,” Horner said.

The Rover’s trip from Earth to Mars will take about 36 weeks. Most of this period (210 days) will be the cruise phase of the mission. The final 45 days are the approach phase, states a press kit available from NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Traveling at about 13,200 miles per hour, the Rover and descent stage of the rocket’s payload will enter the Mars atmosphere at about 81 miles from the surface. A heat shield protects the rover and sky crane during the peak heating (3,800 degrees Fahrenheit) and peak deceleration stages and separates when the Rover and sky crane are 5 miles from the surface. A parachute deploys at about 7 miles up and gradually slows the Rover and sky crane to about 180 miles per hour until the back shell separates and the sky crane’s four sets of rockets begin a poweredd descent and hover, NASA’s press kit explains.

At about 66 feet from the surface, the hovering sky crane will lower the Rover to the surface, detach the cable and umbilical control cord and then fly away, so as not to contaminate the Rover’s landing site. It is designed to come to the surface at least 500 feet (150 meters) from the Rover, and more likely double that distance, NASA’s press kit states.

The rest of the world will be paying close attention Aug. 6, 2012, when the 1,982-pound Mars Science Laboratory Rover “Curiosity” finally descends from its rocket-supported sky crane that Horner helped devise and begins to explore the Gale Crater surface of Mars.

If the Rover can survive the surface temperatures that range from minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 degrees Celsius) to 32 degrees F (0 degrees C), and transmit a radio signal from Mars to Earth — a 13.8 minute delay due to the distance traveled — “Curiosity” will conduct 10 different experiments on surface materials gathered by its robotic arms in an attempt to determine whether microbial life forms exist or ever did existed on the fourth planet from the Sun.

The $2.5 billion Rover’s planned operation life is one Martian year on the surface (687 Earth days or 669 Martian days). Communication with the Rover will be unavailable for about 20 days in April 2013 due to Mars’ position nearly behind the sun from Earth.

For more on the Mars Space Laboratory, go to www.nasa.gov.