Photography by Wesley Law
On February 18, Pablo Sobron, the founder and CEO of Impossible Sensing, awoke before dawn to an inbox filled with well-wishes from around the globe. A decade’s worth of work was about to bear fruit: NASA’s Perseverance rover was closing in on Mars, carrying with it two data-gathering instruments developed by Sobron’s St. Louis–based company. All day, Sobron bounced between anxiety and excitement as he and his 12-person team counted down the minutes in their South City office. Shortly before 4 p.m., as the rover made its final descent toward a successful landing, Sobron felt a rush of blood to his face. This was the end of the beginning, he thought, and a new chapter of work on Mars was about to begin.
How will your company’s instruments assist with Perseverance’s mission? This mission is tasked with answering the question “Did Mars ever host life?” The question won’t be answered directly, per se. We don’t have the technology to unambiguously answer that question—but we do have technology now to look very close into the surface to literally get a better picture of what’s going on there.
What has your work on the mission looked like? Every day, we tell the rover what to do: drive here, drill here, shoot a laser there. It’s a two-way communication. You send a message in the morning, and you get a message in the evening. So every night, our team gets the data and analyzes it in our computers, translating the raw data into information that is useful for scientists and geologists.
What drove you to start the company? I was working at NASA, and my job was in early design—I’m a concept guy—but I realized I could do that myself. It was great working with NASA from within, but it requires working through bureaucracy, and sometimes it’s slow. I’m a fast ideas guy. So in 2016, I thought I would try and do this on my own.
Why did you decide to start it in St. Louis as opposed to, say, Silicon Valley? There are three main reasons. The first is space heritage. The spacecraft modules that astronauts were trained on before going to the moon were built in St. Louis, and Washington University has some of the best lunar and planetary scientists. The second reason is that the low cost of living here allows you to take risks without the penalty of going under if something goes wrong. The third part is a little bit more personal: I view science and see what we do as art. We create new ways of seeing the world and seeing space. The area where we are, on Cherokee Street in South City, is a hotbed of art. We bounce ideas off artists and get so much out of that.
Perseverance will keep you busy for the time being, but are you planning any other projects? We have two other angles where we’re looking for life. The first is Venus. Impossible [Sensing] is working on a mission concept that will deploy sensors in the cloud deck on Venus to analyze molecules that may be precursors to life. It is a hell on the surface—the greenhouse effect is massive there—but if you go 40 miles up in the sky, there are areas in the clouds that are pretty balmy, pretty friendly for life, perhaps.
What’s the other project? That’s for the so-called ocean worlds: the moons of Jupiter and Saturn that have oceans, or seas, under the ice. We’re working on technologies to break through the ice and deploy submersibles—autonomous underwater vehicles—that will be able to swim around and explore the sea floor.
How confident are you that there is—or was—life beyond Earth? Statistically, with the trillions of trillions of stars out there hosting trillions and trillions of planets, it is almost certain that there are planets, much like Earth, that are close enough to the sun—not too far, just in the right spot—to sustain ecosystems of the type that we have on Earth today. What the whole NASA program is about and what my career has been about is building the best technologies we can to go and find answers.
