JPL and the Space Age: Mission to Mars

the mars polar lander and mars climate orbiter missions failed we had to get back in the saddle we had to get something landed on the surface of mars i thought it was honestly it's like a crazy idea given the amount of time that we have the probability of failure was unacceptable engineers don't like designing when there are too many unknowns they fooled me into taking this job saying that oh won't be that hard it's a reflex pathfinder you have all the pieces there we knew it would be a challenge but i don't think we adequately assessed how difficult it would be i think in the back of your mind you're always prepared for anything to happen but this wasn't one of the places that we thought something would go wrong come on man you don't put a system like this on a major spacecraft like this at the last moment trouble is it's great on paper but until you put it out there and test it you really don't know what you have you know i tell my people that in terms of my top ten list of worries the first three are schedule schedule and schedule and there's nothing in fourth place i came to the realization that the heritage wasn't in the blueprints the heritage was the people our next pass through this if it doesn't come together it's an all-go-home thing it's an sixth green over five four three two one [Music] the end of 1999 the mars polar lander and mars climate orbiter missions failed jpl was responsible for these missions and that changed everything there was a loss of confidence what had to be done is we had to get back in the saddle we had to get something landed on the surface of mars problem was we didn't have a lot of time we have to go back to something we know and what we knew is we knew the pathfinder lander and because of that confidence we can do it in a short time we got to take the pathfinder laner and stick a rover [Applause] here we go six pulses for equalization f minus 18 db pulse number one three two one we knew at the time we had a three year project to go to launch that's just very very tight for a mission of this kind of complexity and we've been fighting that challenge since the beginning you worry about am i got the right plan do i really have it figured out are we on track can we stay on track i'll briefly go over launch crews and edl and just give you an idea of how the downlink process works during those phases i'll spend a lot more time on surface specifically the tactical downlink process i'll also talk a little bit about a couple key additional requirements for red river goes to start getting into this cycle of things changing just a little bit here and just a little bit there and all of a sudden the mass got heavier and so other things had to change your design heritage the blueprint i use the phrase phrase that i will never use again because no one will believe me is build to print i said we will take the mars pathfinder lander and build to print we will take the blueprints and we will send it to the machine shop build these same things again and that will be the shell that we landed and then we just have to design this rover that fits inside that build to print concept is the one thing that was completely wrong the message here is if you see something that you don't like i came to the realization that the heritage wasn't in the blueprints the heritage was in the people and the people who designed this thing before they've gone through this design work they've experienced all the difficulties they know how to solve it and then we have a final tcm at 48 hours out [Music] [Music] they tell us these only weigh 40 pounds but they feel like 100. we are building airbag systems to cushion a rover that's going to mars well we have a deadline to meet for testing so we have to work a lot of hours and work hard and get it done on time and make it work good too a lot of it is sewing through these thick layers it's very difficult the stuff we coat it with makes it hard to go through we've had to get special needles special machines and it takes a lot of strength to press it out with your fingers and sew it i've done both i've worked suit parts i've worked gloves and now and i've worked these it's like peas and carrots you know gloves are more delicate more complicated mentally smaller this is physically challenging because it is heavy we have a lot of questions because then the whole time you're building it you're wondering is this going to be right is it going to be okay is it going to work you can't imagine the joy we were jumping up and down when pathfinder landed it was successful and that's what we want to bring into this how would you feel if you knew that something you had actually worked on and touched every day was on mars our names are on mars because we got to sign the lander panel of pathfinder and believe me we'll have our initials in some of these scenes too [Music] [Music] hello it's been hit a lot i mean seriously no no no these things lose a little of their edge look it's got the same texture down underneath where it's never been tested this is the rocket was causing all the problems in the last test so we were right up to the hairy edge we're supposed to just be checking the box we were waiting to see if we had a working airbag system it was pretty scary replica it's a mate you never would have guessed that this rocket caused so much trouble no it's not they fooled me into taking this job saying that oh won't be that hard it's a re-flight of mars pathfinder you have all the pieces there put it together again it'll work and every single last darn piece on that entry descent landing system had to be redesigned sometimes almost from scratch so we're using the reference drop for this first draw mer as being this heritage this build to print you never get to do that [Music] so [Music] [Music] i own the overall system responsibility but effectively i was more of a busybody getting in adam cessna's way rather than driving the system i wanted to see firsthand to understand the challenges and sometimes you can't really understand it unless you're there on site and seeing all the debates that bring out those subtle nuances of the design that you do not hear any other way we thought we understood how the airbag system was going to behave we knew it was marginal and nobody was expecting it to be a robust but the initial design failed and got damaged in ways we were not expecting 45 seconds today we tested at 16 meters per second and it worked i would say that you know on one hand we have good reason to be excited but on the other hand it was expected to work at 16 meters per second we didn't expect this one to fail wow yeah yeah yeah look at it wrinkling up catching that is awesome you can even see a piece of it looks like we have some clear damages the lighting's pretty hot right there back up a little bit you can actually see an abrasion layer lift it off and just sit in there that piece of abrasion layer is just sitting there what we've got here is what we're calling classic airbag damage where the outermost layers are there as sacrificial elements to protect the bladder layer it's a lot like a bulletproof vest it gets torn up and you tear the outside part of the the outer layers of the vest and you protect the user on the inside in this case it's the airbag in the lander this tool's formal name is the rock abrasion tool and in nasa you have to have your name shortened to an acronym so naturally that makes us the creators of the rat i can't tell you how many suggestions i get almost daily for logos it's a bit of a joke around here uh and in the space science community that we are building a rat one of the biggest issues facing us is the dusker to prevent the dust from coming out perhaps billowing up and damaging the other instruments however it's a very slow-moving drill and only sends up small wisps of material into the air we don't like the skirt it's almost as like you're saying okay we want to eject the dust for digging this hole so we can look in but we're building a cover right around the hole at the same time um [Music] you know what i recommend though we go through the report first and then we just usually won sure and then we do what what's who asks questions what's remaining okay there was a discussion that perhaps got a little persnickety because the pi on the telecon said no we have to keep the skirt in place and perform yet a whole another round of tests but i haven't heard anything do you think they were going to do that well i actually i question why why bother doing that we don't know what the skirt does at these different angles we don't know what happens without insert at these different angles this whole thing has been sufficiently counter-intuitive to me from the get-go then i'd rather see that's what's going to happen now wait a minute trying to sell the van trying to tell the idea of getting rid of the skirt is going to be a lot easier if you can show the tape you know this thing creates a the skirt actually hurts things quite a bit where does the dust go how fast what velocity does it fly off at which direction is it going to go etc i mean is there does it fly off in a sheet a cone well that may agree we're going to test completely thoroughly i was just questioning continual testing with the skirt that's all i just didn't quite understand why that should be so extensive we'll do it handle discussion okay from their perspective i understand you know their instruments they're worried about them so so we'll do however engineers don't like designing when there are too many unknowns a couple of uh [Music] that's the baseline and everything that these guys talked about is consistent with that budget there's a list of threats that these guys have come to me with and they've said okay i may i the more structure may be late the pma contracted ball may increase uh the flight software workforce may stretch to the right the et cetera et cetera et cetera and i've added all those threats up they're in the category of everything we can think of that can go wrong although froze would argue that we've made that claim before and we haven't thought of everything i submit that based on the data i gave you this week you can't draw that conclusion what is the internal processes in division 35 to make sure that these promise dates are going to be met we are holding the subsystems fee to the fire as much as we can what part of this gives you guess where are you concerned problem presentation presents to the board they can't make a judgment if they were to make a judgment they'd say you're in in very very serious trouble we're not done with this review yet okay i mean we understand that problem and if you want us to impress the story into one hour we can do it that's not going to work here i mean clearly he does not shift his knee date to the delivery date just as a matter of principle every time it happens we go through a very long process of trying to push back on the subsystems the procedures have got to be more self-contained john's right we've got to clean it up mechanisms at acs for example we are hardware and software constrained big time and so there are probably some things we can do you know there's always some something you can do but a lot of it tends to be non-critical path activities we have to go there's some wow lousy sucks you know we've had that objective right from the start right but if we go out into the middle of the listing we've lost that the main objective the main sort of for those of you haven't been in this process before that ray knows well you don't put a system like this on a major spacecraft like this at the last moment this is there's this tension that exists between the engineering team and the scientists the engineers want success in order to assure success they have to be very conservative people yeah the landing system is very fragile in the presence of sustained winds that if sustained winds go above a certain level that the landing system the airbags cannot do the job and so that's another point that says that even if you don't believe the models you better be wary of what they're saying and that and that actually changes the site selection criteria that's the bottom line that's right you're seeing a much greater concern over wins than we even considered going in but the way we started this was you have to certify the site is safe first so i don't think that the project will not recommend that we land in an unsafe site you know regardless of the science objectives how do you find safe you could probably imagine two partially ordered sets one from the scientific point of view these are all great these are in between and these are not the good and the same thing from engineering and you can imagine lining those two up side by side and then trying to decide whether or not to exist to the site that was not unacceptable from either point of view right and this was done during pathfinder and the gentry was there in the very end myrrh is more complex because there were so many more data sets that you could throw at the problem we have two orbiters that are going around mars that we can direct to take pictures at target locations so now it's much more involved you're actually acquiring the information while you're in the decision-making process while you're building the spacecraft while you're worried about what the spacecraft can actually do and what sort of site it can and can't land at excuse me i i in terms of distant views and relief clearly there's an issue here but what that hematite looks deposit looks like on a centimeter to 10 centimeter to meter scale nobody in this room knows it could be wild it could be weird it could be very very strange-looking and let me just follow that up pathfinder was just as dull and boring from an orbital point of view and we landed there were some hills there that people got pretty excited about uncertainty on this category matt might rival the uncertainty on the winds how could that be scientists trying to judge what the public likes i i think you can explain this one to the public oh man if i explain pathfinders in public i can explain hematite to the public this is under the public no no wait it was under the public category but we have a landing site where that category is not green i think we have a real problem yes so but remember the dynamic range is going to get open there may be some that have reds here the question i'm having is what is the meaning of that road and what is the meaning of good diversity because you can have so much diversity that you don't know what the hell you're doing let's go on let's leave it and see if it comes to help later who thought this up arthur can you find one more person we need another person for this game they lost one so the beginning of june of 2002 the year before launch picnic we are 51 weeks from launch last week the team went out and had a good lunch time and played a little volleyball the schedule is the big concern on this project you know i tell my people that in terms of my top 10 list of worries the first three are scheduled schedule and schedule and there's nothing in fourth place that's just very very tight for a mission of this kind of complexity and we've been fighting that challenge basically since the beginning so the pressure now is on getting the flight equipment together through the assembly test and launch operations phase in order to get ready to go to florida in march of 2003 the schedule situation has forced us to expend money at a greater rate than we expected so we've had to go back to nasa headquarters and ask for an infusions of funds they've been extremely supportive of our requests and we've gotten everything we've asked for [Music] but in going through that process you worry about have i got the right plan do i really have it figured out are we on track can we stay on track my job is to make sure that the rest of the team a very high caliber very motivated group of people can get their job done so my job is to get the stuff that gets in their way out of the way keep this well oil machine running [Music] so [Music] what's your opinion if we uh i think since this is the zero degree um it's probably worth doing so i i've got your concurrence that it will count as a test if it doesn't have are you questioning whether you're going to get air data boom data uh the pilot indicates that we have a very high probability in these gusty conditions that we will smash the air downfall yes we'll go we will count it i'm i'm really amazed at the amount of spinning look at it look at that that is that's blended awesome awesome oh that's fantastic well here's here's the thing too if let's say let's say this one hits and it's a good test we quickly found out that we weren't testing them the way they should have been tested i think in the back of your mind you're always prepared for anything to happen but this wasn't one of the places that we thought something would go wrong we went back in mid-june and had the very dramatic complete structural count and failures five four three two one it was it was slightly devastating significant severe shoot damage well the political spin on this is pretty easy because this chute did not have any of the reinforcements that we put in to stop just these very kinds of failures these kinds of failures are not surprising and that's why we chose to use you got to remember these soft good systems like parachutes or air bags they are not readily amenable to analysis the inflation of a parachute is actually a chaotic event it's a non-linear dynamic event highly driven by the initial conditions of the inflation in that regard i i'm not surprised or disheartened at all by this i need to get the right spin on this so that no one else chokes oh that was of a nature that just makes you you're taken aback it even takes a day or two to absorb the magnitude of what just happened that was rough first of all you have to figure out why you have a failure you have to figure out what your possible fixes are and you don't have the schedule to investigate this in a more methodical manner that you would like so we have to change our thinking on most likely the love and it didn't look like there was a it looked like there was a several different types of failure there at least to me uh to me it looked like it was yeah but again i'm looking through a little camera screen well even i mean it just you know did you hear it afterwards yeah coming to you dennis this cone's for you it's coming to you the fact that uh the parachute exploded not a good thing well yeah i'd rather have it happen here than mars yeah that's right unfortunately strictly speaking that shoot that just exploded was the shoot that we were planning on taking to mars complete structural failures repeated complete structural failures of the parachute and that was extremely distressful i mean that is a sense of panic like oh my god what are you gonna do about this the chute failed in the correct loads that tells us that we have a parachute that's not up to the job we need it to do because we have packed as much parachute as we can into the volume that's available to us our only recourse in making the parachute stronger is to change the configuration and reduce the band length the way you make it stronger is you put maybe other webbing or reinforcements or thicker fabric the net result is that you need more volume to pack that fabric in we don't have any more volume it's going to require people to be brave especially managers to be brave because the certainty that we have the job done is going to come very late and that's going to make everybody nervous our next pass through this if it doesn't come together it's it's an all-go-home thing it's an [Music] over [Music] about a month ago we began assembly test and launch operations when the first part of the flight units are or in our case engineering models are beginning to be integrated in the assembly facility where the spacecraft goes together that's a big deal because it indicates that you're now have completed enough fabrication that you can begin the test phase and begin to understand what it is we really have designed and built and where did we build it a certain way and it behaves in a way that's unexpected and to fix those problems so that at the end of that test period we know exactly what the article will do so we can send it to mars with confidence we are doing two shifts per day we started that from the very beginning we knew it would be a a challenge but i don't think we adequately assessed how difficult it would be i think that's been the biggest surprise [Music] the trouble is it's great on paper but until you put it out there and test it you really don't know what you have so our electronics are failing at our vibration tests sometimes we find it's a real problem in other cases we realize there's nothing wrong with it all [Music] clear this off there's two camps of assembling and testing the rovers and the spacecraft as a whole the assembly test and launch operations team is assembling the flight hardware the stuff that's actually going to go to mars our area the integration and test area has our own lab which is a clean room and a sandbox where we have rovers that we test in the dirt so we receive one set of electronics the brains of the spacecraft then we plug in to each connector and make sure that each connector works and we start slowly building up a spacecraft on a tabletop configuration where then the flight software team can come in and develop the the software that they need to operate each of the devices and then the as part of the test team we start doing higher level functional tests the other one would verify that we didn't have a short chat i like to think my job was kind of like working in the garage it was a lot of hands-on knowing how the vehicle operated or how the vehicle was put together you're trying to balance all these different groups people want to use the arm people want to use the mast and image people want to use both of those together at the same time we're testing in our lab they're putting these the real pieces together it was a lot i mean it was a lot of time it was three shifts around the clock every weekend and there was always somebody in the lab just because things weren't ready yet for us to start testing and your job is just to make sure that everything works is i look at my tie please [Applause] [Laughter] if you get a gust of wind the system starts to oscillate and when you fire your retro rockets you might impart an horizontal velocity so you might touch down with a very gentle vertical velocity but you might be going 30 meters per second horizontally when we do statistical analysis of that problem for mer it came out that the probability of failure was unacceptable so we need to come up now with a solution to that problem if you put a camera and you take two pictures and then you can look at the displacement in the two pictures how much you moved and you divided by the amount of time between the two images you can figure out how much what's your velocity you know the loss of fixes you know where were good to us hey this is doable [Music] we are doing what is our most recent and possibly our last actually test taking the fido rover out to some mysterious field site we do not know where and it's a fantastic site it's an absolutely wonderful landing site it's got terrific geology and best of all there aren't any bushes because this rover doesn't like bushes it's good with dirt it's good with rocks it's terrible with bushes because it's designed for mars where there aren't any bushes or where at least it would be a real discover if we found one we're going to come up with more than you can possibly execute on a drive saw okay what will happen is if we get in there and we find out on the basis of uhf data that we can do remote sensing but we can't do idd then i'll try to get the full set point of this test is to train the science team and how to do field geology with a robot that is somewhere else and using it to simulate the kind of science that we're going to do on the martian surface with the mer rovers i don't know where we are in terms of latitude and longitude and what state of the united states we're in but that doesn't matter what we do know now is we know where we are in some synthetic orbital images we've got images taken from overhead that simulate the kind of data that we'll have from ours the sowg meeting will begin in here promptly at 8 15. so at 8 15 i want everybody in their seats in this room quiet ready to go which rock we choose will be influenced not just by the geology but also by where we're going to go after that that's not something comes naturally to a field geologist we got to stay real focused on the task at hand which is doing the best job that we can for 10 days of really simulating the science that we're going to do on mars geology yeah yeah i know you guys love the pancake excuse me could i have attention for a moment yeah i know you guys love the hand cam panorama don't forget one thing you've really got to focus on is what the next style is going to be so be looking at the current location front has cam so you know what's in your work life okay all right good uh we have a western green floor i probably want to get this thing here say hey folks anybody's got questions issues on how to do naming of things roxanna wales here is our expert go to her for advice but so 17 18 19 three days of testing if we really knock them out like the two in a row maybe make wasty right okay i mean that's just the only concern is that okay so the other scenario is then you start asking what is it even getting one or two of them it is it's worth look if 1.6 fails that's huge and we have three mortars okay three ggs lay the parachute out like this and we're simply going to be relying on the friction with the floor to keep it from sucking the lines into the death zone the way i'd like is to make it to full inflation at center of the thing you just gotta but you gotta just you can't hit the top of the wall so you gotta stay safely off the top of the wall and that's it you go that high boom [Music] [Applause] four three two one come on come on what is that what is that what is that come on man i don't know what it is what do you think it is i've never seen that before we are uh mobilizing or scrambling all forces to have a discussion at 12 p.m pacific on this subject what am i breaking up at any rate um yeah but it is a um it may be a function of the geometric porosity the gap size richard it's uh robin and tracin and adam and wayne is talking to manning outside and he'll be in a second this is not anything that was seen during pathfinder or thus far during mer's development just as a general policy clamp down on the information until until robin and i have had a chance to release and a press release essentially um why are we doing it press release the emails you receive yeah okay that's how information about this drop goes out first because i found with the airbag drops that if you make a telephone call somebody tells somebody else and they play the telephone game and by the time it makes it to up the food chain all the good words have been lost and only the bad words have remained but this allows you to inform your management before it gets through the grapevine yeah wouldn't you like to tell pete before pete somehow found out that's right okay okay because number one i'd like to come up i mean i think it'd be good for us two one fire there it goes look at that beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful big that is awesome that was perfect that's center of the thing everything everything awesome awesome awesome oh that's so good yeah this is totally cool great huh we are so stoked oh that's really nice ten nine eight seven six five four three two one pull five four three two one can we pull the transition through no a foot shy 18 inches shy as soon as the transition got to the first roller this broke probably a spiking load due to the fact of trying to push all that extra around that color yes oh my goodness gracious look at that i hope they do hey babe how are you oh really oh no things are going couldn't be going any worse yeah oh no no not that's not clear we're going to decide the next uh next half hour here what we're going to do and i'll call you when i find out i love you i'll see you too bye oh oh my little transition joint why couldn't you have gone a little further i made it oh well i made it transition joy made it that was 104. we got to get this thing fixed because this we don't have a mission without this device yeah please we we just got to test some more you put this on a cd for me and let me take it home this movie tonight okay yeah let's do that [Applause] [Music] [Music] a little higher [Music] so [Music] hello [Music] [Music] take a little trip to me [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] let's start moving them out guys okay [Applause] wow [Music] [Applause] [Music] just can't wait to get on the road again making music with my friends and i can't wait to get on the road again oh guys you're on the camera on the road again top of that pathfinder seeing things that i may never see again i can't wait to get on the road again my last convoy well we're coming to an end we've been about 2 425 miles we got another 150 miles or so to go and we'll be finishing up this particular wide load convoy which will be my last convoy over the 41 years i've worked at jpl but it's been a quite an experience this is my 19th mission that i've worked on of course the role i also used to play most of the time was the spacecraft test engineer where i was actually out on the floor doing the electrical integration putting things together and then somehow or another i started picking up doing the logistics part as far as the transportation my first trip down here not convoy the project was ranger six that was of 1962. things are a lot different down here than what they are now it's been a real experience quite a ride couldn't want it ain't better now it's been documented so i don't have to tell it over and over again i can show them the video right how about if we pull all the trucks up just side by side rolling here we go [Music] oh [Music] [Music] d minus 15. [Music] t minus 10 9 8 7 6 green board and liftoff of the delta ii rocket carrying the spirit from earth to planet mars load relief is responding [Music] for this [Music] nice clean signature there [Applause] [Music] [Music] so so [Music] [Music] you

Channel: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Views: 72,413

Keywords: NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL, space, exploration, planets, mars, mission, mars rover, spirit, opportunity

Id: f_sSzn87ljM

Length: 59min 56sec (3596 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2022