<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Published in the December 2012 issue, on sale any day now SEE ALL THE 2012 AMERICANS OF THE YEAR When Tom Rivellini was finishing his master&amp;#039;s degree in aerospace engineering, he declared on his r\u00E9sum\u00E9, somewhat ambitiously, that he was seeking a job in &amp;quot;advanced spacecraft design.&amp;quot; This was 1991; the Berlin Wall had recently fallen, the so-called Evil Empire was kaput, the space race and Star Wars weaponry were looking a lot less mission critical. President Bush and Congress had pulled back funding for the aerospace industry; it was a hard time for a guy who admittedly loved difficult math problems and groan-worthy puns and pocket protectors full of colored markers. After a few months of hearing &amp;quot;No, we don&amp;#039;t have anything,&amp;quot; Rivellini revised his CV. Advanced spacecraft design? That&amp;#039;s kind of cheesy, he told himself. Nobody actually calls it that in the real world. Then one day, his career counselor at the University of Texas, Austin, suggested he try NASA&amp;#039;s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. A native of upstate New York, the son of Italian-immigrant parents, he&amp;#039;d attended Syracuse University as an undergrad. Ugh, he thought, California. Reluctantly, he called JPL, the federally funded space-research-and-development center managed by the nearby California Institute of Technology. After being passed around a few times, he finally got a person on the business side. One of the group supervisors, she said, was &amp;quot;actually looking for somebody.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s the name of his group?&amp;quot; Rivellini asked.&amp;quot;Advanced Spacecraft Design.&amp;quot;   Jono Rotman  Sitting across the table from him today, in a restaurant not far from JPL, his green eyes ablaze with engagement, it is easy to imagine the young Tommaso Rivellini who arrived here twenty-one years ago with a nimbus of curly hair. Last summer, as the principal engineer for entry, descent, and landing mechanical systems, he and his exuberant multi-culti team became scientific rock stars. They designed and operated the entire descent to Mars, including the mind-boggling &amp;quot;sky crane&amp;quot; landing of the Curiosity rover \u2014 a $2.5 billion six-wheeled rolling laboratory. A short in-house film documenting the creation of the Rube Goldbergian landing system, Curiosity&amp;#039;s Seven Minutes of Terror, was an Internet sensation. Today the brilliant but unassuming Rivellini has a stubble-shaved head; his laptop case slung over one shoulder has replaced his markers. He has the strong build and energetic gait of an outdoor enthusiast; though his next mission is still years away, he is already fully immersed in it and says he only has time to exercise on the weekends. Twenty years ago, for his initial assignment at JPL, the young Rivellini designed a small bracket that became part of an Air Force satellite. Thereafter he was assigned to the Mars Pathfinder, the first Mars landing project since the Viking landers in 1975. He&amp;#039;s been professionally engaged almost exclusively in Mars landings ever since. As it happens, landing is one of the hardest issues in Mars exploration. Science offers at this time only two main options for touching down on another planet or moon. If it has enough atmosphere, a parachute can be employed. If it has no atmosphere, rocket engines can be used. Mars poses a challenging combination of both situations \u2014 ample atmosphere to slow an entering space vehicle but not enough to allow a survivable landing. Engines offer a steady descent but require heavy fuel. There is also a risk that swirling rocks and dust will damage the spacecraft&amp;#039;s valuable instrumentation. Starting with the Pathfinder mission in 1996, with its Sojourner rover \u2014 and moving on to the more ambitious Spirit and Opportunity rovers in 2003 \u2014 Rivellini and his team solved their landing issues with a combination of parachutes, descent rockets, and enormous air bags. Constructed of multiple layers of Vectran, a synthetic material said to be more flexible and impact-resistant than Kevlar, the air bags inflated around the lander as if it were swaddled within a giant bunch of grapes. The vehicle hit the ground, bounced as many as thirty times (as high as fifty feet), and then came rolling to a stop. The system was inelegant but effective. (And reflected a kind of underlying sense of imagination and perverse humor. You get the sense with Rivellini that somewhere deep inside he&amp;#039;s waiting to wake up one morning to discover this was all just a crazy dream.) When it came time to plan Curiosity, the variables were even more challenging. This rover is the largest yet, two thousand pounds, the size of a small SUV. Last August 5, after traveling 352 million miles in roughly eight months (the launch window occurs once every two years), the spaceship carrying Curiosity hit Mars&amp;#039;s atmosphere at thirteen thousand miles per hour. Seven miles above the surface of the planet, slowed to a speed of nine hundred miles per hour by the light atmosphere, the spacecraft deployed the largest parachute ever used in an extraterrestrial landing. (There&amp;#039;s another series of in-house videos on YouTube, Testing Curiosity&amp;#039;s Parachute, that documents the trials, which took place in the world&amp;#039;s largest wind tunnel. The drama is truly a geek&amp;#039;s delight, down to the fourth and final episode, in which Rivellini and other scientists play a prank on the guy in charge of parachutes by pretending that every one of their data-collection efforts had mysteriously failed during the last critical test. What a hoot!) Once it was slowed by the chute to 313 miles per hour, the lander&amp;#039;s computers activated a system that ejected its heat shield (sending it flying off like a Frisbee) and then fired its retro-rockets. Because air bags were not practical given the spacecraft&amp;#039;s size and blowback from the rockets would stir up potentially destructive debris, Rivellini and his team spent ten years perfecting another solution for getting to the ground. As the lander reached a height of seventy-five feet above the surface, half of its engines were automatically shut down. On command, as the spacecraft slowly descended, three specially constructed nylon cords spooled out and slowly lowered the lander to the ground.... Whereupon the spacecraft cut the cords and flew off to a distance of at least five hundred feet \u2014 to keep the rover clear of collateral damage \u2014 and crashed itself to the surface. Amazing as it seemed, the system worked beautifully. The seven minutes of terror? Actually, it was double that. &amp;quot;We get the telemetry, so we pretty much know what&amp;#039;s going on \u2014 with a fourteen-minute delay,&amp;quot; Rivellini says. &amp;quot;So all we can do is just mentally lock ourselves out. What&amp;#039;s funny is, right at the moment of landing \u2014 we all know what time it&amp;#039;s supposed to land, even if we can&amp;#039;t see it \u2014 everybody makes jokes: &amp;#039;Well, we&amp;#039;re on the surface ... one way or another. It&amp;#039;s either a smoking pile of rubble or a pristine spacecraft.&amp;#039; You had to have a sense of humor because it really was kind of terrifying. Literally a nail-biting experience.&amp;quot; And when you finally got the word? &amp;quot;That was pure euphoria! Ten years of really hard work, worrying, and anxieties were instantly rewarded in no uncertain terms. The &amp;#039;seven minutes of terror&amp;#039; had actually been terrifying. Few events in my life had the same impact. The birth of my two boys and my wedding are the closest. &amp;quot;I actually wound up cheering so much that my voice was totally shot for a week.&amp;quot; Currently working its way across Mars&amp;#039;s Gale Crater at a top speed of eight feet per minute, the rover should continue to send data back for two years. &amp;quot;When we pull off these missions and they go as well as they did, it belies the truly extreme challenge that&amp;#039;s behind the scenes,&amp;quot; Rivellini says. &amp;quot;I remember I showed my friend Seven Minutes of Terror. My friend said, &amp;#039;Tom, are you guys playing up the drama for the audience, or is it really that hard?&amp;#039; &amp;quot;And I said, &amp;#039;It&amp;#039;s really that hard. It&amp;#039;s like a thousand times harder than we describe.&amp;#039; And it really is. Because you literally get one shot after spending $2.5 billion.&amp;quot;  So what&amp;#039;s next? &amp;quot;The next big challenge is coming up with an entry descent landing system that is viable for sending humans to Mars,&amp;quot; Rivellini says. &amp;quot;It has to be really big, and you probably can&amp;#039;t launch all in one piece, so you&amp;#039;ve probably got to put it together up in space and then? I don&amp;#039;t know. Just barreling through the atmosphere and using parachutes... We might not be able to have parachutes big enough. So then everything changes.&amp;quot; The next actual mission, he says, will likely be an Earth-Mars-Earth sample mission \u2014 the challenge to bring home the lander and the specimens it collects. Due to the weight of the fuel and the ascent hardware necessary, the spacecraft will be heavier. And harder to land. To this end, Rivellini has assumed a new title \u2014 chief engineer for low-density supersonic decelerators. The kid whose mother used to hide her appliances for fear her son would take them apart (and not be able to put them back together) is testing an even larger parachute... and an inflatable inner-tube-like contraption for the bottom of the spacecraft designed to give it a larger profile (and greater atmospheric braking and some maneuverability without adding a lot of mass) upon entering the Mars atmosphere. Hearing Rivellini describe one test protocol \u2014 which will take place in the Mojave Desert, on a four-mile-long rocket sled owned by the Navy, to test the parachute&amp;#039;s performance at high speeds \u2014 is like watching an episode of MythBusters. &amp;quot;You get this huge rocket sled, you fill it with seventy thousand pounds of weight, you get four big rockets. You run a cable from the sled through a pulley \u2014 this huge two-hundred-thousand-pound-strength Kevlar cable around this giant pulley \u2014 which is attached to a helicopter, hovering a half mile high, that has a parachute hanging underneath it. We came up with this literally crazy idea and we fell in love with it because it solves so many of our problems,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s really a lot of fun.&amp;quot; Finishing his dinner after another long day, eager to land at home with his family, Rivellini wants to make a last point: This kind of singular recognition makes him uncomfortable. It takes a lot of people to land on Mars. He didn&amp;#039;t do anything himself. That&amp;#039;s part of the beauty. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not just science. There&amp;#039;s an emotional aspect to it. You care about the people and the project and you don&amp;#039;t want to screw it up. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s exhilarating to constantly be immersed in this group of supersmart people who are all highly motivated team players. Of course there&amp;#039;s politics, of course there&amp;#039;s all that kind of stuff that goes along with that environment, but somehow those things fall away when it&amp;#039;s black-and-white \u2014 something&amp;#039;s either going to fail or it&amp;#039;s going to work. You learn to count on folks, because everybody&amp;#039;s pulling their own. You know that if you screw up your job, there&amp;#039;s a lot of people who just put in seven and eight years of their lives and have been totally committed.&amp;quot; Rivellini rises from the table to head home to his wife and two boys. He&amp;#039;s so busy, he says, his only hobby is oil painting. His wife is half Mexican, half Italian. Her father was a professional matador. Inspired by a photo they have at home, Rivellini has lately completed two paintings of bullfighters. It only takes &amp;quot;a couple of months and you can crank out something pretty nice,&amp;quot; he says. How to land on Mars: First, the thin Mars atmosphere slowed the lander to about 900 mph, then a giant parachute slowed it to 200 mph, and retro-rockets gradually brought it down to about 75 feet above the surface, where three nylon chords lowered it softly to the ground. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a16727/tom-rivellini-curiosity-interview-1212/?src=rss>