Perseverance on Mars - Ken Farley - 3/10/2021

presented by caltech [Music] life should have originated on mars did not have very long to evolve and so what we're going to do is investigate these ancient rocks to see if life existed in them the role of a project scientist is to ensure the scientific success of the mission that's the definition of what a project scientist does and over the course of the last seven years i've worked in the design of the rover making sure that the engineers who are building the rover actually understand what science needs to address the question of whether life ever existed on mars the science team is mostly made of a planetary scientist we don't often look at rocks that have this primitive form of life in them and that's because very little of the rock record from that time period is left so you have to look in the few places on earth where it's preserved so we went down to australia drove out to this locality and studied these rocks and it was very impressive after a few minutes of looking at it i got it i could say yes i believe this is evidence of life it's kind of thing that would really be exciting if we found it [Music] pretty much everything around us on earth is covered with an organic film we didn't want to send such a film to mars because we wanted to see whether mars had its own organics and when we first started this project seven or eight years ago the science community was adamant it had to be this clean it had to be this clean it had to be this clean so these surfaces were cleaned to an extraordinary level and then it turns out that these materials when they were ultra clean these metals no longer slid easily past each other and that was especially problematic because if we're say inserting a tube into the sheath where it's stored and it gets stuck there's no technician to go and take it out so we had to change course and so many people said you're not going to be able to do that the engineering team rose to the challenge and perseverance became absolutely the right answer for the name and it also became a kind of a symbolic thing for more than just what we were doing just the country isn't entirely shut down we are persevering we are still doing great things if we go there and we find life that's fantastic if we go there and don't find life that's important too that's at least telling us that life doesn't always occur in a place where conditions are appropriate for it the message that i give to the science team is the engineering side has built the rover to have all the capabilities that we asked for has all the instruments that we asked for has all the sample tubes we asked for they are all ultra clean and now it's up to us welcome to tonight's watson lecture i'm ken farley i'm a professor of geochemistry at caltech and i'm also the project scientist for the mars 2020 mission and it's a real pleasure for me to tell you about perseverance safely on mars so we have now been uh on the surface of mars for about 20 saws that's a martian day and i want to tell you a little bit about how we got there uh talking about entry descent and landing which many of you probably experienced a few weeks ago by tuning in when it was happening i want to tell you about what the purpose of the mission is what we're trying to accomplish and i want to tell you what we will be doing over the years ahead and for this hometown audience i also want to tell you a little bit about what this has been like for me personally to participate in in this really exciting operation i want to start with this image here this is a real image i will try to tell you the difference uh when i'm when i'm showing you a real image as opposed to the animation or an artist's conception this is a real image of the most exciting moment of entry descent and landing this is the perseverance rover touching down on the surface of mars this is part of a series of videos which i'll tell you more about you might have seen some of but i want to tell you what this was like when this image came into the operations center this image came in very late uh in the evening after landing might have been sometime around 11 or midnight after a very long day and there were a few dozen engineers at their consoles up at jpl when this image appeared it was a bit of a surprise we didn't really know exactly when this would come in and it was just jaw dropping we had lived through the experience of edl and now we got to see it and so this was just a really fabulous moment to see us arriving so let me begin by telling you more about entry descent and landing and i just want to review quickly what has to happen uh during entry descent and landing the rover all packaged up inside the shell the spacecraft traveling through space arrives at mars at about 12 000 miles per hour and over the course of a few minutes it must slow everything down so that the rover can be placed essentially no velocity by itself on the surface and i'm not going to go through all these various phases that you can see but it involves aerobraking parachute and then what we call powered descent and in the video i'm going to show you in just a minute you will see images that were taken from cameras that were mounted on the different spacecraft components to allow different perspectives uh on entry descent and landing and it is synchronized with the call outs from the operations center at jpl and i just want to make sure everybody realizes that in real life these events were not synchronized the light time between earth and mars is about 12 minutes so the call outs you hear are actually occurring 12 minutes after the events that are captured in the video and this is one of the great kind of paradoxes of the when you're watching the the team uh during edl the engineer sitting at their consoles cheering or clapping and um or looking concerned uh there's nothing they can do whatever is going to have happened has already happened they're just spectators it's kind of a weird uh aspect to it and i i wanted just sort of convey my own experience with this you will hear in the videos you will hear people's voices cracking with emotion because this really was the highest danger moment for this very large mission and a significant fraction of missions that have gone to mars have failed so this was a this was really a moment when this mission was either going to make it or break it and my experience with this was really i found it really interesting that for literally for weeks before this i would you know i wake up in the middle of the night and suddenly start worrying about this you know just getting concerned like what if we don't land successfully what if we don't land successfully and then the night before landing something happened and i just realized nothing i can do about it and this team has done everything that can possibly be done and it didn't i didn't feel that nervous through the whole thing it was great that it wound up well uh but but at least i at the time that landing came i was confident uh it's kind of like when you're on an airplane that has to land in a storm there's somebody up front that is is gonna get you there the engineers have done their job and i trust them so i'll show you that video but before we do that i want to familiarize you a little bit with the uh area of the landing site this is in jezreel creator and i'm going to go through all of this in some detail in a minute but you're gonna see this landscape in the edl videos uh this area is about 10 kilometers on the side it's not a very big area you could uh you could probably hike across it in in an afternoon um the the several features that i want you to look for both in the edl video and also in the uh images that follow are the delta the big feature here tell you how that formed in in a little bit two craters one called hahuza and one called la orataba those will be quite prominent in the images and in the video and then this peculiar mitten shaped feature that is filled with sand dunes and rocky hazards uh called seita so watch out for those during this video and now i will just run this video of the synchronized call outs from uh jpl straighten up and fly right maneuver where the spacecraft will jettison the entry balance masses in preparation for parachute deploy and to roll over to give the radar a better look at the ground complicated indicate shoe deploy the navigation has confirmed that the parachute has deployed and we are seeing significant deceleration in the velocity our current velocity is 450 meters per second at an altitude of about 12 kilometers from the surface of mars heat shield set perseverance has now slowed to subsonic speeds and the heat shield has been separated this allows both the radar and the cameras to get their first look at the surface current velocity is 145 meters per second and an altitude of about 10 km nine and a half kilometers above the surface now filter converge lastly solution 3.3 meters per second altitude 7.4 kilometers now has radar lock on the ground current velocity is about 100 meters per second 6.6 kilometers of the surface there's the delta and hahuza is continuing to descend on the parachute we are coming up on the initialization of terrain relative navigation and subsequently the priming of the landing engines our current velocity is about 90 meters per second at an altitude of 4.2 kilometers ovs valid we have confirmation that the lander vision system has produced a valid solution and part of terrain relative navigation rhyming pba is nominal we have timing of the landing engines back shell set privilege is 83 meters per second at about 2.6 kilometers from the surface mars we have confirmation that the back shell has separated we are currently performing the divert maneuver current velocity is about 75 meters per second at an altitude of about a kilometer off the surface of mars here in safety bravo we have completed our terrain relative navigation current speed is about 30 meters per second altitude of about 300 meters off the surface of mars we have started our constant velocity accordion which means we are conducting the sky crane about to conduct the cyclone maneuver skytrain maneuver has started about 20 meters off the surface we're getting signals from mro tango delta touchdown confirmed perseverance faithfully on the surface of mars ready to begin seeking the sands of past life it's so much bigger than landing perseverance on mars it's about the american spirit and you brought it back you brought it back in a moment we so desperately need it so here we are this is a image taken by an orbiter mars reconnaissance orbiter and the bright square that you see is actually the rover we can sort of spectacular we can see the rover sitting on the surface of mars and the kind of butterfly wing pattern that you see that is where the retro rockets blew the the dust and sand out of the way and they left these shallow pits around us and i just want to point out two things uh the rover is sitting between that area oops that area called um seita you can see all those sand dunes we could not land successfully there we would uh either uh have difficulty um writing the rover if we land in a dune or possibly driving out and over this way i'm going to show you some images in a minute to show you there are lots of boulders over there and we landed in a little region between those two uh that we selected during uh edl the onboard the the rover the spacecraft on its way down decided that this was the safest place to land and it wound up landing very close to where we asked a task to go and that's pretty spectacular that we can arrive within a few meters of where we want to go after traveling literally hundreds of millions of miles to get there this landing site we've named uh off after octavia butler the science fiction uh author and also coincidentally a pasadena native before i tell you more about the mission i want to acknowledge something that is really very important um and i think maybe we lose sight of it a lot when we talk about a robot exploring space it is still about people this is the last uh picture that we took of the uh mars 2020 team up at jpl you can see this was pre-covered uh if only we could still gather like this um but i want to acknowledge that it is a group of this size that allows something like this to happen and what i'm going to tell you about is the mars 2020 mission and also about a series of follow-on missions that in many ways i i kind of feel like are like a relay race and in the first segment of the relay race the team of people that you see here as well as other people at jpl and elsewhere got the rover built got the spacecraft built and got it to mars that's the first leg they have now successfully gotten us to mars and they are handing it off to the science team as well as a group of engineers that are absolutely essential to keep the rover going and then we are going to hand off the samples that we collect to another set of missions that will bring them back to earth and so this is really an intergenerational effort it is uh i i would suspect amongst the largest scientific endeavors ever undertaken and so from that point of view it is important to realize that there are lots of people and many of these people may be your your friends and neighbors uh here locally and i also want to comment on what president biden said at the end of that clip this mission was in the home stretch when the curtain came down because of covid there were many challenges for us to get the spacecraft to launch and to figure out how to operate it uh in the covid world you might have noticed in the mission operations center during landing there were relatively few people in there we had to figure out how to make that work and the the idea that somehow perseverance was uh symbolic for the country we felt that we felt like you know this is something that we have to do we have to make it work so it is truly spectacular that we have succeeded in getting to where we are okay so let me tell you a little bit about the rover uh this rover is very similar to curiosity if you're familiar with it it's about the size of a car it has seven science instruments distributed around on it and for this talk i'm not going to tell you about what each of the instruments does in favor of actually showing you some of the results that we have but i do want to tell you that the three major goals of the mission are first to seek evidence of ancient life on mars and i'll explain that um you know some of the qualifiers that are in there why they're in there we are going to prepare samples to bring back to earth we the mars 2020 team are not going to bring them back perseverance will remain forever on mars but a future mission could bring them back and it's important to understand why these two goals are linked the idea of finding life on another planet has an enormous burden of proof and the likelihood that any instrument that we can presently fly could detect life in a way that was sufficiently compelling to overcome that burden that likelihood is small and so this is a good reason to bring samples back where you can use the full arsenal of terrestrial labs to investigate them both for things you know you want to look for and for things that only occur to you later like oh yeah we should look for this or that or the other thing so this is how those two two goals are linked and then we also have a third goal which is to enable the future and this means to just demonstrate technologies that will be useful for future explorers at mars possibly even human explorers to allow their emissions to move more swiftly so first let me tell you just a little bit about this life goal the mars 2020 mission is not tasked with looking for extant life things that are alive today and there's a simple reason for that the present surface of mars is too cold and too dry and there's too much radiation to allow any life as we know it to exist in this on the surface and that means if you're looking for life that's not a very good place to look you could always imagine that there's some kind of life life as you don't know it uh that's there but rather than do that we've taken a different approach which is that the the last oh more than more than a decade almost two decades of exploration of mars has shown that it was once a very different planet so this is what mars looks like today this is an image from curiosity it's a wonderful landscape it's got lots of interesting geology but what it doesn't have is anything that looks like water on the surface but in the distant past it may have looked something like this and this image on the right is an artist's conception uh it may or may not have looked like this may or may not have been a northern ocean on the planet but there is abundant evidence that prior to about 3.6 billion years ago there was liquid water on the surface and that tells us a it was wetter b it was warmer because it was liquid and c there must have been an atmosphere because otherwise that water would have just boiled back off so we know that the surface of mars was very different in the distant past and in fact one of the key discoveries that curiosity made is there were environments 3.6 billion years ago that are now recorded in the rock record of habitable environments places where organisms that we know about today on earth without having to imagine anything special where organisms today could have existed so that's why we are looking for ancient life rather than extant life what would that life look like well you saw a little bit of that in the in the introductory clip uh you saw our trip to the pilbara in western australia where we went to look at these rocks what you're looking at here with a sharpie for scale it's kind of a rock called the stromatolite and a stromatolite is uh the equivalent of a fossil but for microbial life so this rock was deposited about that same time about three and a half billion years ago and is the oldest uncontested evidence of life on earth it was produced when a layer a film of microbes grew in the mud at the bottom of a lake or a shallow sea and that layer of organisms that layer of microbes actually disrupted the pattern of sediments to produce this kind of bulbous or crinkly structure and it is widely accepted that no a by a biogenic process could account for this particular kind of structure and that's why we see it as evidence of life so i want to make connect the dots here this rock that you're looking at right now is uncontested evidence of life on earth three and a half billion years ago in a shallow lake or sea we sent perseverance to a lake that is three and a half billion years old so there's a good connection there and uh if there was life on one which there uh there was there is on earth uh it is not implausible to suggest that it also existed on mars let me also then uh emphasize that the reason we are looking for microbial life instead of more sophisticated life that might have left say bone fossils or tooth fossils or leaf fossils is that the complexity of life on earth didn't reach the level of that capability of leaving those kinds of fossils until about 600 million years ago so there's about a three billion year difference uh between when rocks like the one you see here were deposited and when the first real fossils that you might show to your to your child and get excited about until those were left and so just being explicit here we are using earth as an analogy because it's the only analogy we have we would be definitely excited if we found something that looked like a more sophisticated form of life but we are realistically looking for microbial life okay so here is one of the really compelling indications that there was once liquid water on mars this is a delta and i'll show you an image of a delta in just a minute um this crater is about 40 kilometers across it has an inlet canyon that you can see in the crater rim so that's the this back here is the greater rim oops sorry about that that's create a rim with the delta and the red dot that you see there is where we landed so the importance of this image is simply to drive home the point we we are not really going out on a limb when we say that this crater was filled with a lake and because there was an outlet channel we actually know where the since we know the elevation of the spillover point we know how deep this lake was it was hundreds of meters deep this was a huge lake so although this image is an artist's conception we have very strong confidence that this is roughly correct that there was a river flowing into this lake that was hundreds of meters deep we don't know how long that environment existed but it was at least there long enough to deposit that big delta just to remind everybody what a delta is and why this is such really incontrovertible evidence a delta is produced when a river as you see in this image here transports sediment until it hits the slack water of a lake or or a sea and without the turbulence of the river the sediment just falls out and it produces this kind of braided structure that you see in this image here and one thing so that provides strong evidence that there was water but another thing that it does which is really important is it is an abode for life and you can see that from all the different colors on here i don't know exactly what those are but those are certainly some form of life that just colonize the muddy surface so that's great this is a habitable environment but what's even better is that mud buries the organisms and preserves them so we say that this kind of environment has high preservation potential the rocks are likely to actually record evidence that there had once been life in it if that were the case and that's different for example than if you went to say a sierra mountain stream that's filled with rocks and boulders the likelihood that something would get preserved and still look like something that you could recognize is very low so a delta is really an attractive environment for habitability and for preservation potential and that was a key reason we decided to go to jezreel crater so here we are i'm going to show you a few images we've only been on the surface of mars for for uh 20 sols that's 20 just about 20 earth days and we are mostly checking out the rover the science mission will begin in earnest uh uh probably uh maybe four or five weeks from now we've got a lot to do and i'll show you what that is but a lot of it's checkout and the two images on the left show some of the checkout you can see us for the very first time wiggling our wheels and rotating the turret so that's on the robotic arm that is where several of our really key science instruments are located and there's also a drill out there which i'll show you more about in a minute so we're just spinning it around to make sure everything looks good and i'm going to show you a video of the turret in action but one thing to keep in mind is that turret weighs about 45 kilograms it's almost 100 pounds and it's perched out on a long arm it is a very tricky thing to manipulate so when you see the movie of of that being manipulated just recognize how delicate that hole is the whole thing is the image on the right is one of my favorites we arrived from space and we just drove away it's one of the special things about this kind of landing uh called the sky crane the rover was left with nothing around it it's literally like somebody beamed the rover to the surface of the planet and then we just drove off so these tracks will be on on mars for many decades to come recording our uh arrival from nowhere and driving away um this is about the extent of our drive we've driven uh i think in total maybe 70 meters so far but we're just you know we're just warming warming up to do some real exploration this is a uh wonderfully detailed uh 360 degree panorama and you will not be able to appreciate it in certainly in this zoom session and you would not be able to appreciate it even if you downloaded this image and looked at it on your on your own computer unless you zoomed in and you can keep on zooming in and zooming in and see incredible detail i strongly encourage you to do this uh the the march 2020 website at jpl the nasa jpl website has these images for you to peruse they're super fun because there's all sorts of interesting things to look at but i'm gonna i'm gonna show you some of them that caught my attention and got the science team interested um the two things that you can see pretty prominently in here are the lighter circles uh that you see right here and right here those were things that i called the butterfly wings that's where the rockets blasted the sand off of the surface so let me show you some some highlighted areas where we've zoomed in and i can tell you about some of the features we've already been talking about on the science team oh before i show you that let me show you where i'm going to be directing your attention the first few images are going to be looking this way so we landed here that's butler landing and we're going to be looking off in this direction and then so that'll be the first i think two images and then i'm going to show you what it looks like in this direction so this is essentially a pan through a zoomed in part of that mosaic and i like the panning effect because it it gives you the ability to see more than i could just show you in a static image so there are three things that uh you can see it just cycled back um the delta so the very prominent feature here that's the delta that's the crater rim and uh these sand dunes here are that feature i called sata where if we had landed there we would not have been successful so a couple of really interesting things we see already the first is the delta is capped with hard rock like right here this is a very typical feature you go out in the desert you see this all over the place there is a resistant rock layer we speculate that this is sandstone it's very typically a resistant layer the stuff below it is buried and that is almost certainly softer stuff maybe uh mud that was deposited in the lake we're going to go investigate that we'll probably be there in uh maybe a year's time it's quite a long drive over there um the other interesting thing which was was a surprise and you'll see it in some of the other images is there are a lot of boulders here uh i think most of us were surprised by the number of boulders that are laying around here these are smaller than we could have seen with orbital imagery and it is a first order question if you are out in the middle of a lake where did the boulders come from it is not what you expect you need some sort of mechanism to transport those boulders or make them in place uh so we're we're investigating that now which is puzzling over how that actually happened um and the other thing i'll wait for this to cycle back thing that excited me a lot when i first saw it uh is that image there that's the inlet channel right here so so this was super exciting to me to say wow we are sitting in the bottom of this place that we have been studying for so long there's the inlet canyon this is the real deal really exciting um so here we have a zoomed in look um at one of the pieces of the delta this is one that we've we assigned names to things to make it easier to talk about them we call this one kodiak it's a really prominent feature that i hope we explore in the not-too-distant future and in the foreground you see meter-scale boulders as i was referring to and you can see why it was okay where we landed because in the in the foreground so this is this is a probably 60 or 70 meters away in the foreground here there's almost nothing and that's why this was a safe safe place to land we knew from orbit at least at that level that this was a pretty safe place to land and then looking off in the other direction i had at one point uh early on i said look at the crater called la oratava and what you see scrolling right into the middle now is this much smaller impact crater right here you can see the crater rim of la orataba which is a few tens of meters across and it provides at least some idea of where those boulders might have come from just small local impacts that have shattered up the rock and uh and deposited them on the surface but this surface really looks very different uh than the surface for example of gale crater um where there where boulders like this are are not that common there's also some really interesting features off in the distance uh in the on the crater rim some of those are crater rim features produced by the impact that made the crater and some of them are actually lake deposit features so here is a kind of a gallery of rocks that we have seen a first-order question that every geologist when you put them out in the field they will ask what kind of rock is this igneous sedimentary metamorphic it is like the first order characterizations like when you take your kid out to the park and they pick something up and you know they say daddy what is this the first thing you go that goes through your head is animal vegetable and mineral well this is like what is this rock and i will tell you we don't know it is not obvious to us the two to two logical choices are it's a lava flow or it is rock that was deposited in a lake somehow we are trying to sort that out but let me show you that there are features or talk you through some features here that we do think we understand and some that we don't so in the lower right hand corner you see a rock that we affectionately call the harbor seal it is a kind of a rock called event effect and it is telling us about an important feature of this landscape and that it has been sculpted by wind blowing sand so wind picks up sand grains and anything that is standing proud of the surface gets abraded and so it produces these very characteristic um fluted structures and and other kinds of features that we see in many of the images so wind is important and then right above that the rock that looks like it's planed off right at right at ground level that is also because it is planed off at ground level strongly suggestive of wind erosion the wind is basically just sanded it down to the point where there's nothing that the wind can do on it anymore in the lower left is a different kind of a rock um it is this is one that was exposed by the by the jets of the of the rocket um that kind of uh flaky texture that you see in the in the upper left um it is a matter of debate how it was produced but one reasonable interpretation is this is weathering by water and of course that is something that you would logically expect in a lake it is not that common to see this kind of feature on mars we're pretty excited about that that in addition to wind type processes we may see in these rocks evidence of water and then the and just let me restate again but we still don't know whether these are sedimentary meaning deposited by water or by by the wind uh or whether they are lava flows we still want to know that that'll be hugely important in our thinking and then the in the image on the left i think is sort of a cruel joke um it's we call these the holy rocks not very imaginative uh but um i i like to say that you could lock the entire science team in a room and tell them they cannot get out until they all agree on what the origin of those holes is and we would starve to death uh there are lots of different interpretations for what those holes could be um and we just don't know they're just a fascinating feature um could be volcanic those could be gas bubbles those could be produced by wind erosion or any number of other processes so they're really interesting fun to look at but we don't know what they mean so that's some of what we've seen so far we will explore further and we will collect samples so we are going to collect about 40 samples into tubes that you can see on the left and you heard me um expressing my excitement about them being ultra clean well these are ultra clean tubes and we will drill into each one of these tubes a core of rock that is about the size and shape of a piece of chalkboard chalk and uh then we will seal it up and we do that using the drill mounted on the robotic arm so let me show you how that actually is going to go i'll run this movie of of sampling so we will likely do this uh not before the summer because there's a lot of activities here that have to get checked out to make sure they work before we do it so here we've roved up to a rock that we wish to sample so now mounted on that on that long robotic arm is this uh 45 kilogram object that needs to be very delicately placed at the surface rotary percussive drill kind of like a hammer drill that you buy at home depot drilling the sample right into that tube which is inside the bit and then we ingest it back into the rover to process it there that yellow thing is the tube and now you will see the most complicated robotic system that's ever been flown for planetary exploration this is a incredible piece of hardware the little circles that you see the honeycomb that's each one of those is a is a storage location for a different sample tube and what you see going on there is what we call sample handling it's making sure they're sampled in there takes a picture of it seals the tube and now we take that tube and we put it back into one of the little compartments where they are stored on the rover until we make a transfer by one means or another to the future missions which can bring them back to earth i'll show you that just a second so that's how sampling is going to work this was one of the really major new innovations that had to be developed for this rover that's a very sophisticated piece of hardware and one example i like to give is you know when you when you want to get your bag of potato chips out of the vending machine and it gets jammed up you you know you grab the vending machine and shake it a little and hope that it dispenses your chips well there is no way to um shake this thing and so this device not only is very complicated but it has to be foolproof there's no technician is going to go and work on it so here is what mars sample return looks like this is this intergenerational effort uh that is is we're on the first step of it really it is three missions as presently conceived the mars 2020 mission collects samples and we transfer them to a follow-on mission uh that has the mars ascent vehicle a rocket and we are presently um considering the different ways to do it this is a joint right now it's a joint nasa esa effort and and jpl is deeply involved in this there is likely to be a fetch rover with this um what we call the sample return lander this follow-on mission and we will march 2020 we'll put the samples on the ground and the fetch rover will pick them up and ferry them to the rocket the mars ascent vehicle and put them in a container about the size of a soccer ball we should call the orbiting sample that's inside the rocket and that is then uh launched into orbit and in the final image on the right you see the third mission which will capture this soccer ball from orbit and bring it back to earth and the uh current notion is that the samples could be back to earth as early as 2031. and when i when i say that people often think gosh that seems like a long time from now but i'll just tell you that since i was a graduate student in the 1980s mars sample return was always a decade away and it's still a decade away but at least we've started and uh and i would say for the for the younger folks in the audience when these samples come back they're going to be huge it is going to be a fantastic opportunity to learn about mars and what i find particularly exciting it's not my field but i think it's going to be really exciting to see how the science community really grapples with looking for life that isn't us looking for life as we don't know it people have thought about that but some scientist in the future is going to be handed one of these tubes and be told go figure out where there's evidence of life in there not life as we know it necessarily possibly life is we don't know it for the first time people are really going to have to grapple with that so i find that really exciting that that's coming soon we have a prime mission of uh about two years two earth years which is equivalent to one mars year we landed at the red uh star there the butler landing and that area called saita that i told you was you don't want to land in you also don't want to drive on it because you'll get the rover stuck in sand so we have a first order decision to make in the coming weeks do we go clockwise around say top or we don't go counterclockwise so the science team is is now trying to figure out um what we would see on the different routes and how important they are to fulfilling our goals for the mission and then we are likely to pick up a route that's kind of like the yellow one uh where we go up to the delta and explore environments of the delta uh and then ultimately we head up uh to the crater rim and if we are fortunate enough to have an extended mission that is what occurs after the prime missions more than two years from now we will explore the crater rim and actually drive up that rim uh which is about uh 1400 meters high and explore the highlands around the crater so that's kind of the long view of what this mission is about and we'll be collecting samples all along the way until we hand them off to the sample return mission and the final thing i want to show you is the one of the enable the future uh uh features of the mission there there are really two prominent ones which you may have heard about one of them is an instrument which demonstrates the conversion of atmospheric carbon dioxide to oxygen this is something that would be very useful for human explorers in the future to not have to bring all of their oxygen with them but to be able to make it on the surface of the planet so we have a small a small scale version of that which we call moxie and that will likely run within the next few weeks we will demonstrate uh that capability um this is a standard thing that that nasa does is is is kind of shake out some of the technical complexities in a relatively low stakes effort for example if if this instrument called moxie does not work it is not a huge deal for the entire mission if you were an astronaut counting on that oxygen being there you might think it was a big deal if it didn't work we have another similar capability and that is a helicopter so i'm going to show you the video of the helicopter in just a second the helicopter is likely to fly for the first time uh sometime in the next few weeks so this is one of the activities that we need to accomplish before we uh really embark on the science mission on the on the routes that i show you here so let me run the helicopter movie we deploy it from the rover it's mounted on the bottom of the rover we deploy it to the ground those blades on the helicopter are about a meter across because the atmospheric pressure on mars is only about one percent of the earth's surface pressure so it can't be a typical drone that you'd buy in a hobby shop so there are a series of test flights five test flights that the helicopter will be uh put through and they range in complexity from just going up and going down to the example that you see here where the helicopter flies off um takes some images and uh returns to its original landing site which is a place where we know that it's safe to land all those boulders that i told you about those are not a place you want to land a rover or a helicopter so that's what the helicopter is going to do to demonstrate controlled flight for the first time in a on the on another planet so that'll be super exciting and uh that is all i was going to present i'm happy to answer any questions you might have right now thank you for listening

Channel: caltech

Views: 2,452

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Id: 3VeOEm6llAE

Length: 45min 39sec (2739 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021