Engineering & Tech Overview – NASA Perseverance Mars Rover

good morning nasa's fifth rover to the fourth planet is two days away from landing the mission's target jezreel crater holds great promise for the mars scientific community however getting to it safely is quite a challenge hello i'm dc eagle welcome to nasa's jet propulsion laboratory in southern california this is the first of several informative landing week media briefings on the mars 2020 perseverance rover mission so let's get to it here to talk about the mission and some of the cutting edge technology on board perseverance we have with us today thomas zurbukin associate administrator for the science mission directorate nasa headquarters jennifer trosper mars 2020 deputy project manager jpl adam steltzner mars 2020 chief engineer jpl trudy cortes director of the technology demonstration missions program nasa headquarters arisa stilley mars 2020 edl operations lead jpl jeff shihai chief engineer of the space technology mission directorate nasa headquarters and mimi young project manager for the ingenuity mars helicopter for anyone who would like to submit a question you can do so by using the countdown to mars hashtag our phone lines are now in for media you can ask a question by pressing star one and enter the queue and we'll kick things off with thomas sir bilkin well thanks so much i'm so excited to join the colleagues here from jpl as we count down to mars and we just recognize what an amazing journey this has been and i want to thank at this time the team for working so hard on this mission and especially in the past year in adverse circumstances and i want to recognize the many sacrifices that the team had to do and really exhibited this true spirit of exploration that we always talk about i just want to thank them for that you know mars captivates our imagination and has been part of our dreams for many decades and perseverance builds on the long history of systematic science-driven exploration of mars that in has been enabled by ever better technologies and systems right now inside is taking measurements of marsquakes curiosity is focused on geological and the chemical evolution here kale crater and two orbiters are out there new in the last couple weeks joining other orbits from nasa and other agencies learning more about this planet our journey has been from following the water to seeing whether this planet was habitable to finding complex chemicals and now we're at the advent of an entirely new phase returning samples an aspirational goal that has been with the science community for decades it is novel technologies that have enabled those breakthroughs we benefit today and it's novel technologies are enabling the next sleeps of exploration landing with more precision and safely learn how to make oxygen from co2 out of the atmosphere and more and a true extraterrestrial wright brothers moment with the ingenuity mars helicopter riding at the belly of the river right now as we demonstrate controlled flight in a different world we could in fact not land and chester crater if it wasn't for the technologies that are already added to this mars is hard and we never take success for granted and as we want to land on mars it's because it's of course important and we'll do so with cameras on so the entire world is inspired with us and as we do new and tough things and demonstrate these new technologies because whether it's on the red planet or here at home on our blue marble science can bring us together and create solutions to challenges that seem impossible at first and i'm really looking forward to turning it over to you jennifer who is of course the deputy project manager take it away jennifer thank you well i am so excited to be here today i can tell you that perseverance is operating perfectly right now that all systems are go for landing last friday night we actually sent a command to the spacecraft we call it the do edl command do entry descent and landing it makes it sound simple it's not simple but it enters the spacecraft into the timeline where it starts to do the entry descent and landing activities so that was a very exciting event the spacecraft is focused the team is focused and we are all ready to go for landing now i want to tell you a little bit more about where we're at so if you could bring up my first graphic this is something that you can actually look at it's called eyes on the solar system and it tells you where different spacecraft are in the universe and so we can tell you that mars perseverance is 125 million miles away from earth and we are only 370 000 miles from mars so we are getting there the time it actually takes for a signal to go from earth to mars is 11 minutes and so that's how we're communicating with the vehicle right now and now one of the things that we've been working towards is really making sure that the aim points we're targeted for at mars so we want to aim like on a dart board that the aim point is accurate and so one of the ways that we do that is through these plots that you can pull up the next graphic there this is called a navigation b plot and the actual target the bullseye of that target is the green box the green box if if we think we're going to target anywhere in that green box everything is great what you see are some colorful ellipses in the upper right hand corner of that box those and the pluses in the middle the pluses are where we think we're targeting and the ellipses are the uncertainties around those so that means those ellipses all being within that green box it means that the targeting is on the bullseye and we are headed exactly where we want to be for mars now getting those navigation solutions is not that easy and we need a lot of support from the deep space network so you can go ahead to my next graphic the deep space network has stations all over the world there's some in madrid spain some in goldstone california and some in canberra australia you can actually go to dsn now and you can see the real-time live shots just like we're looking at now to see which stations are operating and communicating with with which spacecraft and martini 20 is taking two stations right now madrid so i want to thank all of the deep space network operators across the world who've helped us we've they've had 24 7 coverage for us for the last several weeks so that we could get such good data to have those perfect navigation solutions so thank you and as i uh sit back and this is my my fifth landing i've been on every rover that we've ever sent i get that usual sort of anxiety but very much excitement for what we're going to see i look at the decades that we've spent building these rovers and building these teams to send these missions to mars and i want to talk about that just for a minute i think back to sojourner the very first rover we landed on mars you can see this next graphic sojourner was about the size of a microwave oven very small and even though it's our oldest child they're all kind of like additional children for me it sort of behaved like a youngest child it had a very free spirit it was just a fun mission to drive around and then you can see the spirit and opportunity rovers were the next evolution we built off of what sojourner had done spirit and opportunity actually could talk to earth all by themselves they still used solar panels and there were these twins that explored all over mars and and outlived their lifetime um by multiples of 10 and even 100 and and they were just great rovers and then we kind of took a pause and we really upgraded our systems and you can see curiosity down there in the lower left hand part of this this graphic curiosity we went from solar panels to a radio isotope power source the wheels increased in size we could traverse over much larger rocks and different terrains we had a sky crane landing system instead of air bags i mean we really we really made a step up and then perseverance even though it looks a lot like curiosity is another technological step forward and adam is going to talk a lot about that after i'm finished here and so in closing the one final thing i want to talk about is it's not just about the rovers and in fact it's about the people who build the rovers and it's not about the individual people who build the rovers it's about all those individual people together working together to make this mission work and all of these missions work there there are several dozen of us at jpl who've actually worked on all five of the rover missions if you can believe it and this image this next image is of the team this is the mars 2020 team and there are many people who aren't pictured here but i want to spend this moment to just thank the team for all of their work over the last almost decade to bring us to where we are today the team isn't just a bunch of people who are all the same it's a bunch of different uniquely skilled personnel who know very deeply all the technical things they need to know in order for all those things to come together into a complex system like the ones that we land on mars so thank you to that team and i will end by saying both for landing day on thursday and for the whole surface mission i wish that team great success that they have worked so hard to obtain over the last many years and with that i will hand it off to our chief engineer adam stelzner thanks jennifer um as jennifer mentions right it is a huge army of human beings who have been working um for decades in their careers to put us in a position to be able to put such a technological marvel as perseverance on the surface of mars here we see an image this is on our first image here we see a great shot the hero shot of percy she is uh looks a lot like curiosity but she's packed with a whole bunch of new instruments science instruments those will be discussed a bit in depth next week but we've got raman spectrometers we've got a a technology uh for future human uh explorations to mars which jeff will speak about a little later on today she's big she's a little bigger than uh curiosity although she is a twin she's a few inches longer a couple of about 250 pounds heavier and uh and she's a lot more capable uh next image please as you watch the two of them together curiosity and perseverance uh they look similar but you can notice immediately that the wheels are different i'll speak a little bit about the wheels in a moment but percy's got a new set of kicks and she is um ready for trouble on this martian surface with with her new new wheels she's also much more capable at driving you know curiosity needs to either drive or think about driving but not do both at the same time and we have used a piece of technology that we originally brought on for train relative navigation a special visual processor to allow us to move curio uh perseverance at three times the rate of curiosity now with all that movement we had to reinforce her wheels this is an image of curiosity's wheels she took a beating on the surface of mars because of these sharp rocks called vent effects i have a model of perseverance's wheel right here and you can see it looks quite different than curiosities as you see from this model perseverance has a gentle tread pattern next image please and that tread pattern not only makes her wheels more strong if we go to the next image it also makes them more capable these uh the soft uh tread redesign we call that tread the grousers you can go to the next image um uh allow uh the wheels to be much more strong against rocks maybe we don't have that image and um and also to have better performance in sandy terrain and of course driving is not the the reason for the season we have a sampling system on board and this is why we're actually on the surface of mars you can roll this you can see the robot arm and the coring drill that it has at the end of it we of our mission is specifically to be the first piece of a mars sample return campaign and in this leg we need to take samples of martian rocks inside that golden bit is a sample tube that looks just like this this is one of the world's cleanest items even though i just touched it this is a model of course uh hyper clean inside that uh coring bit once we've cored it we bring the sample tube and the bit inside the robot the rover and you can roll this image this is our adaptive caching assembly this is a small little robot inside the spacecraft inside the belly of the rover that manipulates that sample tube with the sample in it moves it from station to station confirms that we've got the right volume of sample takes images of the sample eventually seals the sample and returns it for storage until we've accumulated a big enough cash to be ready to put it on the surface of mars now this progress this forward motion and technology has not been a monolithic march it's sometimes two steps forward and one step back we know how hard the last year has been we've over the development of uh perseverance we've struggled with some technology challenges please roll this film this is an example of an early technology test for parachutes called the ldsd and you can watch a parachute failure here that unfortunately caused into question the uh the ability of our parachute to help perseverance land on the surface of mars so we needed to stand up supersonic testing qualification program for our parachute which we did and over the skies waltz island please roll we had this image and you can see our beautiful perseverances um uh parachute the same size as curiosities but stronger made of technora kevlar nylon beautiful strong canopy is ready to slow perseverance down in just a few short hours so as we move forward you can roll this as we move forward through technology we have um overcome challenges much as the nation has in this last year nasa over the last year getting perseverance to this place has persevered our nation has persevered our world has persevered through these tough times and and this journey this persevering journey of technology development is teamwork it is a nasa-wide teamwork and here to talk a bit about that uh the um technology development directorate is trudy uh please take it away trudy okay well thank you adam um you know i just want to express a little bit of the sentiment that's already been expressed by jennifer and adam you know on behalf of nasa space technology mission directorate we're absolutely thrilled to be partnered with our colleagues in the science mission directorate you know leading this mission and jpl the multiple nasa centers who worked on this industry academia some international collaboration went into this mission um and so we're just thrilled to be a partner with this on this next really truly groundbreaking mars mission um stmd is quite proud to have four technologies a record number for us flying along on the spacecraft and on the rover um there are two technologies that are landing instruments uh one is a suite of sensors called the mars entry descent and landing instrumentation it's the second version that we're sending uh the first flew on our science lab in 2012 uh with curiosity and it measures the conditions that the aeroshell will see so it's about 28 sensors on both the uh the heat shield and the back shell and it'll give us data about the conditions that that are seen with the hot gases uh some of the the winds that that are seen and it's really going to help engineers to reduce mass and optimized trajectory in the future and then the new really quite extraordinary capability that provides both hazard avoidance and precision landing at a site that's determined autonomously by the spacecraft called terrain relative navigation or trn um and this technology is a critical part of operations it's actually operational during the entry descent landing phase we also then have two technology demonstrations on board during surface operations uh one is to take data on the martian weather in a variety of conditions i like to call it the rover's onboard weather channel i'm coming to you today from west lake ohio we had 12 inches of snow overnight and we could just a little bit of martian weather sounds pretty good to us right now just a little bit drier and a little bit hotter the other technology that's part of surface operations is one that will convert carbon dioxide to usable oxygen um this technology is called called moxie um and i find that that's very apropos because if any rover we've sent to mars has moxie it's perseverance um so with more science and technology on board than ever before the the number that i keep hearing is about 50 percent um i do mean that literally and figuratively and you're going to hear more about moxie in a few minutes from jeff shihai uh the stmd chief engineer who's going to talk to you about that so for myself as the director of a program that advances technologies for future exploration needs personally i think one of the most interesting aspects is how the nasa team tested these technologies on the ground here on earth to get them ready for flight um for example with trn uh that i just talked about the precision landing technology the jpl project team used some pretty unique ways um to prove out the system performance here you know first they put the the system through some typical environmental testing so whatever the spacecraft is going to see on the way to its destination mechanical vibration from launch temperatures and pressures which we call thermal vacuum testing and then electrical compatibility to make sure when components are powered on they don't interfere with each other that type of thing that's pretty pro forma for us it's pretty standard um the second thing they did was focus on the software and algorithms which are a huge part of trn so they did simulations in the lab to model the different scenarios that the system will see um you know when landing on mars and then next if you could roll this video here please uh the team installed the system on a helicopter and flew it out over death valley um in the mojave desert it's really is a good simulator a simulation as we can get where the system will identify known hazards that have been mapped and then the maps are carried on board the system uh really close as we can get and quite conveniently then close closely located to jpl uh so that so that was uh easy to run just like it has to do the system has to do on thursday to get us to a safe landing spot in uh spot on the in the uh just jezreel crater so then the final step in all this and if you you can show this next video please the team uh used suborbital rockets uh to take a next step um this was through stmd's flight opportunities program in fact it was the mast uh mast and space systems uh zombie vehicle which is a vertical takeoff and landing vehicle um and really that was the final step to give decision makers uh you know the comfort that they need to green light the system to be used as the primary system for mars 2020s larger lander vision system and those tests by the way i'll mention took place back in 2014 uh over six years ago which is another just in closing i want to make this point you know this this development that takes place over multiple years you know all the technology development that goes into leading up to the mission and then the demonstrations that actually take place on the rover when we land they're really the primary way for us to continue to make these advancement advancements that are so critical and required to send you know more sophisticated robotic explorers um as well as humans to places in the solar system we've never been able to send them before and in just in closing i'll say stmd and stmd we say and we say it often because we really truly believe it technology drives exploration and what i think is so great about mars 2020 perseverance and ingenuity is that they're all excellent examples of that happening in you know inaction and we look forward to seeing all that action start on thursday and taking place then um and so now i'd like to turn it over to arisa who's going to talk to you about uh even more about trn hi um i have the pleasure of coming to you from the mission support area here at jpl so i'm just a few steps away from where i will take in perseverance's landing on thursday with some of my edl colleagues here at jpl each team on perseverance has a different perspective when we look at this beautiful ancient river delta that we see in jezreel crater and the lake bed the first two images i wanted to share with you kind of demonstrate this the left side is a spectral data image from the mars reconnaissance orbiter so the scientists right they see the geologic diversity and the biosignature potential um that we're looking for with this mission the right side is an example of the edl hazard map and so for edl we ask the question what could kill us on landing day um in the south uh east are rocks that are strewn throughout the um the the jezreel crater landing site for us uh the southwest and to the north we have sand dunes and then that beautiful river delta we keep talking about well that looks like a 250 foot cliff to us as we're landing and we certainly don't want to land on that this this map is the best hazard map we have ever created for a flight mission and it has to be because this is the information that seeds the decisions that trn is going to be making during perseverance's landing so what other improvements have we had to make to be able to go to a place like jezreel crater over several missions uh you let's go ahead and show the next slide actually you can see an improvement in the size of the landing ellipse so some of those earlier improvements were based on the way that we do navigation curiosity had a smaller landing ellipse than historic missions because of something we call entry guidance which is uh the spacecraft waking up when we start to sense the martian atmosphere and start to steer our way through the atmosphere to a target and this is actually a an algorithm adopted from apollo guidance that was used on the apollo missions the biggest difference for perseverance since the curiosity mission is using what we call range trigger so this is a change in the way that we deploy our parachutes curiosity deployed based on an estimated velocity and for perseverance we're using an estimated range that allows us to more precisely control the distance from the target that we're doing that and the effect it has is to shorten the long longer axis or the major axis of our landing ellipse which is why the perseverance ellipse looks much more circular than than previous missions and this is also what allowed us to then start looking at places like jezreel where it's harder for us to avoid the hazards but as you saw in the hazard map our ellipse is full of hazards uh so let's get uh let's move on through edl and get to that part um where we where we start to see tierra and do its work um so i just mentioned parachute deploy now that we're on the parachute if we can roll the footage we've got one more beautiful parachute to play video for you from the aspire testing that adam talked about a few details about our parachute that we're flying the materials are hand sewn and a mix of super lightweight nylon and really strong technora that has a better strength to weight ratio than steel when our parachute is packed in its mortar tube it has the density of oak and when we deploy it it comes out at 100 miles per hour has to inflate to a 70 foot diameter parachute in about half a second and we'll put up to 60 000 pounds 60 000 pounds on the spacecraft and the parachute and like so many other things within edl the parachute has to work if it doesn't it's not going to be a very good day for any of us once perseverance is descending on the parachute we can now release that heat shield that protected us during entry and for the first time turn on the radar and start to look at the ground and this is when we're ready to let tear in loose trn works in two parts so if we go ahead and roll the next video um so the first thing we do is take images with a camera on board compare those to a map on board and then that allows perseverance to reduce the error in where it thinks it is from kilometers to tens of meters we do that with a really capable camera the camera has a 90 degree field of view and uh can you go ahead and roll the next footage that shows the feature matching um 90 degree field of view and it has a one oh sorry okay i don't think i don't think we have it um that's fine um the feature matching you saw trudy talk about where it's comparing uh features back and forth between the map on board and the photos that are taken we're able to do that quickly because the camera has like a 1 1000th of a second exposure which allows us to get clean images while we're well perseverance is swinging around on the parachute and it has about a 0.1 second readout which allows us to spend less time taking or waiting on the foot on the image and more time processing it the computer on board is also specifically built to do this work so it's one of the fastest that we've ever sent on an interplanetary mission built for space and for image-based navigation which also gets to do some of that work again as you heard adam talk about on the surface when perseverance is driving around um the second part of trn is once we once perseverance has a better sense of where she's at she then uses a second on-board map based on where we can currently divert to at that point in time and searches that area to find the safest place that she can fly to that search is worth over 120 football fields worth of real estate on the martian surface at that point so perseverance chooses that that target and then um and that all happens in the the 2.4 seconds it takes for perseverance to send commands for us to separate from the back shell and start a free fall so when we have that knowledge and we're done with our free fall we fire up the rockets uh we like to i like to think of it as the pack or the descent stage that's attached to the rover and start to divert to that safe landing point we go from 170 miles per hour at that point down to around two as we slow down and get ready for the sky crane maneuver so if we go ahead and roll the next um we throttle down eight four out of the eight engines so that we don't impinge the rover door and deploy and this gives you a view of how that deploy looks um during landing where we uh both release the rover and then fire pyros that are gonna release the landing gear or the wheels to get perseverance ready to touch down once we're safely on the surface the final eight out of 158 pyro is fired to release the the bridles and the umbilical the uh the electrical cable that have been connecting the descent stage and the rover throughout edl so that the sense stage can then fly away to a safe distance and now we're on the surface of mars we have a brand new baby spacecraft in its new environment ready to start rolling around um if we're lucky uh the edl camera suite that we've also got on board perseverance this time will have been taking some amazing photos during those seven terrifying or exciting minutes and will give us some some images video that we've never seen before with that um i'd like to pass it off to jeff shihai who's going to talk to you more about moxie oh thank you versa coming to you from northern virginia the suburbs of dc under normal circumstances i would have loved sitting at the table there with the group and uh being at jpl to celebrate uh moxie landing on mars with perseverance but these are not normal circumstances so here i am i'd like to talk about what moxie is how it works how who designed and built moxie how we'll operate it on mars and what we'll learn from so the full name of the technology demonstration is the mars oxygen in situ resource utilization experiment now that's a bit of a mouthful so we pull a few letters out of that and we just call it moxie in situ resource utilization or isru means using the resources we find at the destination to produce useful commodities if we're going to the moon we'd have the resources that are on the surface on mars we have that but we also have an atmosphere that we can use atmosphere is about a hundred times thinner than earth's atmosphere and it is mainly of carbon dioxide about 95 96 co2 but we can use it so moxi is a small scale proof-of-concept demonstration of atmospheric institute resource utilization or isru we have an animation of the moxie design that we can show um there it is we can see that packed inside this gold colored box are three main subsystems there's a compressor to pull in the gas from the atmosphere and feed it into the system there's a solid oxide electrolysis system we call the soxy assembly that does the chemical conversion and then there's a collection of process monitoring and control sensors moxie uses a thermal and electrochemical process to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen but the cathodes in the electrolytic cells co2 plus two electrons become co carbon monoxide plus doubly charged o anions these anions migrate to the anodes where two of them combine to become the familiar o2 molecule with four electrons returned to the electrochemical system that the carbon monoxide byproduct is exhausted to the atmosphere something like moxie any any instrument you want to put on a spacecraft starts out as a vision in the mind of a principal investigator principal investigator for moxie is mike hecht from mit he had a plan for what he wanted moxie to accomplish on mars jeff melstrom at jpl led a team of clever engineers who worked extremely hard and came up with several innovative solutions to implement mike's vision in a way that would fit on the rover survive the trip including those seven minutes of terror that we heard so much about and and work once it gets on the surface of mars we worked with a company called oxyon energy they led a team that worked collaboratively with jpl and with mike heck to develop the guts of moxie that that solid oxide electrolysis stack that i mentioned a company called air squared led the development of the compressor that takes in the carbon monoxide atmosphere part of that effort was funded through the nasa small business innovative research program there's uh jennifer highlighted the the big team that that worked on uh march 2020 and in perseverance earlier there's no question that the team that designed built and tested moxie needed a lot of moxie to overcome all the challenges that were encountered along the way there there were times when some of the managers worried that the technology couldn't be developed in time to get it on the rover for delivery for launch but as you can see in the next video and i think it's it's up there there's the beautiful gold box being lowered into the rover so this is the day in march 2019 when moxie was installed into the belly of the rover so there's a filter on the outside of the rover that takes in the atmosphere and feeds it to this box the box utilizes the power system on the rover to power its operations and so moxie was built and and delivered on time and it's in the rover on its way to mars it'll land about 40 50 hours from now i think just about um when we get it to mars moxie is scheduled to be turned on three times in the first 30 days or so of the perseverance mission the first time we'll be mainly to see if moxie responds to commands and the second time will be to thoroughly check out all the subsystems we'll heat it to the target operational temperature and apply operational voltages now the third run will actually make oxygen under some conservative operating conditions after that during the mission of perseverance on mars we expect moxie to have at least 10 opportunities to produce oxygen those operations will be distributed across times of the year times of day and seasons of the year because the mars atmosphere varies with time of day and season of the year so we want to see how moxie works under different conditions of the mars atmosphere for each of those operations we expect to produce oxygen for about an hour at a rate of about 6 to 10 grams an hour so you might wonder why are we doing all this what will we learn from moxie what is this tech demo going to teach us you can see in the image there a depiction of a first human landing on mars and one one thing that stands out in that image other than the obvious fact that humans are on the surface of mars in that in that image that's a big deal but you can see on the vehicle the landing vehicle these big propellant tanks covered in gold colored foil that serves as part of the insulation system on the on the liquid propellant liquid oxygen is an excellent rocket propellant and for the return trip on eventual human missions if we could make it on mars we wouldn't have to pack it into a launch vehicle fairing launch it from the surface of earth push it all the way to the destination and land it on the plant moxie's i might say that you know when i first heard of this notion i thought you know i wouldn't want to be the first astronaut that's told you get to come home if you can make the propellants for the return trip but actually the the moxie the the production capability for making the oxygen propel will be put in place before we ever launched uh astronauts tomorrow so the vehicle that they needed for the return trip would be fueled up and ready for them before they even got there now moxie as implemented on the rover is about one percent of the scale that would be needed to produce enough oxygen to fill up the liquid oxygen tank on a mars ascent vehicle so the reason we're doing a moxie is we'll take the lessons we learned in developing it and everything we learn from operating it on mars and we'll put together a plan to scale up the underlying technology test that out and then deliver it to mars ultimately as we build up a sustainable presence first on the moon and eventually on mars various institute resource utilization processes will be used to produce propellants or construction materials or life support consumables even energy to power payloads but leading the way will be moxie which is the first ever in situ resource utilization demonstration on another planet now i'll turn it over to mimiong who will talk about the mars helicopter thank you jeff so like moxie mars helicopter is the technology demonstration motivated by the potential to add aerial dimension to space exploration so our team started the question of whether it is possible to fly a helicopter at mars because the atmosphere there is extremely thin one percent compared to what we have at earth so we systematically work through a series of technical steps and so if we started with first demonstrating lift please roll the video with a one third scale vehicle here in a chamber of mars-like atmospheric density and somebody's outside trying to joystick this to fly we achieved lift but not control we learned that the dynamics on mars in this thin atmosphere is very different and so next we built a full-scale vehicle with on-board real-time closed-loop control and demonstrated successfully for the first time ever a power control fly in mars like atmospheric density from there we went on to build a mars helicopter which will not only fly at mars but can operate and survive autonomously at mars and uh let's roll this video and all the while weighing under 1.8 kilograms that's four pounds so what you're seeing on the video here is one of our many many flights that we experimented with this 1.8 kilogram mars helicopter

and you see the helicopter flying it looks very easy when you look at it but you're looking at a room with atmosphere about one percent compared to the room that you're sitting in right now and those plates are working very hard being controlled hundreds of times per second so at this time the engineering mars helicopter has been fully tested as much as we can on earth we have flown with test flown and we have tested for environment and next it's time to demonstrate proof and learn how it operates at mars so to do that at this moment ingenuity is approaching mars carefully held by perseverance rover and is accompanied by a space station which is also riding on the rover and so far so good in cruise we've turned on the helicopter temperature kept maintained as designed by the base station we're maintaining the helicopter battery through the base station and we are ready for adl and the day after landing we'll turn on to check confirm that the health is good after that the next major milestone will be when perseverance rover delivers ingenuity to the surface of mars if we could play this video you'll see that the debris shield that protects the helicopter and descent is first deployed and then the helicopter is deployed by what's called the mars helicopter delivery system it's a very intricate system that's going to take about 10 days to go through these series that you're seeing to drop ingenuity to the surface and that drop the moment that drop happens is the moment that ingenuity has to start operating on its own in a standalone fashion so this little four pounder remember this entire vehicle is 1.8 kilograms about four pounds has to survive the cold frigid nights of mars minus 90 degrees celsius keep itself warm it has to garner energy from the sun through a solar panel to charges very it has to talk to a space station it has to do all of that in this little four pound and we will be the helicopter team will be working with the rover team and the scientists to look for the appropriate experimental site for our flight experiments and then next please and now after that you'll see after the river deploys and drives away there is ingenuity helicopter will have some tests of the rotor system for readiness and then we will go for that very important first flight rover will stay at least 100 meters away and we'll be watching ingenuity and engineering will take his first flight the first flight will ascend to about three meters in height and hover for about 20 seconds and it will be performed the very first ever powered control flight on another planet and as thomas mentioned at the beginning of this event it will be truly a wright brothers moment but on another planet so after each of and then if we can go on to the next step please so this is what we're looking for so this is a picture of our mars helicopter team uh as jennifer mentioned it really takes teamwork we're extremely tight we've been working on this for over six years members from jpl nasa ames nasa langley of the armd revolutionary vertical lift technology program industrial partners air environment qualcomm solero and other companies we've worked so hard and so shout out to our team we're getting to mars on thursday and uh every step going forward will be first of a kind and first step so it'll be nail biting nearly exciting so for all of you out there on behalf of the mars helicopter team please join our journey back to you dc thank you mimi uh we are ready to take media questions remember to press star one to get put in the queue and please direct your questions to one of our panelists we're also taking questions through pound the pound countdown to mars hashtag uh and we have our first question from marcia dunn at ap marcia yes hi um can you hear me yes we can yes for dr serbukin i'm wondering um if all goes well what is the earliest year that you would anticipate getting these samples back um we hear just 20 30s but i'm wondering what's the soonest year in the next decade does that compare it to when the first time crew might arrive and lastly you know mars landings are always so full of tension and stress adding on top of that the attempt to bring back samples how much more is that magnifying amplifying all the tension thank you thank you so much for your question so let me do them in reverse uh the first one is it's not adding stress i mean we always spend all of our kind of we do always the best job we can we bet on success that's just what we do and whether or not we want to turn uh return these samples is not adding to it we're of course planning for that that's exactly what we should be doing for this amazing mission and uh and for me uh we're entirely focused on one thing right now which is successful landing very frankly we're not doing anything else with this team right now they're focused on the successful landing in terms of uh the earliest return you of course have read uh both uh the work that we did and the independent review team and uh they're telling us that basically launching in 26 and 28 kind of time frame is the right time to go there which would bring the samples back in 31 and that of course is because of the planetary alignment style you know the home on orbits going this way and in reverse that set some of these windows that limit a part of that as to some of the propulsion characteristics of the spacecraft that are under conservation so the early 31 is is their 11th time uh they of course i just want to say where we are right now is uh you know in the middle like two every year and there's certainly uh in conditions and trying to make sure that we uh kind of bring all of our stakeholders along and make sure that we have the same enthusiasm for this mission that includes the international stakeholders get this done in this time indeed that the same is true for our human exploration of mars where you know number of discussions are happening you know of course the key element of the priority right now is to take humans out of uh take humans out of um low earth orbit and and really go towards uh the moon and kind of really make sure as part of our artemis program we land uh on the moon and and then uh built from there so so basically the the earliest that we've talked in various plans and that that have been talked about and also in the previous administration it's kind of late 30s where such a thing could happen but i just want to tell you the what i'm talking about bringing the community along is really right still happening right we have not had all the discussion with all stakeholders at the level of detail to really answer that question fully and uh with a lot of confidence technically uh that's i can often know earlier than that that we have talked about in the past so that's how i would talk about those three okay thank you uh next up we have bill harwood from cbs news bill uh bill harwood from cbs news bill are you on the line i am on the line dc can you yes we can thank you uh sorry about that so much for my airpods this is for jennifer trosper can you give us a sense of what we can expect after touchdown in terms of telemetry and imagery that would concern confirming a successful landing i mean some of this is in the press kit but i'm trying to understand what we can expect that afternoon that might we might get in time for evening newscast for example just kind of in general and in a related question can you talk a little bit about how losing data or not receiving data for some reason might not mean something bad happen in other words you know if you went into a safe motor something why we shouldn't all be oh no oh no um you guys would obviously try a lot of recovery and all of that can you just kind of address that a little bit for us thanks sure i'd love to so we have several telemetry streams that come down during entry descent and landing the mars reconnaissance orbiter is watching and we call it a pseudo bent pipe so we get almost real-time data with the one-way light time from mars reconnaissance orbiter through uhf that should give us the most information there are reasons that that could drop off during dynamic events while we're going through the entry descent and landing in particular you saw with erisa the mobility deploy so it's possible we will lose data in that link but it's also possible we'll get the data that has the most data and that's where we would get some final possibly camera images from the hazcams on the front and rear in that data we also have x-band data that goes direct to earth and in that we get some tones those tones just tell you what key events have happened parachute deploy for example so we hope to get that earth does set shortly after landing and so depending on horizon masks it's possible that we would lose that link as well after we land we we hope to get either of those links we also are recording data with the maven orbiter so we will have data that we have to process and we'll get within several hours after landing but then if even if we don't hear anything at landing if some of those data links drop out we do have our first overflight of another orbiter the odyssey orbiter about three and a half hours later and that's a small data volume pass but getting that pass would get a lot of information about the state of the vehicle if it's able to communicate then land was safe after that we have another pass in a few hours it's about 6 30 on on landing day where we would get some more data so if all goes well we could potentially see some images by the end of the day if not it's possible that something happened that caused the vehicle to go maybe into a safety mode after landing if we're in a safeing mode then we have fewer passes we send less data and some of our fault responses so the rover's programmed and spend a lot of our time thinking about what could go wrong and how do we help it save itself and so one example is if something went wrong with the main computer it could take up to a week for the rover to go through all the autonomous actions that it's programmed to do switch through all the telecommunications hardware and then switch to the other computer so there's a there's a lot of investigation we will look at everything look at all these different we'll look we have uhf stations we have x-band stations on earth looking at the spacecraft so we will work very hard to understand the success and if something went wrong to to figure out how to get the spacecraft back if possible thank you jennifer okay next up we have chelsea gold from space.com chelsea hi thanks so much for taking the question uh my question is for jennifer you know everyone talks about the kevin terror which obviously sounds intimidating but as someone who has worked through all of the rover landings from nasa thus far you've been more than prepared for the couple days ahead of us how are you feeling two days out that anticipated yet another fingers crossed successful rover landing on mars i'm feeling great there are no guarantees in this business there are lots of we always talk about what mars might throw at us this time and it's never the thing it threw the last time and so we have to be prepared for that but i tell you i look at those navigation solutions we did a tr our last time to target mars was trajectory correction maneuver number three we've never been able to not do the last two maneuvers and still be within our bullseye target so the team is doing a great job the spacecraft is solid i led the test program i feel very confident that it will do the things we do but again no guarantees but i'm feeling great thank you jennifer again uh let's see we have jill palka from npr joe hi there um quick question about the uh the navigation system the terrain relative navigation system where is does that have a dedicated camera and um if so is there a similar sort of camera doing the same thing for the rover once it's on the ground and and where is that camera is it on the is it on the sky crane or is it on the lander i don't know who should maybe i i'm not quite sure trudy or somebody i'm not sure if arisa wants to take that either right yes it does have yes it does have a camera system on it but erisa might be able to give you more details about it yeah so um as we said uh or as i said before there is a dedicated camera for the entry descent landing part uh for terrain relative navigation um that we called the lvs camera or laner vision system camera and if you looked at a picture of the rover it would be sort of under the front left armpit of the rover um looking down and the computer that is in charge of doing the image processing and helping to get us to a solution we refer to as the bce or i think the visual um and i'm gonna get in trouble enough i misremember but i think it's a visual compute element um and that that computer is the same one that's used on the surface on the rover for um when it does autonomous navigation the cameras that the rover uses to do that are different so we have navigation cameras that are on the mast of the rover so they're the ones um similar to what curiosity does those will take photos of where the rover is along with the hazard avoidance cameras that are on the front lower on the front and rear of the rover and can combine those images um to do to to enable the autonomous driving on the surface so there's different different cameras for those purposes but the same the same computer is doing the work thank you great thank you arisa and now we're going to go to a question from social media gs on instagram asks how does nasa test for the different atmosphere of mars when practicing on earth this might be good for both adam and mimi sure okay so for helicopter flight what we did is we use the space simulator jpl it's a 25 foot diameter chamber about 70 80 foot high and we pump that chamber down to near vacuum and then we backfill with carbon dioxide to the about one percent uh density in atmospheric density compared to outside of the chamber you know compared to earth and that is representative of mars and we've been doing all of our flight tests in that so that takes care for flying a helicopter that takes care of the atmospheric density the second part is the gravity the mars helicopter will experience only about 40 gravity at mars you know and when we're testing on earth it's a lot it weighs a lot more so what we do is we attach a gravity offload on the top uh to take care of the difference between mars and mars and earth gravity so that's how we simulate mars on earth uh thanks um for uh parachute testing we go to very high altitudes in the earth's atmosphere um so we get the right atmospheric density of course because we're here at earth we have the wrong ratio of specific heat heats we have the wrong speed of sound so we need to adjust our testing program as best we can to get the parachutes to open up in the right uh fluid mechanical configuration and uh and uh states um here on earth and we do the best we can uh very high altitudes with supersonic uh rockets that get us up there thank you adam and uh next we're gonna go back to the media on the phone and next up we have paul brickman with upi paul yes thanks uh hi can you hear me yes we can okay um so regarding uh coming in through the atmosphere um so perseverance is like curiosity but heavier um can you describe how the capsule um fears itself during entry and um or if it does steer itself i know that it has at least um one ballast device that it drops and so wondering if uh someone could say how those work and um is if that is what dictates the angle of entry and uh can the castle make any adjustments during that time uh erisa question for you yep um so uh the the the way that we do that um is very similar to curiosity the main differences are when those devices were designed uh for the vehicle at lockheed martin they have some flexibility and how much mass you put into them so before we start entry i think shortly after we separate from the cruise stage about 10 minutes before entry we actually will eject two masses that are called cruise balance masses and that's what allows us to shift the cg um so on the way to mars we're spinning right our cg is centered as it can be um and then we release those cruise balance masses that cause our cg to have an offset and that's what provides the lift vector that we use to steer both curiosity and now perseverance through the atmosphere when we get to the end of that phase we eject similarly eject now six smaller masses called the entry balance masses and that's to put that center of gravity back to the center um pretty closely before we deploy the parachute so that we're not deploying the parachute at a big angle um so the the way that we do that is very similar to curiosity we just adjusted um the masses and took uh and and did it that way for perseverance thank you erisa uh next up is gina sinceri with abc news gina i'm not sure who can take this but i know you have other assets from other countries orbiting mars how are they contributing to this yes so yes there's a number of assets from other countries uh basically the in this entry descendant landing the only assets that actively contribute our us assets we do not uh at this afford the immediate um uh entry descendant landing activity uh uh relying on other assets but jennifer i'm going to kick it to you to see whether there's fullback solutions and which other assets would be used jennifer go ahead yeah the uh so on the first saw we call it cell zero the latest afternoon pass that we get will be about 6 30 pm pacific time that will be with the trace gas orbiter european asset and so they are supporting this mission by relaying uhf data to us so we appreciate that okay thank you next up we have jonathan amos with the bbc jonathan uh hi dc uh greetings everybody from london here uh can i just check jennifer that you're not gonna do a correction at all going into thursday now you you tucked right up in that top right hand corner of that box so you're obviously comfortable with that and then the other question i had just going back to curiosity what's going to happen on on thursday what should we expect to see we we remember adam walking around the uh the control room uh and alan chen was the voice that we heard calling curiosity down and alan tells me he's not going to call it down this time i wonder whose voice we're going to hear calling perseverance down on thursday okay i'll i'll take the second one i will answer uh swati mohan will be calling perseverance down she's a guidance navigation control engineer who's been working tirelessly on entry descent and landing she is one of al chen's deputies al chen will be in there as well he'll be giving the final calls of touchdown nominal and things like that and swati will be giving the intermediate calls so that's our edl team the yeah you'll notice a few differences we'll be socially distanced we'll have masks on there will be fewer people in the in the mission support area we actually fortunately you know have a second floor where we have a large number of folks as well the surface team and the edl the entrance and landing teams will be on site as well so we're spread out but we have a lot of folks here back to your first question about the are you really not going to do another maneuver you're up in the upper right hand corner of your targeted box is that good enough well yes we believe it is now we have if if we got it really wrong we still have the ability to do another maneuver if we need to but those ellipses are the uncertainty ellipses on our estimates and all those ellipses are still well within the green box and the green box is conservative so we have high confidence that we won't have to do another maneuver but we're always ready we have daily tag ups twice a day to talk about whether there's something that we don't like about the navigation data the plots are coming out all the time so we are looking very closely and if we need to do something we will but we don't expect that we will have to thank you jennifer okay next up we have irish television's leo enright leo uh thanks very much indeed d.c

uh i wanted to ask a couple of questions about the terrain relative navigation this is a technology demonstrator yet it is also mission critical uh so i'm wondering how unusual is that um is this something that's happened before regularly perhaps and i'm wondering uh with a technology demonstrator is there a plan b has the sky crane been told that if something goes wrong with the trm that it should make some sort of hail mary landing um and if i may also very briefly ask about this 120 football field size area that orisa spoke about um could you just clarify the the hover time available um with this system uh if you obviously if you're coming down if the sky crane is coming down on the home touchdown line you just plonk it down but if you have to go all the way over to the other end of the field long can you stay in the air is my question well leo as always a very detailed question and thank you for that let's first start off with thomas derbouken yeah i'm just gonna before we go into technology which i'm not the right person i just want to tell you that uh uh yes uh we have when we landed with curiosity it could have done a number of technologies for the first time terrain relative navigation is not an exception what i want to want to tell you how we did this when we chose jazz roster as the place to go because of its amazing science promise we actually did so with an asterix attitude to it which is basically we said we want to do an independent review based on the data and the planning that the the team had put ahead of them to make sure that this technology works and if the answer would have been from that review well we're not quite sure we would have backed off into another landing site and we were convinced i was convinced that the technology was ready uh to go so so the way we're doing this is using the rigor and reusing data to drive uh processes in a way that we can include these technologies and we're proudly doing so now what we're to uh to the specialist on technology okay uh leo did you uh have a follow-up i think there were yeah i was just wondering about a plan b is there some sort of hail mary landing that can be done if for some reason say the trn cameras don't work or something like that uh adam stalson the chief issue um leo we have uh if trn does not work does not converge and we don't get a trn solution we would go to a normal msl curiosity-like divert maneuver and we would have a increased risk of terrain hazards but a a risk that that we um took eyes open at the jezro landing site so yeah there you go okay thank you leo and thank you adam next up we have jacquie goddard with the times of london hello thank you um so we've grown to know a lot about how the spacecraft work um i wondered if you can give us a little insight one of you into how you folks work um i'm referring particularly to what you have to do over the next few weeks and months to keep yourselves on martian time so the sleep shifting i think some of you wear special watches could one of you talk about that really what adjustments do you have to make to how you live and work in order to become a martian thank you i will take that uh the surface team so there are about 350 people and and some additional scientists who will be working on mars time so right now they are adjusting their clocks they the way that we work is um we typically will show up in the afternoon on mars because that's when the data comes to earth and then we will work for 12 14 hours until we get the uplink to send to the rover based on the data that we received now the mars day is 40 minutes longer so that's what makes mars time hard so if you're in the if you're up at uh we'll probably be 2 2 pm will be our start time and then that will adjust by 40 minutes every day which for a while it works we've kind of found that we only ask people to do this for three months the first cycle there's a 37 day cycle that you go through and then you're kind of back to the original time the first cycle everybody's excited they're this is cool i'm on mars time and you know in fact last on curiosity one of our one of our engineers took his whole family on mars time because it was summer and they weren't in school and so we had this whole family on mars time by the next cycle people start to get a little bit tired and by the third you know by the time we finish mars time they are well ready to be finished with mars time it's it's hard on your body it's like being jet lagged and so everybody we we have different things that we allow folks to do if they need to stay local or you know we can we have cots in offices and things like that to just help people um manage in mars time the reason we do mars time is because it is the most efficient way to make have the rover make progress on a day-to-day basis and that's really important early in the mission to get it kind of unbuckled and ready to go for the great science mission that we have all right great thank you jennifer uh let's see we're gonna go to a few more social media questions uh jeff uh apparently social media really is interested in moxie we've got two of them uh for you the first one is from glenn on facebook who asks could moxie generate anything other than oxygen no moxie is specifically designed with the electrochemical system uh and and the elements in that to take carbon dioxide and and generate o2 molecule um there's all sorts of electrochemical processes that are used industrial even very large scale here on earth to to make all sorts of things but each of them are tailored for a particular purpose and this one's designed not only to make oxygen from co2 but to do it under mars conditions great and uh the follow-up daniel from facebook asks is nasa starting to terraform mars using moxie yeah that's a good interesting question good question um and then there's a lot you know in the literature about terraforming uh ranging from you know fairly serious studies to science fiction sorts of works and um it's a dream of a lot of people to take another world and turn it into something that's more habitable or more like we're familiar something we're more familiar with um you know we i talked about

2021-02-18 05:57

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