Nov 7, 2018 By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 3 min read

Adam Steltzner will flat-out tell you that he didn’t do well academically, preferring to play in a rock band rather than apply himself to learning.

The course of his life eventually changed, he told his audience Nov. 6 at Upper St. Clair High School, and with it came a change in “the way we land spacecraft on the surface of Mars.”

As the second speaker in the Town Hall South lecture series’ 50th season, Steltzner explained how he evolved from underachiever to engineer in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with a key role in developing a system that helped deliver the 2,000-pound exploration rover Curiosity unscathed to the red planet in 2012.

The vehicle’s name fits appropriately within the context of Steltzner’s message for those in attendance:

“Perhaps the most important thing I want to impart is a lesson I learned about the power of our human curiosity. It’s alive in every single one of us. It’s sort of our human superpower, and I’ve come to trust it to be a great force of good.”

Back in the mid-’80s, while returning from a gig by his band in San Francisco, he noticed the relative position of the constellation Orion had changed since his previous trip. His curiosity sufficiently piqued, he decided to enroll in a community-college astronomy course that had physics as a prerequisite.

Even though the astronomy class was cancelled for a lack of students, he followed through with physics. And his study of the nature and properties of matter and energy eventually led him to working on a series of NASA flight projects, including the Mars Exploration Rover mission.

The program represents a continuation of attempts, starting with the Viking space probes in the 1970s, to determine whether Mars has sustained life, past or present. Two rovers, named Spirit and Opportunity, landed in 2004.

“They were very important for this question of life because they told us that liquid water had been on the surface of Mars. But they couldn’t tell us some very important things about the water. Was it salty? Sweet? Was the water acidic?” Steltzner explained.

“So in comes Curiosity, a behemoth, huge, chock full of all the science instruments we need to unlock the question of that early wet Mars.”

The more advanced rover’s size presented considerable challenge about how to land it safely. An engineering team led by Steltzner came up with what they dubbed the sky crane, a descent module with the function of lowering Curiosity to the surface using cables.

The notion for the sky crane came from a brainstorming session with a variety of participants, from generals who had worked with previous, successful missions to younger engineers.

Following Curiosity’s landing, the rover was able to drill into bedrock for previously unobtainable mineral samples. And through them, scientists have made the determination:

“Was early wet Mars habitable for life? The answer is yes,” Steltzner asserted, based on findings that date back billions of years.

“Was Mars alive? Is Mars alive? Those questions remain unanswered in front of us,” he continued. “But we know that when earth was starting to get life, the conditions were ripe for life on Mars.”

NASA’s next rover mission, Mars 2020, could provide further elucidation as it seeks signs of habitable conditions and perhaps past microbial life, itself. And the project’s chief engineer is Adam Steltzner.

Not bad for a guy who barely made it out of high school.

For more information about the Curiosity rover, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/.