After the Landing: An Update about NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover

hello and welcome to nasa's jet propulsion laboratory in southern california where we have just landed the most sophisticated and most capable rover yet on the surface of mars the perseverance are over i'm jari cook of jpl's digital news and media office and i'll be your host today as we gather reactions from our key players from the landing and also give a glimpse of what's to come so because of the coronavirus pandemic everything's going to look a little different today we have our masks on and the layout is a little different but i want to introduce our speakers to you so standing on the floor of von karman auditorium we have steve jurissic nasa's acting administrator we also have mike watkins the director of jpl and then we also have john mcnamee perseverance's project manager up on the stage we have thomas zurbukin nasa's associate administrator for the science mission directorate we have lori glaze nasa's planetary science director we have matt wallace the perseverance deputy project manager and al chen entry descent and landing lead ken farley the perseverance project scientist and then coming from our surface operations area we have jennifer trosper deputy project manager and over here we have a special group on our video conference we have a group of the perseverance team members all right so we are going to be taking questions during this briefing so if you're a member of the media and you're on our phone lines press star one and you'll be put into the queue and if you're on social media use the hashtag countdown to mars but before i turn it over turn over the podium i just wanted to take one minute to recognize what a thrilling day today has been we now have the most ambitious rover yet on the surface of mars congratulations all right i'm going to turn the podium over to steve jurissic wow i mean just just an amazing incredible day um i could not be uh more proud of the team and what they've done what they've accomplished under uh under challenging circumstances i also have to tell you that about an hour after landing i got a phone call from the president of the united states and uh and he's his first words were congratulations man and i knew it was him i wasn't getting punked i didn't only only president said congratulations man he um he he talked about how proud he was of what we accomplished um and he wanted me to i wanted me to send my his regards to percy and he wanted to congratulate the team he wanted me to congratulate team for him he does want to congratulate the team personally and i told him we will make that happen and so i'm looking forward to having the president united states congratulate the team this week um you know nine successful landings on mars um the only nation that's been able to do that just just incredible um thousands of people working on this to make this happen at the jet propulsion lab at nasa centers with our industry partners and our international partners i want to call out one of our other government agency partners the department of energy develops the radio isotopic thermal generators first the rtds that power curiosity and our powering uh perseverance and it's a great partnership so thank you to our doe colleagues um you know this this this mission is amazing on its own science technology and caching samples bring back to earth but it's also part of our bigger exploration plans right which involve really understanding mars and the evolution of mars and whether there's life ancient life but also preparing for eventual human missions to mars and so this is one step along the way of our journey to accomplish that goal and it's a major step and we've embarked on that we've taken the first steps and embarking on that journey um you know again i just i just haven't i'm amazed that um that uh that everything went up you know pretty much according to plan and when i heard the touchdown signal come back and saw the first image i cannot tell you how overcome with emotion i was and halfway was i didn't get a lot of sleep last night i think i'm going to get sleep really well tonight so again just just an amazing day um with that i would like to turn it over to my colleague and friend dr zabookin well thanks so much steve and uh i want to share an an event with with you that usually happens when i'm by myself and what you should know is that every time we do a launch or we do a landing we get two plans one plan is the one we want to do and then there's that second plan which is right here that's the contingency plan here's for the contingency plan all [Music] right just about one and a half hours a little bit more history happened right here uh i want to play a video that the team put together before i do so i want to just warn you you may or may not in the last row see some uh bent coed protocols uh you should just know that all of us who are involved back there were doubly masked and normally had all the distance in the world but but uh you know i will tell you later about my emotions there but i i had to hug some people uh sorry for that uh steve and and everybody but uh roll the video please let's lift back that moment we had go ahead we are starting to straighten up and fly right maneuver in preparation for parachute deploy deployed the navigation has confirmed that the parachute has deployed and we are seeing significant deceleration skytrain maneuver has started about 20 meters off the surface we're getting signals from mro touchdown confirmed faithfully on the surface of mars ready to begin thinking of past life looks like we're getting the first image [Applause] uh what an amazing moment i have to tell you after i was kind of reacting the first five seconds or so i was overcome with emotions frankly in the back there and i was tearing up and then frankly what i thought about is a statement that was made 20 minutes or so before the moments you just saw when one of the leaders said this is the first time for months that we're all in the same room and i want to thank you for being here and being part of the team of course many individuals on the monitor here and otherwise we're not in that room and i just wanted to tell you how proud and so moved i was by that team achieving that amazing success i was reminded of a statement of a famous coach who once was asked what are the three most important things that create success in the game and it turns out the same is true for nasa and here are the following three in the order of priority the team the team and the team and i just really want to thank the team for that thanks so much [Applause] of course for me this is not an end but a beginning now the amazing science starts you know and i just i'm so looking forward to the signs that's come and come there every yard on the surface of mars is a yard of mars sample return to go collect these precious samples and bring them back to earth and of course you should know that one of the first texts i got from the international community was from my friend david parker my colleague over in isa who sent his congratulations i just want to tell him back how we're excited we are to continue to work with them on this amazing joint mission this international history-making mission that we're now enduring of course with perseverance right there but as we're already starting to develop some of the team members moving over towards mars sample return and many concrete steps are also happening of course towards another horizon goal which is human exploration of mars as well you know i always think of it as like there's a whole bucket of miracles you need to achieve to do that and we're taking some miracles off the table both today but also as we go forward with mars sample return so the future of mars exploration is just so broad and exciting and involves many other nations as well and uh leaders many of them are still in school or even in kindergarten or or younger and those leaders we're going to need as we do this amazing achieve those amazing goals i want to think of the international partners of mars 2020 perseverance and we had something like 35 vendors from 11 nations that of course added up to the nearly thousand within the united states 11 nations that included a lot of them and i've been in some of these nations and i know where these pieces are coming from and how proud those nations are of course over and over that we have three partners that have contributed instruments france spain and norway and i had text from our french colleagues for example where the prime minister was right there with the team and celebrating with them i'm just so glad for the support in each one of those countries they're receiving from their governments and we look forward but each of our contributions the contributions internationally and the ones by the team here will provide information and tell us about mars and also the future collaboration that will be enabled by the amazing historic feat today mars is always hard we don't take this for granted landing on mars it's one of the toughest things even though the team you know is making it look easy i have to tell you i mean i it's just incredible to me i've i thought you know what i told steve this morning you know i had to get up in the night twice to replace a sweated through wet t-shirt with a new one i was telling myself i'm pretty calm apparently my body did not say so but uh this next night i'm sure i only need one of them as we go forward and that's in no small way because of my next friend i'm going to introduce you to you which is of course mike watkins who's the jpl director take it away mike thank you thomas um i'd like to welcome everyone virtually to the jet propulsion laboratory here uh this room many of our journalist colleagues have been in this room for a landing day where we've actually celebrated all of the mars landings ever accomplished by humankind here in this room and i miss the fact that you're not all here with us today we usually have the lab buzzing with thousands of folks and because of kovid we're doing this remotely but i hope you still feel a part of this and and certainly feel free to engage us uh you know with questions and follow up uh on behalf of jpl i have to say we have a fantastic project team no question about it and john mcnamee and matt wallace will talk a lot more about that team but i want to also notice the rest of jpl it really took a lot of folks working together to make this mission successful and of course we're working on missions other [Music] than mars perseverance as well and we had to keep those missions going we had to keep march 2020 going we had to use our cio office to make sure we could all work in a virtual sense work remotely and of course folks keeping everyone safe on the lab in terms of ppe and facility changes and you know we sort of had to change the tires while we're going down the highway uh starting last year and uh you know we are very proud of of having been able to uh to make 2020 a success and now that perseverance uh is on the surface i hope you are sharing the magic uh that i do personally uh these first few days on mars i always think in some sense are the most magical uh all of the great panoramas and the color photos and great science and our sample acquisition and the helicopter flight you will follow along with those and see them in the coming months uh but there is something special about the first few days because we have just landed a representative of the planet earth uh on a place on mars that no one has ever been to no one has ever seen it except from orbital imagery from a few hundred miles up uh above mars and uh i believe that that magical sense that we bring is a lot of the reason that jpl exists and nasa exists and uh i and everyone at the lab is very proud to be to be part of that and now to talk more about what we expect to do with this mission on the surface uh now that we are safely down i'd like to turn it over to my colleague dr lori glaze the head of the planetary science division at nasa headquarters thank you thanks so much mike really appreciate it yeah i mean i just wow right i there's just so much uh excitement and and emotion here today and and i of course have to extend my thanks as well um to the entire team who really had to work under uh adverse conditions over the last year but um have worked hard for the six years prior to that as well um and probably even before that uh leading up to to the beginning of the when the project got kicked off um i'd also like to to make sure i give a little shout out and some thanks to to my headquarters staff that support this as well um you know we all work together it's all one one big team and i i wanted to tell the folks here the the the march 2020 team uh that it was just such an honor to to be here and be allowed to sit in the control room with you guys you y'all are incredible you're amazing um and i know it wasn't even the full team there and the full breadth of that team uh the capabilities are are just astounding and and so i'm just so proud of everything you've accomplished and and you know thank you for letting me be a part of it here today um it is really truly exciting you know the now that we're on the ground um now the fun really starts and i loved uh you know you're gonna hear hear from ken in a little bit um we're talking to him right after landing and then you know the science team's already getting started they're already working you know ken's in there looking at the pictures uh the first two that we got down and he's already uh you know looking at him and trying to figure out you know what we're gonna do and where we are so fantastic i can't wait to get all the instruments turned on over the next uh several days and weeks and start collecting data and in particular over the you know the next few days as we're we're getting down all of the the imaging and the microphone data that were taken during the descent you know i think it's going to take us all along on that descent we're all going to get to experience just exactly what that was like this will be the first time we've ever had that opportunity to not just look at the the data that came back and said yes the parachute deployed and yes you know the the sky crane operated correctly we're going to get to see it and live it and participate every one of us on that way down it's going to be amazing so really really looking forward to that i'd also like to in my time here give a shout out to the more than one million students that joined in for the mars student challenge and i want to i want to thank you all for can we all thank the students that participated fantastic we're just so excited that so many young people around the country and around the world have have gotten engaged with this mission uh it's incredibly inspiring and as thomas said it's it's your generation that's going to take us forward it's your generation that's going to be uh analyzing these samples when they come back to earth and we're just uh so happy to have uh so much of uh so much interaction with with the students and and the the mars challenge the student challenge is still up there and folks can still sign up and still participate in that activity so just continue to participate so with that um i am going to pass things over uh to john um thank you so much john mcnamee who is our project manager and congratulations john thank you so much thank you lori um so i woke up this morning unlike thomas and steve i slept like a baby and i'll tell you why in a minute a little exercise i had a little breakfast um landed on mars so all in all pretty good day so far and the reason i slept so well is i probably closer knowledge than uh thomas uh island and steve and lori of the quality of the team that was brought to bear on this very very difficult endeavor and i'm talking about the very much extended team that doesn't just include jpl we got tremendous support from nasa headquarters from jpl management the technical establishment that exists here at jpl in the technical divisions but also in industry at the other nasa centers that were brought to bear on this project our international partners and you know a wealth of contractors that contributed greatly to the success of this mission so we all celebrate it together together for sure it was a very difficult task that we asked people to do they delivered they tested and we landed and now we've turned it over to the operations team you'll hear from jennifer trosper here in a minute and the science team you'll hear from ken farley in a minute and they have now they have a job to do i mean a real job to do now that we put this down on on the surface i know that the surface team and the science team um were anxious for us to get there and then as we started to get there they go oh my god they're actually going to get there if we need to finish doing what we need to do to operate this rover well they did that and they'll start doing in fact they're doing it as we speak right now so anyway thanks to all who contributed i would argue that if you looked up perseverance in the dictionary you should see the faces of all of these people that are on the screen here and all the people on this panel so thank you very much i'm going to turn it over to my partner in crime and the person i called the conscience of the project essentially from the get-go matt wallace thank you very much john and and thank you for your your leadership it's been a pleasure working with you the last eight years i have to say um you know you just got a chance to watch this team do one of the hardest things we do in our business which is to land a spacecraft on the planet mars you know we arrived at mars moving at about 12 000 miles an hour roughly and just seven short minutes we had to slow down and and gently put perseverance down in jezreel crater and uh and the the system just performed uh flawlessly you know uh get through 10 or 12 g's of deceleration a supersonic parachute deployment uh you know eight big main engines had to fire our terrain relative navigation hazard avoidance system had to perform the way it was designed and you know it's just a it's never easy these things are so complicated we were running a couple million lines of flight software code i think we had something in order of 30 000 parameters to set and get them all right uh you know just uh it's just a a difficult thing to do and uh it's it's a real very gratifying and quite a relief to be through it i have to say and the good news is i think the spacecraft is in in great shape we got through edl very well i'll channel give you a little more information about that we did transition into our surface mode as we expected to and and so we're doing well we do have a couple images i'm going to pop these up i think on the screen if you can bring up our has cam imagery these are engineering camera images that are taken out the front of the vehicle and the rear of the vehicle when we land and that's jezreel crater right there and you could see the shadow of the vehicle uh and you can look out into the horizon and that is uh that is just uh a great thing to see for the team so um so the next thing we're gonna do here is something we've never tried before uh in addition to landing at jezreel crater we have never tried to bring the team into our press conference here and we want to try to do that so are you guys ready out there coms team ready you guys ready to try this okay i think i'm getting some nods up and down all right here we go we're going to try to switch over uh and introduce you to the uh mars 2020 perseverance team here you go congratulations team [Applause] [Applause] so this is the team that built the the computers they built the structures they built the radars uh they integrated the prop tanks and the thrusters and all the engines uh you know they built actuators and robot arms and sampling systems uh these guys uh just just never never rested all of our terrific science instruments our our technology payloads uh really a remarkable team uh and they did it they did it you know days they did it nights they did it weekends they work through holidays they work first shift second shift third shift uh just a remarkable um you know a remarkable accomplishment and we're so proud to be part of what what they've done here and they look good they look good on tv i think you know so i think you hopefully you got to see some some of the faces and some of the families uh maybe a few signs a couple pets along the way but congratulations to the to the whole team and thank you all for everything you've done i'm going to turn it over to al chen he is the lead of our swashbuckling edl team and he's going to tell you a little bit more about entry descent landing thanks man you know wow that was uh quite a ride it never gets old uh landing on mars and uh you're gonna want to tell the whole project team thank you and especially to the uh to the edl family out there i'm really proud of you you guys did it um i can show you a little bit about what we know so far usually it takes us a couple days to figure out where we went but with our side benefit of our train wealth and navigation system we know pretty well where we went if you bring up the first figure you can see that we're off the center just a little bit to the southeast about a kilometer 1.7 kilometers or so to the southeast that's a pretty good area but terrain relative navigation was pretty important here if you go to the next figure and not just for telling us where we are you can see that we landed in you know an area that's relatively rugged there um and i think uh ken will be able to tell you about the science of what's there uh but i was just worried about what would uh what would kill us on landing so if you go to the next slide here red is generally bad um and you can see that the the system managed to find a nice blue spot in the midst of all that red um all that uh all that death that's out there for us so we found the parking lot and uh and hit it so um you know this rainwater navigation system is absolutely essential in getting us down here and helping us figure out where we are right away we are in a nice flat spot the vehicle is only tilted by about 1.2 degrees so we did successfully find that parking lot and have a safe rover on the ground and uh i couldn't be more proud of my team for doing that um and that's really all i say i think this is the end of my journey i guess with uh with perseverance but the the adventure really the mission is really just beginning uh so let me toss it over to jennifer to talk about the surface work that we have ahead of us thanks al well thank you al i mean you and your team did a fantastic job and we're so grateful to be in this position i almost feel like i'm in a dream our job is to think of all the bad things that can happen and try to avoid those and when all good things happen you feel like you're dreaming and i'm happy to feel like i'm dreaming today and happy to be here that i want to first i want to do the most important thing which is introduce you to another portion of the team some of these folks were downstairs for landing and some of them are up here uh just doing surface operations and so the team wants to share their excitement with you about being on the surface of mars getting ready for an amazing science mission so thank you team this team is awaiting the odyssey overflight yeah let's give him a hand thank you folks so this team is awaiting the odyssey overflight which will happen about 4 4 30 p.m it's a very small data volume so we won't get very much information but then at 6 30 p.m trace gas orbiter will have an over flight and send down a fair amount of data and that's i think what everybody's looking forward to are these images that mike talked about so the images we might get in the if everything goes well we will likely get the has cams with the deployed covers what you were looking at before was the haz cams without the covers deployed we hope that we will get some thumbnail movies of some of the edl camera images so that front row seat and entry descent and landing and then it's possible that we'll get an actual image from the descent download camera the last 10 meters before we landed on the surface so we're all on the edge of our seats looking forward to getting those images just a few other stats about the rover we think we're facing southeast based on the shadows about 140 degrees the tilt as al said is it's flat it's about 1.2 degrees the the power system looks good the rtg uh the generator before we landed was at 105 watts and we think it'll go a little higher the batteries are charged at 95 percent and everything looks great so we are excited to get the next set of information from perseverance now the team will get some images tonight but then over the next few days we spend a little bit of time i'll show you with the model here kind of unwrapping the rover it's been inside the descent stage back shell so the mast is not deployed so we will deploy the remote sensing mast here and then we'll also be pointing you can see here the high gain antenna at earth and that's how we will communicate right now the rover's sending data through the orbiters on an antenna a uhf antenna that's sitting here on the back of the rover and we can command it but only through an omnidirectional low gain antenna here so we don't get very high data rates through that so we're excited to be opening up the rover over the next few days after that we will transition the software as john mentioned we were finishing many of these people have been working on this mission for years and we were finishing the surface flight software as we were flying to mars it's on the vehicle but we will spend a little bit of time transitioning to that software then we will finish the checkouts of all the instruments and we'll drive to our heli flight demo location wherever that might be now we're in i spent a little time talking to the rover planners the folks who decide where to traverse and what's safe and what's not and there's a ripple field in front of us between us and the delta so we might be doing some driving around the the ripple field we don't like sand ripples that much but we're going to spend some time and figure out what the traverse places are and where the helicopter demo flight should be so that's what we're working on uh in in summary i would like to say you know as i step back it's just it's great to be able to share this success i'm so happy for the team who has worked so hard this is an incredible team and they have just pushed through so many challenges but we're also very excited to be able to share this success with everybody who is cheering for us everybody who is watching we really are excited for you to join us on this great mission on mars that we're gonna go through in the next several years learning more about mars and with that i'm going to hand it over to ken farley he'll talk more about the science mission on mars i thanks jennifer i would follow on what steve jerzik said i would say wow we have a science mission it has been a long road to get here and one of the things i would point out it may be not obvious from the outside but a mission like this is a lot like a decade-long relay race there was the whole first stage where the the whole spacecraft was designed and built and literally as the pandemic was closing in was raced off to the cape to make the launch the second leg was to get through space and arrive successfully as we have just done and the third leg is the one that we are about to embark on that's the science mission and one of the amazing things about this is there are thousands of people all along the way and at each step those people peel off and move on to new jobs and so on behalf of the science team i want to thank my friends to the right here and all of the folks that got us to where we are this is a spectacular place to be so thank you thank you all so much for that and we are going to do you proud in the science mission i want to start off uh just saying a few words about where we are and what we know so far uh this is obviously not based on very much information and my phone is buzzing all the time with people telling me things so we're already starting to process the information that we have but in this first image you can see that we landed to the southeast of the delta we are about two kilometers to the southeast of the delta and we are actually right on the boundary between two different geologic units there's the kind of smooth area that we landed on we call that the mafic floor unit and then there's the rough area this is actually where the dunes are and that's the olivine bearing unit and this is a great place to be because one of the things that uh scientists love to do is look to see how two different geologic units come together it tells you a lot about the geologic history so we're really excited to get going on this and if i could have the next image so these images i i hope everybody understands these are actually taken in only one of the color bands this is just in the red color band and they are actually taken through the protective lens cap that is on the camera so these are these are just amazing things that we got back in the first few seconds after we landed but we can already see some important things uh there are rocks in this field of view they're we don't know exactly how big they are but they might be uh about 10 centimeters would be a reasonable guess so those are those are going to be very interesting they will undoubtedly be some of the first objects that we explore once the kind of shakedown phase of the early rover operations completes and also in the background we believe that we can see the delta there there are features in the back that look like the cliffs of the delta so when we get those additional images back that jennifer was mentioning we should know a lot more about that and then we can also see some sand dunes in there and and actually something of a relief our imaging scientist told me when i went and talked to him about this image i asked him what he saw and he said looks like mars so i'm glad we have successfully landed on mars so science team is really excited to get going here we have uh years of scientific investigation ahead of us and i will turn it back to xiaoru for questions okay thank you ken we're about to start q a so if you're a reporter on our phone lines uh remember that you can press star one and get into the queue and if you're on social media and you want to ask questions use the hashtag countdown to mars so our first reporter question comes from steve futterman of cbs news go ahead steve and congratulations to everyone involved in this i'd like to focus my question to matt wallace and al chen obviously we see you through the lenses of the cameras as this is happening could you take a step back and maybe describe for us what was going through your mind your hearts what were the emotions as the the seven minutes of terror were taking place and the reaction when you knew that that perseverance had safely touched down on mars but you know it's hard to really describe to be honest with you you think you're prepared for it it's part of our business in some ways you know we're exploring we're going places we haven't been we know there's risk we know there's uncertainty i was telling somebody the other day i don't think a single work day went by for the last eight or nine years where i didn't think about entry descendant landing you know you always worry uh did you make the right decision did you test the right things did you put the right people in charge we clearly did on perseverance but it just it consumes you it becomes part of you and in in some ways uh it's hard still to believe uh that we've finished it and that we're done you know it still feels a little surreal uh because it just becomes embedded in in the way you you think um you have to be constantly terrified of it you have to respect it at the same time you have to somehow believe that you can do it or else you'd never try to put a car on the surface of mars right it's crazy um and so uh it's part of our it's part of what we do i guess and at some point it becomes part of how you think but but there really is no good way to describe that moment when it's over and you hear those words touchdown confirmed it's just a remarkable feeling of of pride in the team relief and really joy thinking forward to this remarkable surface mission that we have coming up uh that's the best i can do let me let me turn it over to al i mean those seven minutes are still pretty raw for me right now but the uh yeah it's you know the vehicle's going on a roller coaster ride and you are too right the the little pieces of uh of data come back things seem to be working the way you want to go you know you start getting you start feeling good and then you know something comes by that doesn't quite match what you thought it was going to be is that really right you should have expected that or something comes out of water and your stomach drops and then you know okay the things are okay again right then you pick up that next piece of information that says things are actually going okay um it's an emotional rollercoaster ride all the way down uh that way and you're you know you're second-guessing yourself as you go even though it's already happened it's kind of crazy um and uh yeah i mean it's it's a feeling of being very fortunate at the end i think for me that uh i get to work at a place with uh with with people who are both great engineers and great people and we still get to dare mighty things together so thank you great thank you okay our next caller is marcia dunn of the ap go ahead marcia yes hi uh congratulations for l um all those blue dots surround sorry all the red dots surrounding the little blue platch are those mostly rocks how close do you think you came from something that could have doomed the mission on landing thank you we'll have to take a closer look at exactly what we had there i will tell you that in general we make these maps a little scarier because we want to make sure that we find the safest spots in fact these maps are typically saturated at what we consider uh four percent hazard so that if you came down there i mean some of these places are definitely problems but and there's individual rocks that are marked there so we're gonna have to take a closer look to see how close we came uh but we definitely you know the system did what was supposed to do it found the uh the safest area that was available to it and and went there great okay thank you next call is from paul brinkman of upi hello yes thanks for taking my question um i'm wondering if someone can uh i realize you haven't seen the the descent images yet but um to what extent do you expect any major changes in uh perseverance's uh perseverance is planned route based on those images and about how much imagery do you think you're going to get i mean in terms of the number of images or video and um how much better will those be than than what you have from the orbiters uh i don't know if that would be for uh lori or uh or jennifer go ahead laurie or no you're pointing jennifer i think jennifer okay go ahead jennifer well why don't i i can talk a little bit about the images um we think over the next few days we'll get all of the entry descent and landing movies down so that we can see basically that front row seat of what happened all the different cameras and we'll get those movies i think as far as the where we might go once we see those i can probably toss that over to ken and see what he says about that yeah i expect that what we will do is we will explore that contact that i mentioned between the mafic floor unit and the uh and the olivine unit and as jennifer mentioned that's a dune field and we may have to go around the dune field but i suspect we will go around it either one direction or the other uh towards the delta great okay thank you we'll take our next reporter question from sam ahmed of afp go ahead sam hi thanks for taking my question congratulations um we understand we we had two mikes on board when when might we know if we are if our perseverance was successful in recording um the first direct sound from mars jennifer you want to take that one yeah we should be able to get some of that information in the overnight passes tonight and tomorrow morning so hopefully we'll we'll be able to understand whether we got the sounds and what those sounded like great okay thank you next reporter is kate tobin from pbs newshour yes can you hear me yes we can wonderful congratulations to the team great great job and and my question follows on the last two about the uh about the imagery from uh from the cameras that you've put on to the uh descent vehicle and on the rover itself uh can you talk a little bit you say they're gonna come down uh starting tonight and overnight is that all of them i know there were some gopro types sort of rugged sports cameras that you had pointed in all different directions and some high-speed uh video that you were taking do you expect it all to come down in the next uh you know a few hours or is that something that's going to trickle in over days and when do you expect to release it so let's let matt take this one go ahead matt yeah i can give you a kind of an overview there um and you're correct yes as i think thomas mentioned or others had mentioned for the first time we're going to be able to see ourselves in high definition video land on another planet we we put commercial ruggedized cameras at various locations on the vehicle three of them looking up at that big supersonic parachute one on the descent stage looking down at the rover one on the rover that looks up at the descent stage and then we have one at the rover looking down as well and so we think we're going to capture some pretty spectacular uh we think we have captured hopefully some pretty spectacular video and they come with a microphone as well and so i think that's what you're asking about we are in fact hoping that we can bring one image one still image from those cameras uh uh to the table uh tomorrow from the descent stage looking down at the rover and and i think that's gonna hopefully uh we'll see that and and then i'm hoping that that's going to be a remarkable image but the first video product uh we're going to work on over the weekend as the imagery comes down and we're going to try to bring that to to a press conference on monday and i think that's really going to be something to see yeah it's it's going to be remarkable i'm looking forward to it myself thank you thank you okay our next reporter is stephen clark from space flight now go ahead stephen hi thank you for taking my question um just wondering if maybe jennifer trosper can go through the time line over the next couple of days in some more detail about you know when the lens covers are going to be opened when the high gain antenna will have a lock on earth um and when the mast will be you know deployed and when the first drive might be uh just walk me through that for me please and maybe for uh dr zubrukin or dr glaze um you know the mars sample campaign my sample return campaign was really hindering on the outcome of today just wanted to get your comments on on any relief that you felt that you know that your you know your whole mars sample return strategy um is reality now after today's outcome thanks yeah i'll start with uh what what we're doing over the next several saws this is salt zero so right after the rover landed it actually fired some pyros and did release our high gain antenna and also release those lens covers which is why the images that we expect to see this evening will be without the lens covers and those will be the has cam images along with the other images we talked about the the first four or five solves what we're trying to do is get the power the thermal and the communications the infrastructure of the rover stabilized so that then we can go and load the software as i mentioned so the the first thing we'll do tomorrow we actually gyro compass today as well to see if we can understand our orientation such that tomorrow on saw one we can point the high gain antenna at earth and then if we get good pointing then we'll start commanding the vehicle through that antenna and that's one of the key things we're trying to do in these early days is get that communication link working we'll also release the remote sensing mast and then on sol 2 will deploy that mass now while we're doing these things which i call our critical path infrastructure things we're also doing other health checks of other instruments and over the course of the three cells or four saws of the these early activities we'll get all the instrument health checks done we'll charge the rover battery on that saw too once we deploy the mast that's when we'll take those initial images with our double e cams these their camera that they're their color this time in the past they've been black and white we'll take those first panoramas and then the mass cam z which is also on the mast we'll take those panoramas on sol three and then those will be sending that data down along with additional data from the edl cameras and the other data that we talked about over this week it'll take us until about solve four and solve for we actually start to load um and burn into the the rce so our flight computers the new software and once we start to do that we do about four days of transitioning to the new software we do it very carefully we toe dip we make sure that nothing goes wrong and at the end of that is when we start the next set of checkouts where we'll deploy the arm we'll do our first drive about five meters forward and back and then once we get that checked out is when we'll start to drive towards a heli site we'll have figured out where we want to fly the heli uh we need there are certain requirements of of that site in terms of rock sizes and flatness and so we're looking for that right now that ends up being you know a few weeks before we get there but uh but we're excited about it all wonderful i want to quickly talk about your second question stephen and that is uh of course uh there's a lot of friends all over the world who had a sigh of relief and everything went well with this touchdown the mars sample return uh colleagues they're all working really hard to retire the risks of these new technologies and to bring together two of the most amazing missions to now bring the samples back uh that's a work that i started years ago technology development and and the system development here at jpl at the european space agency and elsewhere there's two principles we used to set the timing the first one is we always bet on success in our business even if you sweat through shirt or not like i learned about john you know we bet on success because that's what we want to achieve that's what we're planning for the second one is to go right now and develop the more sample return campaign not only makes the service mission more effective in that regard but also it actually saves a lot of money because we actually can use the systems that we have now move towards that return and so for that reason i think there's a lot of people being excited right now all over the world but uh laurie anything you wanted to add that i may have overlooked in this i i think you've covered that really well the the the only thing i would say is that you know it's always nerve-racking to as we go through the the edl for a lander or a rover um but it was doubly so this time because as you say the the marsh sample return uh was also pretty you know is reliant on the success of of perseverance so yeah we all definitely heaved a sigh of relief uh in thinking forward on on all the work that that's to go uh from our sample return but really really exciting that we've now really embarked on that chapter one of mars sample return um and for real so it's great okay thank you lori okay we're gonna do a social media question this might also actually be for lori pulls to do on instagram asks if perseverance finds signs of past or present life what would we do next oh wow that's a great great question because there's still just so much to do on mars it's a fascinating fascinating place and there's there's a it's a wonderful laboratory for doing incredible science and uh you know certainly the big question for us right now is this question about uh the evolution of mars and the and the existence or not of of past life that's been preserved at jezreel crater and that's our focus right now you know but we're always looking forward to the additional science that we're going to do in the future i'm thinking about again how planets form how they evolve and mars is a great great place to to work on all of those different science questions great thank you okay we're going to go back to the reporter phone lines and we have mike wall of space.com thank you all and um yeah congratulations it was it was a really great day for all of us watching too um just just to kind of piggyback off of um stephen clark's question about what the near future holds could you maybe jennifer or john or or ken like um do you go out like like another couple weeks or a month or so i mean how long do you anticipate it'll take to get to the helicopter site and how long will those flights take and i mean when will the rover be able to actually like start doing science and like start gathering samples and so on and so forth do you think thank you sure i'll go a little further out i talked about we'll have the road once we get the robotic arm working and we get mobility working we'll go find the heli flight demo site so it's about three weeks and then depending on how close that site is uh we have to traverse to it and we still have the helicopter underneath the rover so we can't use our auto auto navigation we have to be a little bit more careful when we're doing that so it could take up to 10 so it really depends on where we find a heli flight demo site then we will spend 30 solves a saw is a martian day it's 40 minutes longer than an earth day so we speak in solves when we're doing operations on mars so we spend about 30 sols for the helicopter demo prior to that it'll take us about a ten sols to get the helicopter just deployed underneath the rover move the rover away we go about a hundred meters away before we fly it so that's another 40 saw so i like to say it's it's sometimes hard to it's always hard to estimate exactly when things happen but we'll be flying the helicopter in the spring here and we'll be spending spring fly in the helicopter after that we're going to upgrade our auto navigation capability on the rover meaning we're just going to try it out make sure it works then we'll drive towards the first science site that ken and his team are interested in going to again that depends on where they want to go how long it takes us to get there and that's the point where we where we will be doing the first sampling so i like to say summer is the time frame when we'll be doing the first sampling those things can change they might go faster or if we have to drive traverse to different places that take a longer period of time it might go slower that's a longer plan and then one thing i'll just throw in the end conjunction uh is around september where we um do not we're not able to communicate with the spacecraft because the sun is between earth and mars and so during that time we'll spend a little bit of work uh finishing off some efficiency and operability capabilities for the vehicle to help it be even smarter and even more autonomous and then after conjunction we'll upload that new flight software build and then that's when we can really do things even faster than we had originally planned ken do you want to talk a little bit about the science part yeah it's a little premature to say very much yet um i i mentioned in a previous discussion that there are 450 science team members and i i think most of them are sending me texts and emails about what we should do now but we've got to get together and actually uh come up with a communal plan we're not ready to do that just yet okay great thank you okay the next reporter question comes from jackie goddard of the times of london hello and congratulations everyone and that includes uh all the folks on those screens at your kitchen tables and your on your couches with your dogs and your cats and your kids um my question is can one of you on the panel please give us some examples of the complexity of the challenges that you faced getting this mission to mars under pandemic conditions and to what extent will covid continue to affect operations for example would the rover operations also be their kitchen tables and sofas and pets on laps um or does that now change thank you yeah i can i can start us off and say a few words um i'll let jennifer say a bit about looking out into the future of the surface mission uh you know the pandemic struck at just about the worst time for this mission we had just shipped the vehicle down to kennedy space center it was in pieces we still had to put it together it's a critical point in time for us you can't make mistakes there's no safety net at that point there's no double checks you have to do it right we were still finishing some of the flight hardware back here at jpl we had very little schedule margin you know the teams were already working multiple shifts and i had already scheduled out the weekends and uh you know we had to react very quickly and and we were normally you're just focused on trying to do the job do it right and get it done in time to make the planetary launch window because if you miss it you're going to have to wait two years and uh and suddenly the we had to start thinking primarily about how to keep the team safe and their family safe and and how to get through all these logistical challenges you know we were quickly trying to understand the protective equipment we had to bring in what kind of social distancing we had to deal with how many people could stand around the rover and how close could they be inside a clean room you know what kind of protection we got from our clean room garb we we were just struggling to understand if all of our support community the companies that just clean the garments you know for our clean room or bring the nitrogen in for our thermal vacuum chambers whether or not they were going to be there and continue to deliver the things that we needed to keep to keep going we had people here at jpl that had to travel to kennedy space center and we couldn't get them we couldn't travel commercially and so we had to ask for some help from nasa headquarters our friends at armstrong gave us a jet devi uh helped us with the transporting via an agency jet back and forth or we got support out of wallops another nasa facility to fly some of our flight hardware there and back so it was a very very challenging uh time and and then we had to figure out how to actually launch the thing and and fly it when you know we had all these constraints as well we were modifying our processes and protocols in our operations facility um you know very just very very challenging um you know and the team uh i think that the team like all of you out there they're worried you know worried about their parents or grandparents and and uh just worried about their kids out of school worried about taking care of you know kids at home and do doing their work um so it was it was a tough time we actually um we decided to try to market we we put a um a plate a covet plate on the port side of the rover it's now sitting on jezreel crater uh uh with the with the vehicle uh and uh you can see the video there of us installing that plate uh down at kennedy space center and that plate is really there to symbolize the challenge that not just our team was facing but everybody has been facing it's been a tough year it's been tough to do this mission under these uh in this environment but the team uh like they have with every other challenge has stepped up to it we got a lot of help from the institution from the agency uh and i think um and i think that's gonna continue into the future so that we can do this surface mission uh jennifer do you want to add anything well i'll add that we are not all together and that's very unusual for a landing and when we start a surface operations ken's talking about his phone blowing up usually that would be a big meeting that's in one of the buildings here in the laboratory where we all talk about what the the science of the mission is and based on where we are what we want to do the engineering team is largely on site right now and to finish development was a struggle being remote because these are complex systems they take a lot of individual expertise put put together in a way that we can operate a vehicle that we can build software that makes that vehicle work and doing all of that remotely without as much uh interaction has been hard for the team we have the science team now is fully remote and so and you know it's just like all of you guys i mean i work from my laundry room for the last several months right and my kids are in zoom school and they'll walk in and then people say they can't hear me because the washer is going i mean everybody has these challenges that are going on because this is not the way we typically would design a mars mission but the team has been fantastic and just overcome every challenge we actually have we have now uh robots on the floor where if you're remote but you want to go look in a room you can log into one of the robots and you can drive it around the floor now and surface operations and and go talk to the people that you want so we we've we've learned a lot about how to do things remotely i think it has changed how we think about the problem but it is it is challenging and i look forward to the time i think there will be a time uh when we can all be together again and not have all the restrictions i'm in a room by myself which is the only reason i'm not wearing a mask and i think that that does make it um one of the things i thought the team missed out on a little bit was just that excitement and energy that comes from being all together right before landing and so we were together but it was remotely and so i think it'll be fun and great for the team to be able to get back together again when we can do that okay thanks jennifer uh next call comes from amanda khan of the la times hi uh thank you so much for taking my call can you hear me yes okay great um so um i had a couple of questions here um congratulations um to jump off of that that last question i'm sort of wondering if all these pandemic restrictions will be affecting um how uh you guys deal with with mars time will that be affecting the mars town experience and and also will be affecting the experience of the rover drivers how will that be changing because of the pandemic yeah well the mars time question is great we so mars time as you obviously know you've asked the question is uh we get up in the morning on mars and then our clock shifts by 40 minutes every day so when you're all here and you're together that kind of works but when you're sitting in your living room or you know in a small room in your house if you need to be on a telecon all night long planning the rover's sequences for the next day that may not work out for your spouse or your family or those things so we've had to change in some cases we've actually had to create remote but on-site uh places for people to come to we don't want to gather too many people together we need to have our socially distinct facilities but we have several i would say we have a couple dozen people who are remote but still coming to lab to different areas during mars time so that they can not interfere with their family's life which is not on mars time and then as far as our rover planters they're going to get busy they already have some meshes where they're trying to come up with strategic traverses with the images we we have but i think it's the same for them we they have some unique equipment they need to use so again we've set up some different locations where they can come in and use that equipment it doesn't have to all be we have some over in this building and then we've set some up in another building so rover planners who can't be at home on mars time can come in so it is it is different and it's different for the families and we'll see how we'll see how it works um we do have probably about 50 people in here that when they work mars time they're actually at the facility and on console as you see behind me great okay thanks jennifer okay the next call comes from leo enright of irish tv uh thanks very much uh yari and as we say in the irish language go gordus ukri to everybody involved particularly the people on the zoom screen many congratulations i had a very detailed geology question ready for ken farley but uh jennifer trosper mentioned a robot that they're using to communicate i i wasn't quite clear about that so i thought i would ask about that a bit more you said you're a robot that can move and talk to people let me yeah i'll clarify it's a robot that you can log into and essentially drive it around and your face will be there and you can zoom up you can drive up next to somebody that you want to talk to closer than six feet and then you can have a conversation with them from your i mean is it a rover or what is it no it's just a robot that moves around the i can't remember the actual um maker maybe somebody can help me out with that but it's a it's a robot that we drive remotely around the floor it's it really just has wheels and then a screen it's a moving computer screen maybe that's a better way to describe it could i do a follow-up sure we can do that yeah sure okay thanks because i did have a question for ken farley um can i i you know this zoom screen is fantastic because we're all used to the crowd coming in in jpl after a landing and the other tradition in jpl after a landing is the journalist with the geeky question uh so i just wanted to ask you could you clarify have you landed at canyon shay and if that is where you have landed um can you tell me whether you've looked at channel islands and the outcrop there that does appear to be a delta formation and would you consider doing a quick run to channel islands rather than a long run over to the delta yeah okay so let's let's clarify what's going on here so the science team has associated specific earth locations they happen to be national parks and preserves to specific regions uh in jezreel crater and it is from those quadrangles we call them those quadrangles on earth that we will draw the names that we informally attach to features that we look at and we take observations of so we have in fact landed in the canyon de shea quad um and uh the i'm not sure exactly where the the feature that you were referring to is i still think that our most likely ultimate destination uh is going to be to the west northwest and that we will very likely go up to the delta front that in on the image you see right now is in the in the upper left-hand corner okay we're going to end on a social media question so vince on youtube asks was the landing today the best one so far uh i'll ask matt that question first yeah yes 100 it was the best one so um you know i this is my fifth mars rover at jennifer and a handful of other uh others of us on the project to work you know a number of these and uh it's uh they're all very very special i have to say but uh as of this moment right now this is the best landing on mars i would have to say all right great thank you that's all the time that we have for questions today if you're a member of the media and you still have a question you can contact the jpl digital news and media office we'll continue to answer some questions on social media and tune in to nasa tv and online tomorrow we'll have another news briefing at 10 a.m pacific time and we'll give you an update about the start of the surface mission uh you know if you want some more updates you can also go online to nasa.gov perseverance and mars.nasa.gov perseverance for additional information you can also follow us on social media at nasa persevere now one last thing before we go i just wanted to say that if you wanted to welcome our latest robotic explorer to mars mars will be visible in the night sky tonight it'll be right next to the moon so have a look thank you very much for joining us and go perseverance [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: NASA

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Length: 70min 6sec (4206 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021