Getting to Mars with NASA’s Dr. Jakob Van Zyl

[Music] I'm welcoming yacon Vanille the associate director of the Jet Propulsion lab tell us about the magnitude of the curiosity landing on Mars just give us a sense of what a feat this was before that landing we had two successful landings one was a basically shoe box size the other one was about a desktop size and then suddenly we landed the rover the size of a Mini Cooper car a couple of years later but to give you an idea of how much of an impact it had for the people around the world we had more than a billion hits on our website right after that landing and people just kept that up for many many months afterwards how do you engage a public as you you're sponsored by governments and industries a whole bunch of constituents support you how do you engage a public emotionally in a journey that takes three years to get there it's terribly uncertain the promise is extremely challenging and there's not gonna be little green men coming up to the lens of the camera saying hello you know how do you how do you do that with that and remembering that you'll if you don't do a well you'll risk all further statements with the public how do you do that well I mean that's a good question in in if you most human beings are by nature curious and want to explore so what we did in the case of curiosity is we put together a little campaign if you want to to help the public understand how risky it was what we were trying to attempt and so by the time we landed actually it was a case of everybody was rooting for us I mean people understood how difficult it's going to be a hundred things that have to go right and if any one of them goes wrong it's game over and so they were sitting there biting their nails with us as that landing was happening so it had it is a case of explaining to the public in a language that they can understand what it is that you're trying to accomplish and you know because everybody wants to be an explorer they just naturally liked it so in the end it was everybody's rooting for us I got emails from all over the world and I got phone calls right afterwards from all over the world people who wanted to know how does it feel and things like that so it's just communicating in a language that they can understand let me ask you a follow-up question to that because that is a way to engage them in the process but the product of curiosity wasn't the landing the product of curiosity is what you learned for landing there so you you you didn't want to confront them let's say little green men as I said because you knew that the information coming might be more sublime well correct so so I did you make that as a conscious choice focusing on on that instead of the other item yeah definitely and we consciously made sure that we manage the expectations of what it is that we are therefore even to the point where we made very sure that people understood we were looking to see if Mars ever could have supported life we were not looking for signs of life in fact we made it very clear our instruments wouldn't be able to recognize the signs of life because they weren't designed for it that would be the next step so I think in the end people understood but they all wanted to know hey so what's the answers right and fortunately we got the answer very quickly so and the answer was yes it could have supported life the magnitude of this project is something that most people would never encounter in their lives the length of time it took to plan the number of people that had to be involved the number of separate teams and the risk scenarios the what-ifs the stage is the milestones the proof-of-concept tests and then the what if it doesn't go right so talk about how you thought about that whole project plan and the details of that and then how you risk manage in general when you tackle a problem like the curiosity landing and so on you have to be comfortable from the beginning that there are certain things that you cannot prove to a hundred percent we have a saying it JPL test as you fly and fly as you test you can only do that up to a certain point for example we could not test the sky crane that crazy landing system where we were hovering and lowering the rover down in the same environment as Mars we the earth just has too much gravitational pull for us to do that and there aren't places big enough on your test facilities big enough on earth that we could actually rig up something that would take a look away some of the the Earth's gravitational field and so on but what you do is you carefully analyze every step along the way and you test everything that you can test to make sure that if you then combine that with models high fidelity models of how things should work that you can have a reasonable certainty and that's the only thing you can do you can have a reasonable certainty that it'll work but in the end you do have to have a little bit of luck that's now your question about managing the risk that's a very important question that you need to decide up front what is the amount of risk that that you can tolerate and for a project like curiosity the answer is very little because when you're talking about billions of dollars and you have one shot at it then things have to work so you may recall that originally we were supposed to launch two years earlier but we felt at that point we were just not comfortable enough yet to launch so we went to NASA and recommended to not launch we're not ready we can we do not feel the risk is low enough to launch at this point in time and that was the right decision in my other question on risk scenarios did you prepare for the nightmare scenario of if this landing didn't work when you got there oh absolutely because you had that seven minutes of dark time hora we prepared for every eventuality and how and how did you prepare especially to Peter's point to the public messaging yes so we had the I should say this is a standard practice at NASA so when you have a mission like curiosity landing the the video where the blue shirts are jumping up and down and high-fiving each other that room had a person in there who was appointed beforehand as the failure review board chair if things didn't go well that person's job was to immediately lock that room down make sure everything stays in the room for the eventual investigation of what may have gone wrong could we have done something differently it's very very difficult in a situation like the landing of curiosity where you're watching what happened 14 minutes earlier there's nothing you could do from the earth to change the outcome but there may have been something that somebody heard along the way that people didn't realize was significant so you want to keep all of that information in the room there were cameras there were recorders everything was going on and there was also the messaging to the public that that was prepared ahead of time in case we had that kind of a scenario when you manage a whole process has multiplicative risks you know risk built on risk response on risk and you do that is there any room for good enough or does everything have to have a much higher tolerance there's so many risk factors in other words you know the idea that one piece can upset the whole system so what's your tolerance for good enough as opposed to prevent perfect that depends a lot on what it is we're doing if it is something on the scale of a curiosity then the reason so such a thing is whether is the enemy of good right you're trying to make sure that you have really looked at all angles you've asked all the questions of what could go wrong and if that goes wrong what would we do if it goes wrong what would the system do because we would not have any input into it during the landing so you look at it from all aspects now that comes at a price when you are that risk-averse of course it takes a lot more resources in time and money and so on to make sure that everything is is ready and that's part of the reason originally we had moved to the little launch two years later but it you know that kind of a conversation goes on in every class of mission that we have so when we do a small satellite the cubes hats that they're called which is sort of a technology demonstration then you can stand a lot more risk because the amount of resources involved in developing something like that is much much smaller than you have for example for a curiosity so we we try at least now everybody says once everything is on the launch pad it is so-called Class A which means it's like the curiosity we try not to do that but the natural tendency is as you get closer to launch people get a little more paranoid will everything work or they get into groupthink and get so emotionally vested in in the launch that well we are very careful about that in fact we are we constantly remind our employees that they not only have the right they have the responsibility to stop the launch if something if they think there is something that would prevent success what do you think is the greater danger minimizing the risk or exaggerating the risk and minimizing the opportunity frankly I think it's it's the latter if you look at the the price if you want to for a space mission and how it's gone up the the low risk to failure the policy that we have or approach that we have comes at a very very high and as a result there are fewer and fewer opportunities everybody rings their hands about how do we solve this but if you are the person in charge of that particular launch in the end you want to make sure that it works so the with done experiments over and over - you know it was an era of faster better cheaper at NASA and things like that they all have their merits but in the end people are very risk-averse when it comes to this game oh really risk-averse in some cases I would say yes if the taxpaying public you know trust you with two and a half billion dollars you want to make sure that you don't disappoint them but the taxpaying public also has a vision in their mind that comes through film and books and other materials that fashions the expression of what you're doing so when you see a movie like the Martians I'm sure you probably saw the film right you'll see a movie that and it seems like you went to the Mojave Desert you know you didn't go to Mars and that you know it was a world that now we think of Mars more as the Martian than of JPL that's what that's what Mars is and that's what it could be how do you how do you temper that kind of experience that that modern cinema and television has given as the guideline for people to look at the missions you do the picture that they create is actually very helpful to us because again it it rekindles that spirit in humans that we want to explore we want to go to Mars everybody wants to be that person that goes tomorrow maybe not the one that's left behind but they want to go to Mars they want to experience the sights and the sounds and so on on this planet and that's what the movie allows them to do now what we are trying to do is of course come up with ways that we can take the public with us on the real journeys that we are actually doing but if you think about what NASA's vision for the future is it needs to take humans to Mars it's not on the timescale of them or the Martian movie necessarily but the plan is to take humans to Mars eventually and create the research stations and things like that on the on the so you think we'll look back might not be around but 50 years from now pick a modest amount of time 50 years we look back and see that movie and reality will reflect be reflected in that movie I think it except for a couple of technical inaccuracies but in general yes I think so I think you will we will look back and say you know that wasn't such a bad portrayal of what life could be on Mars and on that note we want to thank you.yeah cup for stretching our vision and our dreams thank you [Music] [Music]

Channel: UCLAAnderson

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Keywords: anderson, ucla, business school, b school, peter, guber, peter guber, judy, olian, judy olian, dean judy olian, dr. jakob van zyl, jakob van zyl, jakob, van zyl, nasa, jet propulsion lab, jpl, mars, space travel, interview, leaders, leadership, leading

Id: g6RAPJIFgW8

Length: 14min 5sec (845 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2017