NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover mission serves as ultimate test for working from home (planet)

An artist’s conception shows NASA’s Perseverance rover using the PIXL X-ray instrument to analyze rock on Mars. (NASA / JPL Illustration)

The launch of NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover marks the start of a seven-month-long journey involving tens of millions of miles of travel — but it also marks the end of an eight-year-long journey involving millions of miles of travel on the part of scientists and engineers across the country.

And perhaps the biggest marvel is that, in the end, most of them got the rover and its scientific instruments ready for launch while working from home.

Working from home has been a tough thing to manage for many of the businesses affected by the coronavirus pandemic and social-distancing restrictions. It’s been tough for NASA as well.

“Putting a spacecraft together that’s going to Mars, and not making a mistake — it’s hard, no matter what. Trying to do it during the middle of a pandemic, it’s a lot harder,” Matt Wallace, the mission’s deputy project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said during a pre-launch briefing.

Fortunately, NASA and its partners could draw upon decades’ worth of experience in remote operations. “When the pandemic came along, it didn’t make that much difference in the way I operate, because I was already used to working remotely with JPL,” said the University of Washington’s Tim Elam, who’s part of the science team for the rover’s X-ray fluorescence spectrometer.

Once the rover is on its way, working remotely will become even more routine. “Pasadena is about the same distance away from Mars that Seattle is,” Elam joked.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket could send the rover on its way from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida as soon as Thursday: Liftoff is scheduled for 7:50 a.m. ET (4:50 a.m. PT), and forecasters say there’s an 80% chance of acceptable weather. You can watch NASA’s live video coverage of the countdown starting at 7 a.m. ET (4 a.m. PT) Thursday:

The 1-ton, six-wheeled rover is due to land next February inside Mars’ 28-mile-wide Jezero Crater, at the site of an ancient river delta that now appears bone-dry. The top three tasks on the $2.4 billion mission’s to-do list are:

Thousands of scientists, engineers, technicians, support staff and students have been working to get Perseverance ready for this trip to Mars, including hundreds in the Seattle area. Here are four case studies, focusing on Mars mission veterans as well as a first-timer.

Aerojet Rocketdyne’s propulsion systems have flown aboard every successful NASA mission to Mars, and this time around, Aerojet’s involved in virtually every phase of Perseverance’s journey.

The company is providing four solid rocket motors to give ULA’s Atlas 5 rocket an extra boost, plus the main engine and 12 reaction control system thrusters for the Atlas’ Centaur upper stage. Aerojet also built eight stabilizing thrusters for Perseverance’s spacecraft, eight more thrusters for the descent stage, and the plutonium-fueled power source for the rover.

All of the 28 thrusters on the list were manufactured and tested at Aerojet’s facility in Redmond, Wash., which has been in operation since 1968. “That history goes back to the Boeing spin-off engineers who formed the company originally as Rocket Research Company, with the desire to focus on space production,” said Fred Wilson, Aerojet’s director of marketing and business development in Redmond.

Most of the work for the Perseverance rover was done long before the pandemic hit, but Aerojet is currently in the midst of preparations for future missions to Mars as well as to the moon. Wilson said about two-thirds of the Redmond workforce is working from home.

“Everybody who doesn’t have to be directly involved in working on the hardware is working from home,” he said. “But we have been able to maintain a high level of operational efficiency. … Our on-time delivery performance for the year is 92% out of the Redmond site.”

Wilson said not one of Aerojet’s Redmond employees has tested positive for COVID-19. “So, knock on wood, it’s been a very good success story for us,” he said.

Melissa Rice, a planetary scientist at Western Washington University, stands alongside a Curiosity testbed rover at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s “Mars Yard.” (NASA / JPL Photo via WWU)

Perseverance is the third Mars rover for Melissa Rice, a planetary scientist at Western Washington University. And the fact that she’s based in Bellingham, Wash., more than 1,200 miles from Pasadena, means she’s had plenty of experience with working remotely.

It all started when she was a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and JPL, where she worked on the Opportunity and Curiosity missions.

“Because the whole mission is so well set up for remote operations, often the science team would be calling in to our meetings from their various offices at JPL, rather than being in the physical room together, just because we have that teleconferencing capability set up so well,” Rice recalled. “So, when I left JPL and started my position here at Western Washington in Bellingham, it took quite a while for some of my colleagues to realize that I wasn’t just down the hall.”

That familiarity with remote operations has come in handy for dealing with the pandemic. “We’ve had lots of practice,” she said.

Rice’s team works on the rover’s Mastcam-Z imaging system, which is destined to become the first set of zoom cameras on the Red Planet. The system can capture wide-angle or high-resolution 3-D pictures and video in a variety of wavelengths to help scientists determine the mineral composition of Perseverance’s surroundings.

“My specific role on the camera team has been selecting the wavelengths that we’ll use to look for hydration on the surface,” Rice explained. “This will be the first time that we have a rover whose eyes are specifically tuned to the absorption features due to water.”

Her one big regret is that she and her students had to call off a trip to Florida to witness the launch, due to the pandemic. “That’s unfortunate, more so for the students than for me,” she said, “because I think seeing the launch live can be a life-changing experience.”

First Mode’s president and chief engineer, Chris Voorhees, shows off the employee-owned company’s digs near Seattle’s Pike Place Market. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Perseverance provided a Seattle startup called First Mode with its first contract.

“The first activity that we did was to support the Perseverance rover, specifically its physical assembly and integration,” said Chris Voorhees, the company’s president and chief engineer.

When First Mode was founded in 2018, many of its 11 employees were alumni of JPL as well as Planetary Resources, a Redmond-based asteroid mining venture that fell upon hard times. Now the engineering firm is prospering, with a workforce of more than 50 employees.

First Mode’s engineers designed a rover surrogate, nicknamed the “Faux-ver,” which was used to simulate the real rover’s mass and thermal characteristics during the development and testing of spacecraft hardware.

Now engineers from First Mode are part of the team that’s planning Perseverance’s atmospheric entry, descent and landing on Mars — a key phase of the mission that’s known as EDL or the “seven minutes of terror.” In the months ahead, they’ll be supporting operational readiness tests aimed at making absolutely sure that nothing will go wrong. Or if something does go wrong, that there’s a backup plan for saving the mission.

Because of the pandemic, those tests will have to be run in remote mode. “That’s a real challenge, not just for us, but for the team in general, ” Voorhees said.

“What you really want is to have everybody in the room, but if you can’t have everybody in a room, how do you best represent that?” he said. “That team is working through the challenges of that right now.”

This is the first Mars rodeo for the University of Washington’s Tim Elam.

Elam built his career as an expert on X-ray fluorescence at UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory. So when scientists and engineers were brought onto the team for Perseverance’s Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, or PIXL, Elam was a natural addition.

“All the rovers so far have and an X-ray-based instrument that measured the elemental composition of the rocks,” Elam said. “What’s new about PIXL is that it measures that not over a fairly broad area of a couple of centimeters, but in a very tiny spot. It’s about 100 microns.”

Spot-by-spot readings from PIXL’s X-ray fluorescence spectrometer will be assembled and matched up with images of areas the size of postage stamps to get a sense of detailed variations in physical structure and chemical composition.

The scale is such that scientists could arguably make out the fossilized remnants of Martian microbes. But even if ancient life isn’t definitively discovered, the data from PIXL — and from a complementary instrument called SHERLOC — will help scientists decide which rock samples are most worth bringing back to Earth for further study.

Elam helps bridge the gap between the engineers in charge of designing the instrument and the scientists in charge of looking for just the right kind of rock. “I don’t have an official title, but I like to think of myself as the chief spectroscopist,” he said in a video.

During a Zoom interview, Elam said he missed being able to meet up with the rest of his team in Pasadena. “We’ve learned to get better at doing it remotely, and the ability to have tools that involve video and simultaneous audio, just like we’re having now, makes a big difference,” he said. “But I still miss those interactions.”

He and his family had been planning to travel to Florida for the launch, but like Rice, they had to call off the trip due to the pandemic.

“My family has been following this just as much as I have. They’re interested in space, and they want to see what happens,” Elam said. “So I would say there’s a pretty good chance that this household is going to be awake at 4 a.m. on the day of the launch.”

Live coverage of the countdown via NASA and United Launch Alliance is due to begin at 4 a.m. PT (7 a.m. ET) Thursday.

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Liftoff! NASA’s Perseverance rover begins odyssey to seek out traces of life on Mars

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket sends NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover into space from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. (ULA Photo)

With the fiery flash of a rocket launch, NASA’s Perseverance rover headed out today for what’s expected to be a decade-long campaign to store up and bring back Martian samples that may hold evidence of alien life.

United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 7:50 a.m. ET (4:50 a.m. PT), sending the rover into space for a seven-month cruise to Mars.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, access to the area surrounding the launch pad was restricted, but hundreds of thousands of people watched the liftoff via streaming video. And as if the pandemic wasn’t enough of a challenge, in the minutes before launch, a magnitude-4.2 earthquake rattled through NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where the rover mission is managed.

Mission managers said the complications had no effect on the countdown.

“This is all about perseverance,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said during the buildup to liftoff. “Going to Mars is all about persevering in general. Doing it now is more persevering than ever before.”

An hour after launch, Perseverance’s spacecraft separated from the Atlas 5’s Centaur upper stage and flew outward to the Red Planet. NASA said the signal from the spacecraft was initially “too loud for the antennas on Earth.” But in the midst of a post-launch news briefing, deputy project manager Matt Wallace reported that the operations team was eventually able to lock onto the signal properly.

Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said such adjustments came with the territory. “You want to be a rocket scientist, this is what you do. … You have to have a little bit of nerves if you’re in this business,” he said.

Adam Steltzner, the mission’s chief engineer at JPL, said he expected in-space operations to settle into a routine. “I’m looking forward to, ideally, a very quiet and boring cruise to Mars, as we prepare for the never-boring and always stressful entry, descent and landing on the 18th of February,” he said on NASA TV.

Like its older cousin, NASA’s Curiosity rover, Perseverance will land with the aid of parachutes and a retrorocket-equipped descent stage. A “Sky Crane” will lower the 1-ton rover to the surface of Jezero Crater, and then the descent stage will blast itself away from the landing site.

The six-wheeled, nuclear-powered robot is designed for a primary mission lasting at least one Martian year, which is the equivalent of nearly two Earth years. But if Perseverance follows Curiosity’s example, it could be on the job for far longer.

Perseverance bears a strong resemblance to Curiosity, in that they’re built on the same basic chassis with a similar-looking camera mast and robotic arm. NASA and its collaborators have added some new twists, however.

A mini-helicopter called Ingenuity is tucked under Perseverance’s belly and will be deployed for unprecedented test flights after the landing. Another experiment called MOXIE will test a technique for turning the carbon dioxide in Mars’ thin atmosphere to oxygen. That trick will come in handy if and when NASA sends astronauts on extended trips to Mars as is planned in the 2030s.

The biggest difference between Curiosity and Perseverance is that the new rover’s scientific instruments are fine-tuned to look for signs of life on the microscopic scale.

A laser-equipped camera system called SuperCam can detect organic compounds in rocks and soils from a distance of more than 20 feet. Two close-up imaging systems, SHERLOC and PIXL, can theoretically make out the structural and chemical signs of fossilized microbes. And a radar imager called RIMFAX can map subsurface structure at a resolution of inches, to depths as deep as 30 feet.

The target landing site in Jezero Crater is thought to have been a river delta in ancient times, and it was chosen in hopes that the minerals in Martian rock would preserve fossils — or at least the chemical evidence of biological processes.

It’s unlikely that Perseverance will find indisputable evidence of life on Mars. Debates about Martian life detection tend to end inconclusively, whether we’re talking about the Viking lander missions of the 1970s or suggestions of “nanofossils” in Martian meteorites that fell to Earth. But this mission has a long-term strategy for settling such debates.

Perseverance is designed to drill out and save dozens of promising core samples for later pickup. The current plan, which is still under development by NASA and the European Space Agency, calls for sending out a NASA lander and a European-built rover in 2026. That rover would fetch the samples and put them into a capsule, which would in turn be loaded onto a mini-rocket and launched into Martian orbit.

“It’s kind of an interplanetary relay race we’re doing,” David Parker, ESA’s director of human and robotic spaceflight, explained during a pre-launch briefing.

Yet another spacecraft would take a trip to Martian orbit, capture the capsule and bring the samples back to Earth for study in 2031. That would mark the first opportunity to examine fresh samples from Mars with the best instruments that scientists have at their disposal — and the best opportunity to answer the age-old question about life on Mars..

“I do believe that the ultimate proof and the ultimate analyses that are really critical to that question, at the level of standard that we need to answer this, will come from laboratory analysis on Earth,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “So I believe this will be a process that will extend over 10 years or so, where evidence is mounting from remote sensing and in-situ measurements up there, but then really culminating in bringing these samples back.”

More morsels about the Mars mission:

This is an updated version of a report first published at 5:01 a.m. PT July 30.

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NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover mission serves as ultimate test for working from home (planet)

An artist’s conception shows NASA’s Perseverance rover using the PIXL X-ray instrument to analyze rock on Mars. (NASA / JPL Illustration)

The launch of NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover marks the start of a seven-month-long journey involving tens of millions of miles of travel — but it also marks the end of an eight-year-long journey involving millions of miles of travel on the part of scientists and engineers across the country.

And perhaps the biggest marvel is that, in the end, most of them got the rover and its scientific instruments ready for launch while working from home.

Working from home has been a tough thing to manage for many of the businesses affected by the coronavirus pandemic and social-distancing restrictions. It’s been tough for NASA as well.

“Putting a spacecraft together that’s going to Mars, and not making a mistake — it’s hard, no matter what. Trying to do it during the middle of a pandemic, it’s a lot harder,” Matt Wallace, the mission’s deputy project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said during a pre-launch briefing.

Fortunately, NASA and its partners could draw upon decades’ worth of experience in remote operations. “When the pandemic came along, it didn’t make that much difference in the way I operate, because I was already used to working remotely with JPL,” said the University of Washington’s Tim Elam, who’s part of the science team for the rover’s X-ray fluorescence spectrometer.

Once the rover is on its way, working remotely will become even more routine. “Pasadena is about the same distance away from Mars that Seattle is,” Elam joked.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket could send the rover on its way from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida as soon as Thursday: Liftoff is scheduled for 7:50 a.m. ET (4:50 a.m. PT), and forecasters say there’s an 80% chance of acceptable weather. You can watch NASA’s live video coverage of the countdown starting at 7 a.m. ET (4 a.m. PT) Thursday:

The 1-ton, six-wheeled rover is due to land next February inside Mars’ 28-mile-wide Jezero Crater, at the site of an ancient river delta that now appears bone-dry. The top three tasks on the $2.4 billion mission’s to-do list are:

Thousands of scientists, engineers, technicians, support staff and students have been working to get Perseverance ready for this trip to Mars, including hundreds in the Seattle area. Here are four case studies, focusing on Mars mission veterans as well as a first-timer.

Aerojet Rocketdyne’s propulsion systems have flown aboard every successful NASA mission to Mars, and this time around, Aerojet’s involved in virtually every phase of Perseverance’s journey.

The company is providing four solid rocket motors to give ULA’s Atlas 5 rocket an extra boost, plus the main engine and 12 reaction control system thrusters for the Atlas’ Centaur upper stage. Aerojet also built eight stabilizing thrusters for Perseverance’s spacecraft, eight more thrusters for the descent stage, and the plutonium-fueled power source for the rover.

All of the 28 thrusters on the list were manufactured and tested at Aerojet’s facility in Redmond, Wash., which has been in operation since 1968. “That history goes back to the Boeing spin-off engineers who formed the company originally as Rocket Research Company, with the desire to focus on space production,” said Fred Wilson, Aerojet’s director of marketing and business development in Redmond.

Most of the work for the Perseverance rover was done long before the pandemic hit, but Aerojet is currently in the midst of preparations for future missions to Mars as well as to the moon. Wilson said about two-thirds of the Redmond workforce is working from home.

“Everybody who doesn’t have to be directly involved in working on the hardware is working from home,” he said. “But we have been able to maintain a high level of operational efficiency. … Our on-time delivery performance for the year is 92% out of the Redmond site.”

Wilson said not one of Aerojet’s Redmond employees has tested positive for COVID-19. “So, knock on wood, it’s been a very good success story for us,” he said.

Melissa Rice, a planetary scientist at Western Washington University, stands alongside a Curiosity testbed rover at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s “Mars Yard.” (NASA / JPL Photo via WWU)

Perseverance is the third Mars rover for Melissa Rice, a planetary scientist at Western Washington University. And the fact that she’s based in Bellingham, Wash., more than 1,200 miles from Pasadena, means she’s had plenty of experience with working remotely.

It all started when she was a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and JPL, where she worked on the Opportunity and Curiosity missions.

“Because the whole mission is so well set up for remote operations, often the science team would be calling in to our meetings from their various offices at JPL, rather than being in the physical room together, just because we have that teleconferencing capability set up so well,” Rice recalled. “So, when I left JPL and started my position here at Western Washington in Bellingham, it took quite a while for some of my colleagues to realize that I wasn’t just down the hall.”

That familiarity with remote operations has come in handy for dealing with the pandemic. “We’ve had lots of practice,” she said.

Rice’s team works on the rover’s Mastcam-Z imaging system, which is destined to become the first set of zoom cameras on the Red Planet. The system can capture wide-angle or high-resolution 3-D pictures and video in a variety of wavelengths to help scientists determine the mineral composition of Perseverance’s surroundings.

“My specific role on the camera team has been selecting the wavelengths that we’ll use to look for hydration on the surface,” Rice explained. “This will be the first time that we have a rover whose eyes are specifically tuned to the absorption features due to water.”

Her one big regret is that she and her students had to call off a trip to Florida to witness the launch, due to the pandemic. “That’s unfortunate, more so for the students than for me,” she said, “because I think seeing the launch live can be a life-changing experience.”

First Mode’s president and chief engineer, Chris Voorhees, shows off the employee-owned company’s digs near Seattle’s Pike Place Market. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Perseverance provided a Seattle startup called First Mode with its first contract.

“The first activity that we did was to support the Perseverance rover, specifically its physical assembly and integration,” said Chris Voorhees, the company’s president and chief engineer.

When First Mode was founded in 2018, many of its 11 employees were alumni of JPL as well as Planetary Resources, a Redmond-based asteroid mining venture that fell upon hard times. Now the engineering firm is prospering, with a workforce of more than 50 employees.

First Mode’s engineers designed a rover surrogate, nicknamed the “Faux-ver,” which was used to simulate the real rover’s mass and thermal characteristics during the development and testing of spacecraft hardware.

Now engineers from First Mode are part of the team that’s planning Perseverance’s atmospheric entry, descent and landing on Mars — a key phase of the mission that’s known as EDL or the “seven minutes of terror.” In the months ahead, they’ll be supporting operational readiness tests aimed at making absolutely sure that nothing will go wrong. Or if something does go wrong, that there’s a backup plan for saving the mission.

Because of the pandemic, those tests will have to be run in remote mode. “That’s a real challenge, not just for us, but for the team in general, ” Voorhees said.

“What you really want is to have everybody in the room, but if you can’t have everybody in a room, how do you best represent that?” he said. “That team is working through the challenges of that right now.”

This is the first Mars rodeo for the University of Washington’s Tim Elam.

Elam built his career as an expert on X-ray fluorescence at UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory. So when scientists and engineers were brought onto the team for Perseverance’s Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, or PIXL, Elam was a natural addition.

“All the rovers so far have and an X-ray-based instrument that measured the elemental composition of the rocks,” Elam said. “What’s new about PIXL is that it measures that not over a fairly broad area of a couple of centimeters, but in a very tiny spot. It’s about 100 microns.”

Spot-by-spot readings from PIXL’s X-ray fluorescence spectrometer will be assembled and matched up with images of areas the size of postage stamps to get a sense of detailed variations in physical structure and chemical composition.

The scale is such that scientists could arguably make out the fossilized remnants of Martian microbes. But even if ancient life isn’t definitively discovered, the data from PIXL — and from a complementary instrument called SHERLOC — will help scientists decide which rock samples are most worth bringing back to Earth for further study.

Elam helps bridge the gap between the engineers in charge of designing the instrument and the scientists in charge of looking for just the right kind of rock. “I don’t have an official title, but I like to think of myself as the chief spectroscopist,” he said in a video.

During a Zoom interview, Elam said he missed being able to meet up with the rest of his team in Pasadena. “We’ve learned to get better at doing it remotely, and the ability to have tools that involve video and simultaneous audio, just like we’re having now, makes a big difference,” he said. “But I still miss those interactions.”

He and his family had been planning to travel to Florida for the launch, but like Rice, they had to call off the trip due to the pandemic.

“My family has been following this just as much as I have. They’re interested in space, and they want to see what happens,” Elam said. “So I would say there’s a pretty good chance that this household is going to be awake at 4 a.m. on the day of the launch.”

Live coverage of the countdown via NASA and United Launch Alliance is due to begin at 4 a.m. PT (7 a.m. ET) Thursday.

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With stops at Amazon and Rover, Convoy VP Kristen Forecki shares her map for success

Kristen Forecki, vice president of supply at Convoy. (Convoy Photo)

One can take a reductionist view of career success as a series of lucky breaks or the result of relentless hard work. Kristen Forecki is convinced that it’s a combination of both.

“You can put yourself in a position to be really lucky,” said Forecki, vice president of supply for Convoy, a Seattle-based company that has built a digital platform to make the U.S. trucking industry more efficient.

Forecki laid an academic foundation to position herself to seize good opportunities, earning a Bachelor’s of Business Administration from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She built a robust network of personal, professional and academic connections. And she has allowed her personal interests and passion to help guide her career path.

Forecki moved to Seattle with her husband a decade ago. She was working as a senior product manager at Amazon when a business school friend tipped her off to a startup called Rover. It was around the same time that her own beloved dog had caught kennel cough while being boarded with other pups during a vacation. She saw the potential in a business that matched individual pet-sitters and dog-walkers with pet owners. The company had fewer than 20 employees when she joined as director of operations in January 2013.

In 2015, a friend of her husband’s told her about Convoy. She met the team, led by CEO Dan Lewis, and Convoy’s investors. She was energized by the group and its mission.

“The promise of the company was we could make life better for everybody,” Forecki said. For the truckers, it meant more time at home with families while maximizing their incomes and cutting environment-damaging pollution. “It was a super compelling proposition for me.”

She joined as employee No. 11. The business has since grown to 1,000 workers and in November was valued at $2.7 billion.

Convoy’s Kristen Forecki, center, with her sisters Abby and Jackie. (Photo courtesy of Forecki family)

The employees that Forecki leads include Convoy’s quality and compliance team, which selects trucking carriers for its marketplace and manages their performance; the brokerage team, which partners with the tech team to match trucks to jobs; and the supply programs teams, which is focused on strategic initiatives and working with new partners. In her role, she works with finance, PR, legal, marketing and human resources departments, as well as overall company culture and strategy.

To help support female colleagues, Forecki is the founding executive of Women@Convoy Employee Resource Group, one of many organizations within the company to boost underrepresented workers.

Forecki’s has developed multiple strategies for success:

Cultivate a group of mentors and connect over quick questions (forget the idea of lengthy regular lunches), while viewing the relationship as a two-way street where you might share job candidate suggestions and interesting news stories with a mentor.A leadership lesson that she gained at Rover and applied at Convoy was building teams quickly around specific goals you want to achieve, not the task you want them to do.Bring your authentic self to your role, even if you look or identify differently or have a different background than others in the room. Imitating others will never lead to your best performance.

As a younger woman in leadership in a male-dominated field, Forecki admits the last tip in particular can be challenging to follow. It’s not easy to standout as different from colleagues.

“It will be scary,” she said. “Be scared and do it anyway. You’ll ultimately have greater success and be happier and more proud of yourself.”

We caught up with Forecki for this Working Geek, a regular GeekWire feature. Continue reading for her answers to our questionnaire.

Current location: Seattle

Computer types: MacBook Pro

Mobile devices: iPhone 11 Pro

Favorite apps, cloud services and software tools:

Slack. Chatting is so much better than email for discussing a topic or getting a quick answer.Google Suite for everything else. (How did we ever work before Google Docs? Creating dozens of versions of a doc seems like madness now.)Pinterest for personal use. It’s surprisingly good at introducing users to new information if you start pinning research/educational/history themed topics. It’s also a great alternative to social media and online shopping, both of which I’m fairly strict about limiting. Plus it gives me a digital outlet for my type-A desire to categorize and organize.Forecki’s work-from-home space has a garden view. (Photo courtesy of Kristen Forecki)

Describe your workspace. Why does it work for you? Once we started working from home with COVID, I turned our guest bedroom into my office. I joke it has become my “room of requirement” (a reference to the magical room in Harry Potter), because it’s also my “home gym” with my yoga mat on the floor and an under-desk elliptical for quick workouts.

The room looks out over our garden, which is my favorite place in the world. It’s never lost on me how lucky I am to have that in the city.

Your best advice for managing everyday work and life? Schedule it. I can’t stress enough the importance of scheduling. If it’s not on my calendar, it’s not real. My work time, my social time, my errands — everything goes on my calendar so that I force myself to make time for the most important things each week. I color code my calendar so that I can see at a glance how I’m allocating my time to various categories.

My amazing executive assistant, Tara, also schedules blocks on my calendar to make sure I have time to eat, check email and finish important work. I find that if I don’t use this system, it’s easy for top priorities to get crowded out by urgent items, and I end up working more hours but accomplishing less. Rigorous scheduling forces me to prioritize and allocate my time accordingly.

Your preferred social network? How do you use it for business/work?

I prefer Instagram for keeping in touch with friends, although I limit my time and sometimes delete the app for a while to prevent it from becoming a regular time suck.I use LinkedIn to stay on top of relevant events and to meet new people; there are so many incredible people to learn from.

Current number of unanswered emails in your inbox? 74. I read and categorize all of my email, but I take it in dedicated batches throughout the day rather than watch my inbox all day long. And I never check email before work in the morning. Email is a low-energy activity, and I save it for low-energy times of day.

Number of appointments/meetings on your calendar this week? 35 work meetings, a virtual piano lesson, and a virtual happy hour.

Forecki with her husband, Eric Weiss, traveling in Mauritius. (Photo courtesy of Kristen Forecki)

How do you run meetings? The most important thing to get right is for everyone to know why we’re having the meeting. As soon as we accomplish the objective of the meeting (e.g., a decision, an update, a review), the meeting is over. This sounds simple, but I remain surprised that some people don’t do it. Being clear about this saves a tremendous amount of time.

Everyday work uniform? High-waisted jeans, Blondo waterproof ankle boots (perfect for Seattle!), a black or white sleeveless shell, and a blazer or long cardigan. I’m a devotee of the capsule-wardrobe concept (owning fewer, timeless, interchangeable items), so I really do wear a version of this almost every day. Now that we’re working from home, I’ve replaced the jeans with yoga pants and left the blazers in the closet.

How do you make time for family? My husband and I both have demanding jobs, so we’ve built regular family time into our weekly routines. (As I say above, schedule it!) Friday nights are date nights, and Saturday nights are movie nights. If football is on, we never miss a Packers game (we’re both from Wisconsin). We also carpool to and from work, which gives us time to check in each day.

Of course we find time to hang out spontaneously as well, but knowing that we have a plan for dedicated time together gives us something fun to anticipate, and it takes the pressure off the rest of the week.

Best stress reliever? How do you unplug?

Reading outside, reading in the bath, reading in front of the fire. I am constantly building new reading spaces into our house. Reading recharges me, and some books are like medicine. If work is stressful, I’ll reread “Sourdough” or “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” on a loop.I also subscribe to the Japanese concept of “forest bathing” — essentially, surrounding yourself with trees, nature and all things green. I love to garden or take a walk in nature while listening to a good podcast.And I can’t overstate the importance of social connection as a stress reducer. Happiness research shows that social connection is the number one predictor of overall life satisfaction and the biggest inoculator against stress. When work and life are crazy, I make it a point to reach out to my friends and family, rather than fall into the trap of thinking that I’m too busy to get together. (Read “The Happiness Advantage” by Shawn Achor for more on this topic.) My husband is a wonderful connection, I have brunch with a friend most weekends (pre-COVID, of course), and I spend hours each week on the phone with my sisters and parents.

What are you listening to? Podcasts, especially 99% Invisible, Radiolab, Planet Money, and Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me. Music: Amazon Prime has a “Matchbox 20” station right now that is playing all the ’90s alternative music. It’s giving me some serious nostalgia of summers past. Sia’s “1,000 Forms of Fear” and Taylor Swift’s “Lover” are both great summer albums as well.

Daily reads? Favorite sites and newsletters? The New York Times for daily news. The Atlantic for thoughtful, long-form pieces. WaitButWhy for blog posts on unique topics. And GeekWire for startup news.

Book on your nightstand (or e-reader)? I love my Kindle, because it means that I can have all my books with me all the time. I’m always reading at least one fiction book and usually have a business book going on the side. Top of my Kindle library right now:

“Code Name Helene” by Ariel Lawhon is the best fiction I’ve read this summer. Bonus: It’s based on the real Nancy Wake, an incredibly inspiring woman.“Unleashed” is a new business book by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss. Frances was a professor of mine at business school, and her definition of leadership — “Make others better as a result of your presence, and make it last into your absence” — remains one of my highest goals as a leader.And I recently reread “So You Want to Talk About Race” by Ijeoma Oluo, which I highly recommend.

Night owl or early riser? Night owl, although I had to figure out how to live as a morning person when I started at Convoy, because freight starts moving early. Now I’m somewhere in between, but I still indulge my night-owl tendencies.

Where do you get your best ideas? By exposing myself to a lot of new things, with podcasts and fiction books and interesting news articles. Then I give my brain a break and let it make connections and put the pieces together. As Don Draper of “Mad Men” says, “Just think about it. Deeply. Then forget it. And an idea will jump up in your face.”

Whose work style would you want to learn more about or emulate? Like so many people right now, I’m in awe of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is somehow managing to stay cool and speak candidly in the face of ridiculous opposition and insane stakes — literally millions of lives on the line. No matter what, he seems to keep working toward the best outcomes with integrity and conviction.

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¿Podrá el robot Mini Rover evitar perecer en una “tumba” de arena?

Una capa gruesa de arena es un mal terreno para cualquier vehículo con ruedas. Las dunas de Marte son una trampa capaz de atrapar robots hasta provocar el cese de su funcionamiento. El robot Spirit quedó atrapado en la arena marciana y no pudo ponerse a resguardo cuando llegó el invierno; incapaz de moverse hasta donde sus paneles solares pudieran recibir la vital luz para sobrevivir, dejó de funcionar. Otro robot en Marte, el Opportunity, tardó semanas en salir de una parcela de tres metros, llegándose a temer que sucumbiría en esa pequeña duna, bautizada con el elocuente nombre de “Purgatory” (“Purgatorio”).

Es evidente que la próxima generación de rovers robóticos para explorar terrenos de otros mundos tendrá que ser lo bastante buena como para permitirles a tales robots ascender por colinas cubiertas de arena u otro material suelto y evitarles quedar atrapados en terrenos granulares blandos.

Un nuevo robot tiene técnicas de locomoción complejas lo suficientemente eficaces como para permitirle subir por colinas cubiertas de arena sin quedar atascado. El nuevo robot, llamado Mini Rover, está equipado con cuatro apéndices terminados en rueda que pueden levantarse del suelo y que están impulsados por 12 motores diferentes. El Mini Rover ha sido desarrollado en el Instituto Tecnológico de Georgia (Georgia Tech) de Estados Unidos.

En el transcurso de los experimentos con el Mini Rover realizados por el equipo de Dan Goldman, Siddharth Shrivastava, Andras Karsai y otros, se comprobó que el robot es capaz de subir una pendiente utilizando un modo de moverse que combina movimientos de remar, caminar y girar la rueda.

Construido con apéndices multifuncionales capaces de hacer girar ruedas que también pueden alzarse o servir de remos, el Mini Rover ejecuta complejas técnicas de locomoción lo bastante eficientes como para permitirle ascender por colinas cubiertas de arena sin quedarse atascado. (Foto: Christopher Moore, Georgia Tech)

“Esta combinación de levantamiento y movimientos de giro y remado, si se usa correctamente, proporciona la capacidad de mantener algún progreso hacia adelante incluso si es lento”, explica Goldman. “A través de nuestros experimentos de laboratorio, hemos demostrado principios que podrían conducir a una mayor eficiencia en la exploración de otros mundos, e incluso en superficies desafiantes en nuestro propio planeta”.

El comportamiento del Mini Rover fue diseñado usando una rama de la física conocida como terradinámica.

El trabajo con el Mini Rover ha contado con el apoyo de la Iniciativa Nacional de Robótica de la NASA y la Oficina de Investigación del Ejército de Estados Unidos. (Fuente: NCYT Amazings)

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