A conversation with Charlie Sobeck, Kepler mission manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.

Transcript

Host (Matthew Buffington): You are listening to NASA in Silicon Valley, episode 54. This week we’re talking to Charlie Sobeck, the mission manager for NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler mission based here at NASA’s Ames Research Center. You may have heard about Kepler but in case you haven’t, this spacecraft is hunting for planets outside the solar system or exoplanets. So far, Kepler has found more than 2,500 bona fide exoplanets, and it’s done so by observing planetary eclipses of distant stars. When a planet eclipses or passes in front of its star it blocks a tiny fraction of starlight. This is similar to how objects in our solar system, such as planet Venus or our Moon, block some of the light when they eclipse the sun. This method of detecting planets called transit photometry has not only revealed the presence of thousands of exoplanets but from the miniscule change in brightness, scientists can also determine the planet’s size, distance from its star and its orbital period or how long it takes to make one trip around the star. Scientists call it orbital period but we call it a year. In today’s episode, Charlie shares with us the excitement of leading the mission, being an “enabler” for the insatiably curious scientists he works with and how he created his path to work at NASA nearly 40 years ago. Here is Charlie Sobeck.

[Music]

Host: Charlie, how did you end up in Silicon Valley? How did you end up joining NASA? Tell us about yourself. Go for it, man.

Charlie Sobeck:I grew up in Davis, California, outside Sacramento.

Host: Okay, so you’re kind of local.

Charlie Sobeck:Absolutely. I’m a California person.

Host: Nice.

Charlie Sobeck:I was born in Bakersfield. People who know Bakersfield from 60 years ago, when I would tell them the story, they would say, “Oh yeah? At the gas station or the donut shop?”

Host: Nice. Somewhere on the 5. Exactly.

Charlie Sobeck:Except there wasn’t a 5. It was the 99. They didn’t have a 5 back then.

Host: See that I say, “the 5.” That shows the L.A. influence.

Charlie Sobeck:Right. I grew up in Davis. I followed Gemini. I was a NASA nerd. I followed Gemini, Apollo growing up in grade school and junior high. I wanted to work with NASA. I got really excited when TIME magazine published a story about what it would take to go to Mars, and that sounded really cool to me. In fact, I sat down and wrote some letters to NASA Ames.

Host: Really?

Charlie Sobeck: Whoever it was that got those letters sent me back a package of stuff, which I probably never read most of it. But I decided in high school I really wanted to work for NASA. In college, I was looking for a co-op job with NASA. I started at Northwestern University. Didn’t have a lot of support from Northwestern. So, on a summer vacation, I came down to Ames and said, “I’d really like to work for NASA. What are the chances I could co-op [be a cooperative education student] with you?” And they said, “This is great. We have a great co-op program and we’d love to have you come. But you have to be from one of these 11 West Coast schools.”

Host: Really?

Charlie Sobeck:They gave me a list. So, I looked at the list and said, “Okay, if I transferred to [University of California] Berkeley, could I come co-op?” And they said, “Sure.” So, I literally put in my papers, and three months later I moved to Berkeley. I had transferred to there.

Host: Wow. Transferred everything over. Wow.

Charlie Sobeck:I got here to Berkeley. I picked up the phone. I called Ames and said, “Here I am at Berkeley.” And they said, “Oh, well, we’re full.”

Host: Oh no.

Charlie Sobeck:I finished my degree at Berkeley. I took a couple of co-op stints for Hughes Aircraft Company down in Los Angeles. Then by sheer coincidence, I was living in the dorm. And one of the people down the hall said, “Hey Charlie, you want to work for NASA, don’t you?” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “I have a friend who’s a co-op student down there and she’s leaving.”

Host: Wow.

Charlie Sobeck:“Would you be interested in taking her place?” That got me an interview. I talked to some people. My final co-op stint was with the space projects division and working on Galileo probe. Upon graduation, I was given a job and I worked 15 more years on Galileo.

Host: Really?

Charlie Sobeck:Right.

Host: What were you studying back then? Was it more engineering or were you thinking science? What were you doing?

Charlie Sobeck:My degree is in electrical engineering and electronics, on detailed semiconductors and so forth.

Host: Okay.

Charlie Sobeck:I had a hard time taking assumptions, and I would work everything from first principles. You can only go so far that way, especially since I really did like the big picture. So, I’ve never really used my electrical engineering degree. I’ve done test engineering, systems engineering, management. I’ve learned a lot on the job. I can pick up a lot. I’m a pretty smart person. It’s just been a ball. I’ve enjoyed it.

Host: Wow. Okay, so working on Galileo, tell a little bit about the story of how that pivoted to the work that you’re doing on Kepler and managing that project. Walk us through how does that go from one to the other.

Charlie Sobeck:It doesn’t. It really doesn’t. There’s no connection at all.

Host: Of course not.

Charlie Sobeck:I spend the first 15 years of my career on Galileo spacecraft, and I said, “Boy, how many people get to work on a flight mission like that?”

Host: Wow.

Charlie Sobeck:I looked around, and not many people had worked on multiple flight missions. There weren’t a lot of flight missions at Ames back then. And so, I said, “Boy, this may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” It was the greatest thing that I’ve ever done.

When it was over, I worked on some space station payloads. I did proposals for a Mars airplane and a Venus lander. I worked on an aerobraking system and I worked a SOFIA [Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy] instrument, infrared spectroscopy, all of these things for a year or two here or there. And then I fell into Kepler, and I’ve spent the last 17 years on Kepler. It’s going to close out my career. It’s been fabulous. But there’s no connection between the two.

Host: It’s just like being in the right place at the right time.

Charlie Sobeck:Yep.

Host: And being able to just pick up and just adapt, I’m sure. This is cool because Kepler is one of those really neat, interesting mixes of the engineering side, obviously, like, management side, but then also the science side that’s taking all these results and how these two groups work together. I’m guessing then you’d have been involved with Kepler since the early days. This is with Bill Borucki and before the thing actually even launched and all of this?

Charlie Sobeck:Certainly before it launched. I was not in on any of – I didn’t participate on any of the failed proposals. It wasn’t me.

Host: You were the winning ingredient once they pulled you in.

Charlie Sobeck:They finally won the first proposal without me.

Host: Okay.

Charlie Sobeck: It was about two dozen applicants for that final discovery proposal and that opportunity. Kepler was selected along with two other missions for a three-mission runoff, if you will.

Host: Okay.

Charlie Sobeck:Headquarters saying, “We’re going to pick one of you, but one of these three.” In the end, they picked two and Kepler was one of them. I joined after they had done that narrowing down to three missions, and helped generate what we called a concept study report that led to the authorization to go ahead and launch.

Host: That’s kind of the normal flow for these things. It’s not like somebody dreams up their dream NASA mission, and then it just gets funded and you go through. There’s a lot of ebbs and flows, and you propose and it fails, but then this one gets picked up.

Charlie Sobeck:Right.

Host: There’s all kinds of weirdness that could happen.

Charlie Sobeck: I had anticipated that. Like I say, I didn’t think I would get another flight mission.

Host: That’s right.

Charlie Sobeck:I anticipated I was going to spend the rest of my career writing proposals that wouldn’t be accepted. Because there are a lot of good ideas out there.

Host: Very much so.

Charlie Sobeck:Lots of people have proposals of really interesting things to do. What are the odds that yours is going to be picked? The odds are pretty small, really.

Host: Wow. And so, talk about – on the podcast, we’ve had several different Kepler people, from people working on the citizen science, Natalie Batalha talking about as a project scientist and different things. We’ve had a mix of people on there. Talk about what are you working on day-to-day. How does that work with the team? Tell us your story.

Charlie Sobeck:Number one, I just love working with the scientists. It is so cool. That is the biggest thing about my job is I get to work in the same hallway as these really wonderful people, these great scientists. Not only are they good scientists in what they do and world-class. But what I found is scientists, in general, are actually really cool people.

They’re not the nerds and the geeks that you keep hearing stories about. Every one of them is a really well-rounded person. They have stories of their lives. They all talk about when they took apart their car and how they did this. They had varied interests. The one thing that holds them all together is curiosity.

Host: Absolutely.

Charlie Sobeck:Every scientist I know is infinitely curious about everything. About politics, about environment, about the science that they’re actually doing, but about everything else, about books and movies. They’re all really interested. They just don’t have an off switch.

So, what do I do in all of this? To be honest with you, what I am is I’m an enabler. From the very beginning of my career, I saw my job as enabling these scientists to do what they do best. That’s what this is all about. The missions are all about science.

Host: Yeah.

Charlie Sobeck:How do you get them to do – ? How do you allow them to do the science they need to do? Somebody has to build the hardware. Somebody has to manage the testing and manage the budgets and the schedules, and all that stuff, because it all has to get done. But all of that is meaningless without the science itself. So, my job is an enabler. I personally am something of a troubleshooter, a firefighter. I really do my best work –

Host: You do what needs to be done to get it to happen.

Charlie Sobeck:I’m at my best when things are going crazy. When things are going smoothly, I tend to get bored and things fall apart a little bit more. These days, my deputy teases me. Because she says, “Nothing lights up Charlie’s face more than somebody telling him, ‘There’s a problem on the spacecraft.’” Now I can go into action.

Host: Speaking of which, because one of my favorite stories, and I’ve heard it a bunch of times – we’ve had different people on the podcast taking about this – is the whole Kepler mission of, like, it gets proposed, and then it failed. Proposed, fail. It finally gets there, it’s funded, it’s built, it’s launched into space, everything is going great, and then a reactor wheel. So, I want to know from your side as the troubleshooting, “Let’s just make things happen,” what goes through your mind when your multimillion dollar space telescope just doesn’t start functioning the way it was. And then you have to turn to the engineers to find a better solution. Talk about what’s going through your mind at that point.

Charlie Sobeck:I’ll start by going to the punchline. When that second reaction wheel failed, and we said, “Gee, we can’t point at this Kepler field of view anymore. The mission is over.”

Host: Yeah.

Charlie Sobeck: At that point, I was pretty sure the mission was over and there was not anything we could do about it. We’re NASA. We don’t give up. By God, we’re going to try to recover that wheel. We worked for a few months on doing that. But I didn’t have any real hope that that was going to happen. Now, where the real work, where I started doing my thing, was a year before, when the first reaction wheel failed.

Host: Okay.

Charlie Sobeck:We still had a mission. We still had three.

Host: You’re good. You have redundancy built in.

Charlie Sobeck:That’s right. We can continue doing it. But dammit, we better learn something from that failed wheel. And so, we just tore into the data. We looked for what caused it, what signals there were that would suggest the wheel was having problems.

In the end, we didn’t come up with a solution. There’s no way we’re going to protect the remaining three wheels. They were either built well or they had a latent failure in them that sooner or later was going to bite us. But we found very little that we could do that was going to prevent another wheel from failing, eventually.

But what we did find, most interestingly for me, was we found the signature. We knew now what to look for, and we were going to have advance notice. Looking back at the old data, we could find signatures that said that first wheel was going to fail, and it showed us evidence six months before that it was stressed and something bad was going to happen.

Host: Wow.

Charlie Sobeck:Lo and behold, five months before the second wheel failed, we saw the same kind of signal. So, we knew that we had a limited amount of time left. We had procedures in place to catch the spacecraft. It didn’t go spinning out of control when that second wheel failed. But when it did fail, at that time, I didn’t have very much confidence that there was anything we could do about it.

Having said that, it was amazing that we were able to do something about it. A couple of things sort of happened that caused this to occur. One was an engineer at Ball Aerospace who built the spacecraft, and who’s their chief attitude control guy, said, “I’d like to talk to you about an idea I have.” He showed us this idea of balancing the spacecraft against the sunline using two reaction wheels.

His idea wasn’t quite right. He had us pointed still at the Kepler field of view. At that point, he said, “If we balance it just right, I can give you 5, maybe 10 minutes of data before I have to reorient the spacecraft and fire some thrusters.” He showed us simulations and we looked at it. But it was enough to get people thinking.

We started polling the science community and said, “What if you could point the spacecraft, but you’d have to reorient it periodically? How often would be acceptable? Is 10 minutes long enough? Where would you choose to point? What kind of science would you like to do?” We got 42 different white paper responses from the science community saying, “Here’s all the stuff you could do.” It was a huge amount of different kinds of science. It wasn’t the Kepler mission anymore. This was the K2 mission.

As we got the science inputs, the engineers started looking at it, said, “We could do that science if we pointed somewhere else. If we pointed somewhere else, we could give you not 10 minutes, but 2 hours of uninterrupted time. In fact, we could give you 6 hours. No, make that 12 hours.”

Host: Wow.

Charlie Sobeck:And so, we circled and spiraled our way in to finding the right pointing attitude, the right solution to K2. Once we first started turning that page and we first started seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, it took about 2 to 3 months before we said, “You know, this is going to work.”

Host: Wow.

Charlie Sobeck: Then you had to spend several months doing the engineering, making sure you understood where the axis of symmetry was and how to command the spacecraft to do these odd things. How do you deal with an antenna which isn’t pointed to the Earth anymore? Then it was a lot of engineering issues to happen. But 6 months after this first light at the end of the tunnel, we were doing an engineering test, and that engineering test was 10 times better than we expected it really would be.

Host: Really?

Charlie Sobeck:We thought we were going to be – if we could do a factor of 10 in precision to what Kepler had done, we said, “This would be a good mission.” We didn’t end up a factor of 10. We ended up [only] 20 percent worse [than Kepler]. This was an order of magnitude better than we had anticipated a good mission would be.

Host: Wow, that’s crazy. And so, shifting gears slightly, because this is still along the lines of Kepler. I think a timely thing right now of the eclipse. The eclipse is happening in August.

The thing that I get a kick out of, of some of the work here at Ames. I’ve seen SOFIA that you had mentioned, of the telescope on a plane looking at Pluto when Pluto passes in front of a star in occultation. Think of Kepler and the transit method of when a planet passes in front of a star, we get the light dip, but then also this eclipse.

It’s all variations of the same thing, of how can you get science from you have a bright, shiny object and a land mass passes in front of it. It’s just so funny, because whether it’s occultations, it’s transits, or the eclipse, you can get science out of this. And so, it’s almost variations on a theme.

Charlie Sobeck:Yeah, sure. They’re all the same things. You’re blocking light. You can see it if you look out at the light across the street. When traffic goes by, you can see it dip. Something interrupted the light and you know what it was. The solar eclipse that we’re going to be seeing here, that’s a special event for us. But there are eclipses and occultations all over the place.

Interestingly enough, Kepler uses the transit method. A planet goes in front of the disc of the star and it blocks a little bit of the light. We use the transit method for things in our solar system. Venus transits the sun periodically.

Host: Yeah.

Charlie Sobeck:In fact, every hundred years or so, every hundred and six years or something, it will do two transits. It’ll do one, and then five years later it’ll do another one, and then it’s a hundred and six years before it does it again. It repeats it in pairs. While we were building the Kepler instruments, both of the two Venus transits occurred.

And so, we were able to reach out to the public and say, “That’s what we’re going to be looking at. That is that feature.” Literally, you’d put on your solar observing glasses, look at the sun, and see this little tiny spot. You could see it, but it was small. And that’s what we were trying to measure with Kepler.

Host: Wow. For you, Charlie, what are the next steps? Kepler is in its winding down part. We just had a really big catalog get released, and I know there’s still more updates going to that. K2 is still moving along. But talk a little bit about your timeline, what you’re working on, what you plan on doing in the next couple of years.

Charlie Sobeck:Yeah, so let me just start with a mission, what’s the mission doing. I’ve been thinking about what a good analogy would be. We just published our latest catalog, and it’s four years after the last Kepler data has come to the ground. We’ve put out, I think it’s our seventh or eighth catalog, and people keep saying, “When are you going to get it right?” kind of thing. “When is the last one?” This is the last one we’re going to do because we’re disbanding the Kepler team. But it’s like publishing a map of the United States. “When are you going to get it right?” Well.

Host: It’s just a matter of detail.

Charlie Sobeck:Yeah, it’s a matter of detail and it’s a matter of what are you looking for. If what you want is a roadmap, we’ll get it right when you quit building roads.

Host: Yes, exactly.

Charlie Sobeck:Every once in a while, it’s worth updating. It depends whether what you want to do is. If you want you go hiking, you want to know the topology, whether there’s mountain ranges and things like that. If you’re going to be driving, you want to know where the roads are. If you’re a pilot, you want to know where the airspace that you have to keep out of is. There are a variety of things you use maps for.

Host: Farmers are going on different thing.

Charlie Sobeck:Right. What is the rainfall for your crops, and what’s the temperature at various places? Maps do various things and our Kepler catalog does various things as well. We are done publishing our catalog, but the community is going to take over the Kepler data, and they’re going to publish additional addendums and other catalogues and overlays that show this same kind of thing. That say, “If what you’re interested in is M dwarfs [planets], here’s the overlay you put on the Kepler results to see where the M dwarfs are and what the significance is.

Kepler itself is going to have a legacy which is going to go on for a long time. For my part, I’ve got almost forty years of government service. I’m thinking Kepler is probably going to be my final project. I’ll stay with the mission. My intent is to stay with the mission through the very end. I’d like to continue to participate until it runs out of fuel and we have to pack up all the data and we store all the documentation and write the final reports. I think that would be a great way for me to end my career at NASA Ames. So, that’s my global plan.

Host: Any work on some of the other follow up telescopes, thinking of TESS, WFIRST – participate or share stories?

Charlie Sobeck:I’m not a direct participant in those various other missions. I’m aware of them. When people ask our Kepler experiences, there’s things that we’ve learned in Kepler that is applicable to these things. I share that with them. I give them my insights has I have them. But other people will fly those missions and they’ll figure other solutions to some of the problems.

Host: You’ve been working on this for a while. The team has been doing insane, incredible work, the scientists and the engineers. Talk a little bit about the people side. Because at the end of the day, you’re working with human beings, you’re working with friends, and colleagues, and people you go to barbecue cookouts.

Charlie Sobeck: Yeah.

Host: Talk a little bit about that.

Charlie Sobeck: Absolutely. In the end, it is the people that does all the work. It’s the people who fly the spacecraft, who come up with the science, concepts, who implement it, who do everything. It’s all people. You can say we have computers that do all these searches. But it’s the people who figure out how to program the computer, what algorisms to use. A lot of what I do. I mentioned at the beginning that I consider myself an enabler.

Host: Yeah.

Charlie Sobeck: And one of the things you have to do to enable is get people to do the best they can, put them in a position where they can do what they do well, give them the support they need, provide them with the care and feeding, and that’s not an insignificant job.

Host: No, it’s huge. Yeah.

Charlie Sobeck: Early on in my career, I was still really technically oriented, still just out of school. One of my managers said, “That’s a lot of fun. But I think you’ll find as you go through your career that managing people will be much more interesting.” I didn’t believe him, and I didn’t believe him for several years. Forty years down the road here now, I say, “You know, he’s right.” It’s a lot of fun working with people and seeing them perform well. There’s a lot of satisfaction in watching people do a good job.

Host: Yeah. It’s almost like you get really good at your craft at the skill, whether it’s technical, whether it’s writing. There’s puzzles that you solve day-to-day. But then there’s human puzzles. It’s like finding the right person for the right job, or maybe somebody who’s really talented in one thing, but maybe if you move him somewhere else. It’s understanding how people think and work to make it more efficient and work better.

Charlie Sobeck: Right. I’m a big puzzle person. I love puzzles. I love crossword puzzles. I love jigsaw puzzles. I love number puzzles, logic puzzles, topology puzzles. I just love these things, and I get a great kick out of solving them. Managing people is a wonderful puzzle, and you never get the solution.

Host: Yep, yep.

Charlie Sobeck: You never get that high of, “I’ve got it right.” But it also is never done. You’re able to come in the next morning and say, “I’ve got another piece to find, another knot to untie.”

Host: Excellent. So, for folks who are listening, we are on Twitter @NASAAmes. We’re using the hashtag #NASASiliconValley. If you have any questions for Charlie, any questions about Kepler or anything NASA related and crew related, send us those questions. We’ll hook it up over to Charlie for responses and stuff. Thanks for coming over. This has been fantastic.

Charlie Sobeck: You’re welcome. It’s great.

[End]