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August 11, 2012

TC West grad helps on Mars mission

BY GLENN PUIT gpuit@record-eagle.com

TRAVERSE CITY — Marc Allen's parents always bought him space toys when he was young.

Space station and space shuttle toys, to be exact.

And when Allen was a student at Traverse City's West Senior High School he was fascinated by planets, space, and the prospect of life in galaxies far, far away.

"Then I saw the video of the original Mars Rover back in 2003, and it was completely amazing to me," Allen said. "I knew this was something I wanted to get involved in."

That's exactly what he did.

Allen, 29, whose parents live in Traverse City, is a software engineer on the Mars Curiosity Rover mission. The spacecraft landed on the red planet this week and is producing captivating, real-time images of the Mars landscape.

Allen and his parents both attribute his success in part to the education he received in Michigan. He graduated from West Senior High, then obtained degrees in computer science and space system engineering from the University of Michigan.

"Marc got involved with other kids like him at West, and he really blossomed," Allen's father, Bruce, said this week.

Marc Allen now lives in Pasadena, Calif., and works for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. One of his primary responsibilities is developing software that helped interpret radar readings during the Curiosity craft's landing.

"The software basically talks to the radar and says, 'How far from the surface are you?', and the software communicates back to Earth," Allen said.

He also helped develop a backup computer and software system for the Curiosity. He's worked on the project for three years, culminating this week with seven minutes of silence at Propulsion Laboratory headquarters while the craft descended, then confirmation that the landing was a success.

"It's indescribable," Allen said. "The last two minutes of the landing are the most difficult and most risky. You are watching it happen in real time, the data coming down, and you are like, 'Wow, this is actually going to happen.'"

Allen's mother, Christine, said Friday she's "very proud" of her son for what he's accomplished at such a young age.

David Kirby was Marc Allen's science teacher at West Senior High. Allen, Kirby said, was a smart and always smiling kid when he went to the school from 1998 to 2001.

"We do an outer space unit in physics," Kirby said. It's our longest topic, and it's the one kids are most fascinated by. They just can't get enough of it — black holes and exploding universes."

To know one of his students is working on the Curiosity mission is fabulously rewarding, Kirby said.

"This brings me a lot of joy," he said.

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