The Future of Mars Exploration • Anita Sengupta • GOTO 2017

[Music] thank you so much for having me at go to Berlin I was at the go-to conference in Copenhagen back in 2015 and I think that's where I met some of the organizers for the Berlin conference so I definitely wanted to come back and visit your beautiful city I have one day here as I hope I can see all the sights in terms of my background my background is all aerospace engineering I have my BS my MSM a PhD in aerospace engineering which is also code for rocket science so my PhD is actually in the development and propulsion systems for deep space exploration and sort of propulsion systems to slow you down in the opposite direction that I'll talk about a little bit today but several years ago I had the great opportunity to work on the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover mission by a show of hands and if you have familiar with it a good some of you are so we we did land in August of 2012 and I was able to work on the mission from roughly 2006 to 2012 my background has been exclusively in the development of spacecraft technologies for propulsion purposes and for entry descent and landing a different planetary atmospheres purposes I'm also a research professor at the University of Southern California where I teach spacecraft design to undergraduate students and very recently only a few weeks ago I actually took on a new role as senior vice president at Hyperloop one which is a new mode of transportation which is actually like transportation on the ground so you'll probably see me speaking about that a lot more in the coming years and in my new role but the purpose of my talk today is to talk to you about the basis for Mars exploration and where we're going as a society where we're going as a planet and hopefully will become Martians ourselves in the coming years so first what I would like to show you is a video that we created in advance of the curiosity landing called seven minutes of Terror it did go viral on YouTube and I think you'll see why and the reason why it's called seven minutes of Terror is it takes seven minutes to get from the top of the atmosphere of Mars down to the surface and our job is to land safely on the surface of the planet [Music] when people look at it it looks crazy that's a very natural thing sometimes when we look at it it looks crazy it is the result of reasoned engineering thought but it still looks crazy the top of the atmosphere down to the surface it takes a seven minutes it takes 14 minutes or so for the signal from the spacecraft to make it to earth that's how far Mars is away from us so when we first get word that we've touched the top of the atmosphere the vehicle has been a lie you're dead on the surface for at least seven entry descent landing also known as EDL is referred to as a seven minutes of Terror because we've got literally seven minutes to get from the top the atmosphere to the surface of Mars going from 13,000 miles an hour to zero in perfect sequence perfect choreography perfect timing and the computer has to do it all by itself with no help from the ground if any one thing doesn't work just right it's game over we slam into the atmosphere and develop so much aromatic drag power heat shield it heats up and it glows like the surface of the south 1600 degrees during entry the vehicles not already slowing down violently through the atmosphere but also we are guiding like an airplane to be able to land in a very narrow constrained space this is one of the biggest challenges that we're facing and one that we have never attempted on Mars Mars is actually really hard to slow down because it has just enough atmosphere that you have to deal with it otherwise it will destroy your spacecraft on the other hand it doesn't have enough atmosphere to finish the job we're still going about a thousand miles an hour so at that point we use a parachute the parachute is the largest and strongest supersonic parachute that we've ever built to date it has to be able to withstand 65,000 pounds of force even though the parachute itself only weighs about 100 pounds when opens up that fast it's a neck snapping 9 G's at that point we have to get that heat shield off it's like a big lens cap blocking our view of the ground to the radar the radar has to take just the right altitude and velocity measurements at just the right time or the rest of the landing sequence won't work this big huge parachute that we've got will only slow us down to about 200 miles now it's not slowing up the land so we have no choice but we gotta cut it off and then come down and walk this one could turn those rocket motors off you don't do something weird you're gonna smack right back into the pair of feet so the first thing we do is make this really radical divert can either fly off to the side diverting away from the parachute killing our horizontal velocity and our vertical velocity getting you over moving straight up and down so if you look at the surface with his radar and see where the boil and then head straight down to the bottom of the crater right beside six kilometer high note we can't get those rocket engines to post again because if you were to descend compulsively for their engines all the way to the ground we would essentially create this massive dust cloud that dust clouds have been go and land on the rover if the damage mechanisms a tappa damage instrument so today we solve that problem is by using the sky created twenty meters above the surface we have to lower the rover below us that's heaven that's 21 people and then gently deposited on its be palmistry as the rover touches down and is now on the ground the descent state it's in a collision course with a robot we must cut the bridle immediately and fight in the same stage away to a safe distance on the road so as I think you all know that was successfully accomplished in August 5th of 2012 and of course I worked on it so I'm a bit biased it was a very impressive engineering feat and a very impressive engineering challenge in pretty much all disciplines of engineering and in the fields of autonomy as that entire sequence actually happens autonomously without a human being in the loop but just to take a step back from the description of that mission specifically I wanted to talk about why are we so interested in exploring Mars and one of the best ways that we can describe that is by thinking of the larger context of our solar system and so in our solar system there are three planets which are known as the terrestrial planets and those are Venus which is one planet in from Earth earth and Mars and the reason why the planets are grouped this way is that we believe that at the beginning of the formation of our solar system Earth Venus and Mars were very similar to each other but now you can see with Venus on the Left Venus has a surface temperature of 400 the 70 degrees centigrade which is the temperature setting for your oven if you want to make it clean itself it has an atmospheric pressure 100 times what it is on the surface of Earth and an atmosphere which is entirely co2 and up in the clouds is made of sulfuric acid in comparison Mars the planet on the right is a world which has a very very thin atmosphere it has about one percent of the surface density as compared to earth also made primarily of co2 and no appreciable water on the surface so how is it that these two planets evolved so differently from Earth and what is it about Earth which were no it's not going to go the same way and I think one of the greatest challenges that we have as a society right now is to prevent climate change and do something to slow it down and hopefully reverse it because Venus is an example of a planet which has experienced a runaway greenhouse gas effect and all the oceans on the surface of Venus boiled and are now in the upper atmosphere which creates at incredibly high temperature and high pressure and Mars on the other end had a different fate where we can now no longer live on the surface of Mars without bringing our own life-support equipment with us so one of the reasons why we explore space is actually to understand our own planet and how its evolved the second reason why we explore space is for the more fun exciting reason of could we one day live on the surface of another world and this table on the right gives you a comparison of some of the properties between Mars and Earth so because Mars is smaller than Earth the gravitational acceleration is about one-third which means that you would weigh one-third on Mars as you do on earth so that's not good for our human bodies but compared to being in the microgravity environment on Space Station for example it's actually a lot better to have that gravitational vector it allows us to grow tall it allows us to grow strong it allows us to actually grow plants for food to eat so I know a lot about space station my last project into them for about five years similarly on Mars the temperature is quite low so it is very very cold at minus 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the worst case winter time during the evening in the polar regions but during the summer time on Mars in the equatorial regions during the middle of the day it can actually approach a temperature which is reasonable so from a bringing your resources with you perspective Mars is not that difficult of a place for us to be able to survive you can think of it as the Antarctic the real problem of course with Mars is that the environment is not something that we can breathe it's made of purely co2 and the surface density is only 1% what it hear us on earth which means that we would have to bring our own oxygen supply so that we can make air so that's the biggest challenge and then also radiation the radiation environment on Mars is obviously much more harsh than the radiation environment on earth by a show of hands who here has seen the movie the Martian okay so you're big fans of science fiction then like me so we'll talk a little bit more about that at the end of the talk in terms of where we're headed but one of the reasons why I am so interested in Mars exploration and exploration of our solar system in general is to understand from a planetary science perspective how the planets evolved and so on Mars you can see in the upper left here is a mountain called olympus mons it's three times the height of Mount Everest and it was an active volcano but now it's stopped so think of the volcanic activity that created something so large in an environment so far away the image on the bottom here Valles Marineris is basically Mars's version of the Grand Canyon but it's about six times as deep as the Grand Canyon and we all know what created the vent Grand Canyon here on earth which was water flowing on the surface so we do believe that there were appreciable water flows on the surface of Mars but now they're gone as well as most of the atmosphere so what happened one of the theories of what happened is that Mars does have a residual magnetic field which means at some point in its past it had a much stronger magnetic field it had a molten core and it was rotating creating this effect called a dynamo which we have here on earth and that magnetic field around Earth actually protects us from in space radiation it actually protects our atmosphere from being stripped away by the radiation that comes from deep space so what we believed was that many many years ago probably four billion years ago there was some kind of impact between the asteroid obody and Mars which then shattered the core disrupted the magnetic field and then resulted in the atmosphere being ripped away and the water therefore being boiled off of the surface because of the low pressure environment so we don't know if this is what's happened but this is our hypothesis and we send spacecraft to the surface of Mars and we send spacecraft to orbit Mars to make scientific measurements to test these hypotheses so we understand the evolution of the planets so by a show of hands who thinks that Mars has moons it does it has two moons it has a moon called Phobos and a moon called damos and you can see they're quite small only 20 kilometers diameter for the 112 kilometers in diameter for the right and so because they're so small they actually can maintain their weird potato shape looking body structure because they don't compress over their own gravitational influence and they don't experience differentiation like a planet does but what we believe is that these are captured asteroid --all objects-- that got captured and Mars's gravity well but the reason why these are so interesting to us now is that we could conceivably use these as natural satellites if we were to set up a human colony on Mars both to mine minerals from the surface to mine water from these bodies as well as to set up literally a communications infrastructure on these satellites so that we can easily communicate between the surface of Mars and back to earth by having satellite relays on these bodies in addition to mining depots on these bodies so for the future human expeditions to Mars or setting up a future human colony there we need to use the resources which are already available to us because that solves the energy problem of having sit things over a really long distance so by a show of hands who thinks we found water on Mars so you guys have been doing your homework so we actually have and so what this picture is on the upper right is taken by a spacecraft called the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which has been in orbit around Mars for over 10 years taking incredibly high-resolution images of the surface which gives us all the beautiful data that I show today from a top-down view and also gives us interesting reconnaissance information so we can figure out where do we want to land on the surface of Mars when we send missions to land on the surface the picture on the bottom here is actually a view underneath the Phoenix lander which was taken I think in 2006 timeframe and the little white patch that you see we've actually confirmed is salt water ice that exists in the polar regions on Mars so this is so important because if we know that there's really there's water available to us pretty close to the surface if we do send people to Mars in the future they could access that water and use it for washing their clothes for take for bathing as well as for growing plants in pressurized environments so we know that hidden beneath the surface on Mars is evidence of its poorer or past habitability over time so by a show of hands who thinks that there's flowing water on Mars so this is a less known finding but there actually is it's in the form of mud so sort of a wet mud and so what you can see on this picture in the lower left is streaks coming down the cliff faces on Mars and we believe that these are actually wet mud water flows and the reason why this happens is because the planet is tilted on its axis which means that if there was frozen water in the subsurface as as mars goes around the Sun it melts or it sort of like heats up and as a result the frozen water can seep out at the side depending upon the season and the weather it's in the northern the southern hemisphere of the planets and so once again it means that there is water in the subsurface and where there's water there can sometimes be life and so one of our future missions we would actually like to land in one of these places where we know there are these active water flows to be able to sample them and see what's actually in it and why this is important is that this data was actually determined a student back in I think it was September of 2015 who took a look at this image data was coming from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and did an analysis to actually determine that this was water coming out using another instrument called a spectroscopy instrument to confirm that so part of the data which is collected by all these missions whether they're NASA missions ISA missions JAXA missions is that that data is available open source for people to analyze whether they're students or even private citizen scientists so that's kind of exciting we're inherently all the science data which is collected you can view it as open source but from a science perspective so how many times have we landed on Mars we've landed a total of seven times successfully on Mars they were all done by the u.s. space program NASA the first one was the Viking landers in the late 1970s that was a long time ago you can imagine the state of computer technology back then as well as the knowledge of the planetary atmosphere back then 20 years later or so we landed the Pathfinder Sojourner Rover which was a very small Rover we developed a whole new set of technologies there was about a gap of 20 years between the first and the second landing we had two more successful landings in the early 2000s with Spirit and Opportunity rover using a different set of technologies enabling us to bring more mass to the surface and then we did it again in Phoenix in 2004 with a single platform and then we did it again in August of 2012 for the Curiosity rover and the next two missions that we have coming up are the insight mission in 2018 just around the corner which is actually going to measure whether or not there are still active seismic activity on the planet looking for Mars quakes to get a better understanding of whether or not we still have a geologically active planet and then Mars 2020 which is basically doing the Mars Science Laboratory mission again but this time collecting a sample to cache it for a future mission which will pick it up and send the sample back to earth and we can talk about more more in the Q&A section but over the course of these different missions we've developed new technologies which have enabled us to land more accurately and land more equipment on the surface of the planet which allows us to do more science and it also gives us the building blocks or the stepping stones to facilitate sending people to the planet in the decades ahead and these images that you see here are images taken by these landed platforms on the surface of the planet and so I always find them very beautiful but also kind of eerie but they look very similar to Earth which means that our plants really aren't that dissimilar to each other so the reason why this is important though is that we learn from the past and then we build from that on the future and so one of the analogies I would give you here for the software conference is the agile design methodology so we're not able to use agile design methodology for a given mission and and because it's totally new and you can't afford to have a mistake it has to work the first time but we can use it in sort of a historical sense where we build from the prior missions use the things that we demonstrated and then implement it on the next mission I'll talk about that a little bit later how we use the Curiosity missions technology demonstrations to build on the future mission which is the Mars 2020 mission coming up but what you can see here is the evolution in the capability of the roving technology that we have sent to the surface of the planet on the lower left we have something which is sort of like a small toy truck sized version which used solar power on the left hand side is the Explorer 8 Mars exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity which are about the size of a lawn mower also using solar panels and then you can see how much larger the Curiosity rover is with its large wheelbase and about a mass on the order of the mass of a small car like a Mini Cooper type of car and the reason why we grow the Rovers is because if you were going to go out into the desert or into the mountains you probably would want to be in something like a four-wheel drive right if you're off-road so the larger your wheelbase the more difficult terrain you can cross over and then more equipment you can carry on your back so we can do more science as we develop and build larger Rovers and so this particular achievement was won from an entry descent and landing spective as we have to land something which is much larger on the surface of the planet and I'll talk about that in more detail as well but the purpose of the Mars Science Laboratory mission is to determine whether or not Mars once supported life in the past and could it still support life today it turns out it's very difficult to make scientific measurements to find active life because you have to understand what makes it tick you have to basically feed it and make it grow and that requires a really long period of time and a set of technologies from a science instrument perspective that haven't been yet developed but what we can do is assess past or present habitability and we look at that by looking at the rocks the geology the geochemistry and the role of water and the formation of these substances and also we take a look at what the surface radiation environment is so the biggest challenge to sending people to the surface of Mars is dealing with the radiation environment because our bodies are not designed to withstand high radiation well it cancer will die that kind of thing so we have to develop technologies to shield ourselves from the radiation environment well we can only do that if we know what the radiation environment is and then we can develop the shielding necessary to mitigate the value that that is so that we can protect ourselves as people and also organisms in general organic life which is hydrocarbon based organisms also cannot withstand significant amounts of radiation with the exception of tardigrades if you've ever heard of this before which are little things that live in the water so the next question though becomes from a science perspective is that where do we want to go on the surface of Mars so the picture that you see on the upper left here is sort of a Mercator projection map on the surface of Mars and the science community asked us the engineering team can you land us in a place called Gale Crater that you can see on the lower right here and the reason why they wanted us to land them there is because they believed from surface top-down images for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that this was the site of an ancient water body either a river or a lake bed billions of years ago so we're best to look for the evidence of past life than in the sedimentary rock layers of an ancient water body and so that was our challenge the engineering team to be able to have a system which could land something around a thousand kilograms to the surface in a place called Gale Crater and I'll tell you a little more about Gale Crater but just for reference the Mars exploration rover landed in Meridiani and curiosity landed in Gale Crater so they're very far apart from each other so sadly the Rovers will never be able to drive to meet each other like Mark Watney did but that will require but better driving technologies in future but just a better view of Gale Crater Gale Crater has in its center a mountain called Mount sharp which is six kilometers high so I went and checked last night this is about 50% taller the pizzo Bernina which I guess is the largest mountain range in the eastern Alps so you can get an idea of how big this region is by comparing it to you know local features in the eastern alps six kilometers high the mountain in the middle and then there's a valley and then there's crater walls on the side so from a landing accuracy perspective we have to be able to land in an ellipse which was roughly 20 kilometers long by 12 kilometers or 7 kilometers in diameter so when you look at this from a bull's-eye perspective that defines your accuracy and also understand the distance between Earth and Mars is 400 million kilometers which means you have to go from over a distance of 400 million kilometers you have to land with an accuracy of 20 kilometers that's pretty difficult if you think about it and in terms of understanding how our technologies have evolved over time in the 1970s we kind of had more of a slingshot approach sending the Viking Rovers there they had a landing lips of you know almost two hundred miles in diameter which I guess is what three hundred kilometers in diameter and so over time we've improved our landing accuracy using basically turning these things into airplanes so they can fly themselves to a more precise location just something with a landing ellipse diameter of about twelve by four miles so that's about twenty like seven kilometers and so that was the challenge for the entry descent landing team for curiosity was to shrink down the landing lips creating a more precise system to get the scientists exactly where they wanted to go because if we didn't do that we would either smack into Gale Crater and crash or smack into the sides of the crater wall and crash and that would have been mission over no science information collected but just for reference the distance that we're talking about here is from four hundred million kilometers away we would have to land in a distance which is between the Berlin International Airport and I guess on the southeastern section of Berlin so even though that might seem like a large distance here if you think about the distance over which you have to do that dart throw it's incredibly challenging you know it's basically less than a needle in a haystack so I want to talk a little bit about how the landing system actually operates because I think people usually find this interesting so what we use is the principle of aerodynamic drag which is when something is coming at a really fast speed you slow down when it hit the atmosphere should we start from around 20,000 kilometres an hour we go down to around 1,000 kilometres an hour and we deploy a very large parachute which is probably about one and a half times the size of this room that slows us down also due to aerodynamic drag to around we know 300 km/h at that point we've reached terminal velocity we can't go any slower so we have to take out the rest of our energy using retro rockets which is basically firing rocket engines towards the ground to slow yourself down it's momentum transfer we do this until we get to around 20 meters above the surface which is probably you know two times the height of this room and then the rover starts to get lowered on the tether tether when it's fully extended is seven meters in length and the reason why we do this is because now the rover is the actual landing platform it allows us to put all of the mass that we want into our scientific platform versus having airbags like we had used in Prior missions and so that device that you see there which is called the sky crane is basically a mini spacecraft or a mini airplane flying the thing towards the ground but slowing it down at the same time and then the rover has safely landed on the surface of the planet so by using the concepts of aerodynamic drag by using the concept of aerodynamic lift basically by rotating the orientation of that weird-looking Bowl shape we can actually fly it down very precisely to a location that we want on the surface of the planet which gives us that 20 kilometer landing ellipse and we had never done that before because we had never made the entry vehicle Bowl shape and airplane before we had never done that and that's the reason why we were able to land this more successfully on the surface of this planet so this is a view of the thing that we call the Aero shell the Aero shell contains the rover and it has the strange shape that it has because it actually is intended to generate aerodynamic drag and for those of you who don't know what that is if you're going down the motorway you put your arm out the window you feel the force on your arm that's aerodynamic drag so we're using the atmosphere to actually take out our energy so it's really smart right it's a green way of slowing yourself down versus doing it all Retro propulsively but at the same time as you're going in it really fast speeds you start at 20,000 km/h when you rub your hands together an ad you know how to get warm with friction think about that but you get up to 5,000 degrees centigrade so in the very front of that vehicle we have something called a heat shield that heat shield basically burns up as it burns up it takes all the energy way with it and it protects the rover inside of the rest of the vehicle from getting hot so on the surface of that heat shield you have a maximum temperature of five thousand degrees centigrade on the interior of the heat shield where the rover is you have a temperature of room temperature that's the differential which is enabled by using the heat shield technology and then the other thing to realize that even though it doesn't look like an airplane it actually has an angle of attack it has a slight lift-to-drag ratio and that allows it to generate a lift vector which if you modulate that lift vector you can actually fly it more precisely so that's why I give it an allergy of a bird and so that is how we landed the thing precisely but all of this was done autonomously with software in the loop with a guidance navigation and control system because of the time delay between Earth and Mars is so long that you can't have a human being with a joystick flying this down to the surface it has to be done on board using its own guidance navigation and control system which is where officee software comes into the picture so this is another way of viewing the entry descent and landing architecture you start off with 100% of your energy 20,000 km/h you sell yourself down to around 1500 km/h at that point you've gone through peak decelerations which is around 10 g's you've gone through this peak heating environment you then deploy a parachute that parachute slows you down to around 300 km/h you then drop the parachute cuz it's no longer doing anything for you you take off the rest of your energy on retrorockets you're coming in at 20,000 kilometres per hour and you're landing at around 2 km/h so that is the whole challenge of the entry descent landing system and all of this happens in less than seven minutes and so my role on the mission was the development at the supersonic parachute system because I have a background in aerodynamics and computational fluid dynamics and so I won't go through that in great detail just because that's more of an engineering presentation but that was my role in the mission it was a lot of fun to work on but this is where I wanted to bring in the waterfall versus agile analogy overall the full Mars Science Laboratory mission does follow the waterfall design approach but the individual elements whether it be the heat shield the parachute the engines or the sky crane that actually does follow more the agile methodology where you do a prototype you test it you then make it better you test it again and then you finally fabricate your final one which goes and lands on Mars on landing day now the reason why Mars is a more difficult engineering problem is that there is no way that you can actually do this end-to-end sequence here on earth because the properties are so different the gravity is different the atmospheric properties are different in terms of composition in terms of density so the very first time we test all these technologies together is actually when we land it on Mars and so that's the tremendous engineering challenge of what we do here is that we have to use this out Angella methodology to qualify the individual elements and then piece them together using a Monte Carlo simulation to make sure we have the margins and the design that we need and then we go off and test it for our very first time on landing day and of course we have tremendous engineering knowledge that went in advance of that which gives us a very high probability of success which I'll show you at the very end of the talk but I'll show you one video of parachute testing because I think this is fun so this is where our first test was not successful but our subsequent testing was we've redesigned the system so that it survived and so we do our testing out in the desert at around 3:00 about a thousand meters in altitude and so this parachute is enormous right it's about one and a half times the size of this room so it gives you a picture of how big that is if not larger and so we use this to structurally qualify the design we do computational fluid dynamic simulations to determine what kind of load it with C on Mars and then we design a test here on earth which will demonstrate that load in a full-scale environment and if it doesn't work we make it stronger but obviously our first one wasn't successful but then we redesigned it to make it wrong with the six second time and so I like to show this picture because this is important to be for all of the women in the audience and all the men in the audience who have daughters and sisters and things like that is that engineering typically has been a male-dominated field things are getting better you know we're probably on the order of you know 25 to 30 percent females now when it comes to aerospace mechanical engineering I think computer science also has a relatively low male to female ratio but it's really important to have diversity in the workplace and the reason for that is because diversity of people leads to diversity of thought leads to amazing solutions and our team from the overall and true descent landing team was very diverse you could see that in the video we had people from Asia we had people from South America and then we had me who's a mixture of Indian and European but if you don't have diversity you get this right the matrix right you have a bunch of clones who all do the same thing and this was a very mean clone this particular intention so that's not a good solution right you want to have diversity as my point so the future what is the future of Mars exploration advanced power system so we demonstrated for the first time a radio isotope power source on the Curiosity rover and so it's something called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator which takes the decay of plutonium 238 converts that heat energy into electricity and you have a battery that lasts for decades upon decades and so this type of system gives you a constant power source it's not sensitive to you know whether it's day or night it's not sensitive to the deposition of dust on the solar panels it'll keep you going for a really long time so these kinds of systems are the ones that we want to develop for future human landed things that they have power which is always there for the emergencies in the nighttime scenario and this gives you a nice idea as well of how large the rover was happening a my colleague standing there next to it so what are some of the essentials for going to Mars you want to have a whole range of instruments you can make measurements one of those things is a weather station I'll show you some data from the weather station in a little bit and a lot of cameras and then a lot of scientific instruments which allow you to determine the chemical composition of the rocks the soil the atmosphere as well as the mineralogical composition of the rocks and the soil because that will tell you how the planet involves and so our Rover was equipped with a suite of really powerful scientific measurements which it makes immediately and then it uploads the data back to earth twice a day and then we have scientists analyzing it on the other side and so I do like to show this one is that clearly your science intrument of choice would be a laser with if you're a Star Trek fan photon torpedoes and although it doesn't look this extreme it does have a laser and that laser basically if I'm the rover here and I'm firing my laser into that desk it would burn a hole the side of the desk what would burn a hole in your t-shirt for example and the reason for that is because you want to create that amount of heat energy because it vaporizes the block and when you vaporize the rock it generates a spectroscopic signature which allows you to determine what it's made out of so there's a reason why we carry laser it's not just for shooting people that's not a good reason so how long does it take get to Mars so in November of 2011 we packaged the aeroshell with a rover inside it with a cruise stage into a launch vehicle and it takes roughly seven to nine months which ironically is the gestation period between a sloth and a human baby so from that perspective it's not that bad for schoolchildren they think that's the most incredible long time ever but for us for like a that's not so bad we could probably do it right seven to nine months and a tuna can next to other people that we may or may not like I don't know it better be your friends but one thing that I'd like to talk about is that we were able to use this mission to generate a technology which we'll use in the future Mars 2020 mission and we carried a camera onboard the rover looking down so what you see here is the Curiosity rover looking down seeing the heat shield dropping towards the surface looking into Gale Crater you can see how the camera image is moving back and forth this is because the rover is hanging onto the parachute basically and so what you're seeing is the rocking motion that you would see the asila tarry motion on the parachute but we can also see as a darkened region here which evidence of past volcanic activity or volcanic locks on the surface you also see several pock marks on the surface these are basically little mini craters with inner crater because the atmosphere on Mars is so thin things can get through right from meteorites where as they burn up here in the atmosphere is more likely now what you'll start to see next as the shaking motion will stop it'll start to sweep off to the side because now the parachute has been cut away and it's now on its descent rockets going towards the surface of the planets it hasn't quite happened yet but you'll kind of see the divert move maneuver which I think starts about now and so as we're approaching the surface we're getting video data this video data allows us to actually to determine what our altitude is it allows us to determine our position relative to noon surface features so having video images in the loop allows something called terrain relative navigation so that you can more accurately get to the surface now we're getting closer and closer the rocket engines are fine into the soilless you're starting to see the dust get kicking up you can see the rover's wheel has just come down and so now it's basically on the sky crane approaching towards the surface and you can't see much now because it's basically blocking out all the light this was an image or a set of images that was captured by a camera real-time during the landing event on Mars and so if we had used that data during the descent we could have used it to determine our altitude and we could have used it to determine our position relative to known surface features which would have allowed us to land even more accurately but because we don't want to do something the very first time right with a two billion dollar mission in case it didn't work we demoed this technology on this mission and now we will baseline it for the next mission so that's kind of the analogy I would use for agile where it goes mission to mission that we do that so this is what terrain relative navigation looks like so you're coming down the surface you're taking these images you're processing them and you're comparing them to known features in the onboard computer and then use that to actually change your position so you modulate your thrust vectors you can get a better precision to where you want to go relative to your desired landing site so that is going to be the baseline for the next mission which launches in 2020 but the other thing which I think is cool is that everybody loves images right and so the first image that the rover was had to send back to earth after it successfully land on the surface was if its landing site so you can see here this is immediately after landing you can see Mount sharp in the distance you can see the shadow of the rover in front and it looks like a transformer to be that's kind of fun for people who like those movies and then the other thing to realize is that you look at the picture on the right which is a color image of the landing site it looks so similar to the desert so if any of you have been out to the desert in Nevada you'll know how similar that actually looks to the region just outside of Las Vegas so even though it's another planet it's so similar to our home planet that it's kind of scary because it really means that we're all interconnected and we've got to do more to protect our own home world otherwise if you go the way of Mars which is no atmosphere and we can't survive so here's a good comparison of simulation versus reality what you see on the image on the lower right here is a red ellipse the white box is where we targeted to land assuming all the properties were nominal if the properties were off nominal so for example the winds were higher than average for example the at fear was thinner the atmosphere was thicker the drag being produced with a parachute was slightly higher than lower than we thought it would be we made a prediction using a Monte Carlo simulation that our 99.9% probability would fall within this landing ellipse and we actually did land very close to the center cuz we actually did land in that white box so which means we did a good job with our engineering calculations and you can see a better idea here of where the landing site is which is the Green Dot relative to where we wanted to drive to which is the base of Mount sharp so we have to do that driving on the scene which we've done over the course of the past five years so this is another really fun image we had an ability to position the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to put it in orbit in such a position that it could take a picture of the rover under the parachute as it was descending towards the surface and so we finally got this picture uploaded to us around midnight on the landing night and we all saw it we're all really happy because we were having a great party for having been successful till ended but this was fun for me right because I could see that the parachute was fully inflated there was no damage to it so obviously we did a good job in designing the parachutes so what's in the future autonomous systems so we all know that that's coming now with cars right cars or hopefully will ship to our autonomous driving Network so that we can be more efficient reduce traffic congestion but we've already demonstrated this for the Curiosity rover it has cameras on board so they can take images so they can make the determination of what is the says's safest way for me to drive from here to there the rover is not going to drive into this thing right it's gonna take a measurement of ahead of time and say oh I'm gonna go this way so it actually navigates autonomously we give the direction go and make a measurement over there where that post is you figure out the safest way to drive there so this is how we are able to make something happen so far away from us with a time delay yet safely intelligent systems so I would argue that the rover is intelligent because it takes selfies just like the stalks take selfies and so this is actually a selfie of itself where it has a bunch of cameras it has an arm and so we piece together those images so we can create this 360-degree view but I think this is like the best selfie ever relative to ones that we probably take so life on Mars that this is so apropos since I saw those pictures before curiosity killed the cat so hopefully you get that I am a cat person don't worry if any of you follow me on Twitter you'll see my cat all over but there are no cats on Mars hopefully one day there will be so what are we doing we are taking scientific measurements and so remember I told you before there was a laser see the picture the animated gif this is a scientific animated gif on the upper right you see the hole that's being generated that's because the laser is firing into the rock and generating making a hole it generates a vapor that vapor is then immediately turned into a spectroscopic signature which tells us what the elemental composition is of that rock so that's how quickly we can make these scientific so it's just like in Star Trek where they analyze something at Rygaard oh it's made of this listen this we can actually do that with the instrument on board so that is also reality relative to the Star Trek universe so understand in the environment we have a weather station we make measurements of the wind we make measurements of the pressure the temperature and we make measurements of the radiation environment on the surface and so as you can see here the temperature goes up and down because during the daytime obviously the temperature goes up at nighttime their pressure the temperature goes down we know what's really cool you see that same diurnal variation in the radiation measurement what that means is the atmospheric density on Mars when it's higher versus lower attenuates the surface radiation so now we know exactly what the surface radiation on Mars is and we probably can use sort of a high pressure system as a means of attenuating radiation as a radiation shield that's one example of things that we can do enabled by the measurements that curiosity is made another really important scientific finding is the evidence of organic compounds we have confirmed in multiple occasions now that there is indeed methane being produced on the surface of Mars methane has a really short residence time which means if you find it in the atmosphere it's because it was recently produced like wooden the last thing a couple of thousand years or something like that which is actually pretty recently you can't say whether it was produced yesterday or a thousand years ago but that still or recent finding and may thing can only have two sources high biological source which is cool right enteric fermentation the breakdown of food in your gut by bacteria or a geological source but in either of those scenarios the fact that it's being actively produced means that the planet either still has some kind of seismic activity or the planet has bacteria right it's one of those two things which is pretty exciting we don't know but that's the measurement which is going to be further facilitated by the ISA trace gas orbiter mission that recently got tomorrow's I think about a year ago so what is in the future getting larger pelo to the surface and so even though this is an artist conception these things are actively being worked on so I actually had the opportunity to work on the Orion spacecraft for several years when I was over at NASA JPL and so this is the next spacecraft which is going to send and house at people on their journey into deeper space whether that's going to the moon going to Mars or going to an asteroid beyond so these are things which are actively being developed its space agencies around the world and so I don't like to think of myself as a large payload but I'm certainly larger than the average scientific instrument and of course this can hold about six people in there so what is in the future environmental control systems so on Mars you have to be in a pressurized environment you have to protect yourself from radiation you have to have an air supply and so these are systems which are being demoed in Arctic research stations by various different groups in academia and the government at different places on earth to understand how can people live in a small space confined space for long periods of time so what is in the future surface mobility another fun picture I got to take is that we are developing these systems as well this one in particular is being developed at NASA Johnson Space Center and so you would have to have a pressurized cap that goes over it but we're developing sort of an electric car based ways of getting around on difficult terrain and these things are tested out in the desert all the time so the real way that we're going to be able to survive on Mars and set up a colony is by using in situ resource utilization and this means being green this means using the planetary resources to keep yourself going so you can do that with power by using solar power for example or wind power Mars actually does have a lot of wind not as bad as they showed on the Martian however a radiation protection you can bury your habitat under the ground you can use the soil to protect you from the radiation environment water you can access and melt the subsurface aquifers they talked about before methane if methane is being produced you can actually use that to provide rocket fuel or some kind of fuel for internal combustion engines on the surface and extremophiles which is growing plants in a very difficult environment so for radiation protection this is a usual graphic where you can see the red bar on the right is 500 days on Mars and this is orders of magnitude is the scale on the Left going up rather versus what you get on earth so we know that we cannot survive for 500 days on Mars without doing something with Ray environment and this graphic on the left shows you a computer simulation of what's going on with the planet Mars relative to the radiation coming from the Sun so it's pretty extreme and it comes from the Sun and it also comes from deep space you gets you in two ways so we have to do something to mitigate that so we need a shield like they have an allergic Enterprise Star Trek fans here yes no a few okay and this is actually real right you can create a shield which uses a magnetic field to protect high-energy particles from coming in our own earth uses a shield it's called our magnetic field so could we do something like this for a spacecraft absolutely is the technology in existence yet no we need to work on it could we do it for a habitat on the surface of the planet probably as well but it's actually worse in space and it is on the surface of the planet growing food we can use fiber optics to generate light going into an underground cavern where we grow plants for eating because on Mars we're all going to be vegetarians sorry guys that's just the way it has to be and I'm vegetarian so I don't mind and then growing food so another great example we've demonstrated this on the International Space Station which is growing a lettuce leaf not in soil but being spritzed with nutrients in a microgravity environment so we're already making great steps in the research area to develop a lot of these technologies to facilitate them for future long-duration deep-space missions with human beings and artificial intelligence that's the key so we have Robonaut which you can see off to the left here and Robonaut why couldn't Robonaut do a lot of the assembly for us but I can't Robonaut do a lot of the work that protects our weak feeble human bodies from being exposed to the harsh environment of Mars absolutely Robonaut was demonstrated on the International Space Station and this is a new robot which is being developed at NASA Johnson Space Center it's actually kind of cool because you could like push on it and shouldn't kick it or something like but you can pull it's our impression to push this back on you and stuff like that so there's a lot being done in the robotics front right now and this really would enable people to do minimum exposure do minimum EVs on the surface and get most of the work done by artificial intelligence and robotics platforms so the of course final question I like to leave everybody with is would you want to live on Mars it's certainly not going to be easy you know earth is a very beautiful planet and then you work on missions into deep space and more you realise we should really do a lot more at home to protect it because all the other worlds out there are not like ours right they do not have water on the surface they do not have an an air atmosphere and plants and tropical jungles we do what we can to protect our planet here at home and so I would like to kind of drive that home as a message but I do believe that our future is Mars so these missions they are a wonderful opportunity to provide a base of jobs for scientists and engineers and are the hotbed of new technologies which are developed which can be used in the private sector as we all know you know all of the telecommunications industry came about because of the space program or they can be used to simply further the exploration of our solar system and beyond and so right now all of the spacious ease space agencies around the world are interested in going to Mars the only way we're going to make human missions to Mars possible is if we collaborate and work together we can't do it siloed one country the other country we have to come together pull our resources figure out who's good at what spread the funding around so we can actually make it happen and then the other point is all the data is open-source it's accessible to anybody who wants to download it anybody who wants to analyze it because I think Mars is the future for all human beings not just one particular country and for me doing outreach presentations to kids is one of the most important things I can do the reason why I became an engineer is because I was a huge fan of space program a huge fan of science fiction so now that I am an adult engineer I need to go and talk about that so I recently worked with a lady over at ISA to create a book which is called a galaxy of her own and it features the story is I think around 50 or so women in the space program and it actually gets released today ironically in the UK and get it on Amazon things like that and so if you are if you have classrooms or any of your spouse's or teachers or something like that I think it's a really nice book to teach young people about what you know underrepresented groups like women in aerospace can actually accomplish and you can certainly ask me questions you want on Twitter or on my Facebook page but I think I probably have a few minutes now to answer questions so thank you [Applause] [Applause] thank you very much Anita that was intense I hope you learned a lot oh yeah oh yes and I have a lot of questions in here that you asked in our app I will start with the first question that came in and then let's see how far we come so what what do you think about X space and commercial developments in space exploration do you see it as a competition or will it help NASA oh I think it's the best thing ever so I think the problem with space exploration now is that if it's limited to government agencies the funding is quite small so the fact that we can actually come up with ways to commercialize space is going to facilitate the generation of new technologies and I think all the future sort of people going into space is not gonna be part of NASA or you say anymore it's there's gonna be like people who do it from Boeing people who do it from SpaceX from Blue Origin to so many different companies so I think that's kind of the wave of the future I think the government side will probably be reduced and focused more on research and then all of the facilitation of these explorations for commercial purposes will be done in the private sector thank you and oh my god they are more coming in there where was I there was a and that's a team work in metric or imperial units both so the interesting thing is that on the aerospace aeronautical side of things they almost always use the imperial units it just historically all of our interface documents are in metric and everything on the government side of the house is in metric but because we have many different partners and some of them want to work in in imperial units that's fine but we do our interface documents in metric it's their work being done to improve the speed of communication between Earth and Mars so unfortunately that is a speed of limitation is based off of the speed of light so that is purely driven by a three times 10 to the 8 meters per second so it's based off of the distance that's how fast photons can travel that's how fast electromagnetic waves can travel so everything in our universe is governed by the speed of light so unless someone can somehow warp space-time that will never change and so for example the new horizon mission which was out at Pluto I guess probably a couple of months ago it made the Pluto I took like over an hour for the data to get back because it's so far away so there's nothing you can do about it unless there's some way to have my quantum entangled comp come communications to places but no one knows how to do that yet either okay when will the first person go to Mars and do you plan to go to Mars yourself well so I think that it'll probably happen in the next 10 to 20 years is my guess and I think I would yeah I think it would be kind of cool I wouldn't want to do a one-way trip or anything like that because earth is very nice actually and so I think the one thing you realize is as you get older and get to go to more cool tropical places or like actually it's pretty nice here versus a place which has no water cuz I like the beaches and things like that but I would for sure if it was if it was not a one-way trip and I could actually come back home again then I would do it yeah good what programming language was used for the software I think most of it was C and so none of it is it Oh a lot of it is brought about by old code which we reintroduce in later missions so we do have a lot of reuse of our code but then a lot of the stuff which is developed for scientific instruments is brand-new but the basic operating system we've sort of repurposed for mission to Mission how do you get the soil samples ecetera back so we have several ways of getting soil samples we have a drill we have a brush and we have a scoop and all of that is at the end of an arm and so because we have the ability to reach out and either do brushing drilling or scooping and we bring it back and we put it inside the rover and so there's a different it falls into a platform which is kind of like we call it the shake and bake oven and so it shakes it around so it fill it filters out basically you know bigger particles from smaller particles and it goes into an oven it gets heated up generates a vapor once again and tells us what the mineralogical composition of the rocks is and one more was there collaboration between ASA and NASA for curiosity and will there be a collaboration for ExoMars and Nessa on NASA's own mission in 2020 so there certainly was so what are most of our collaborations have traditionally been on the science side so we have several different science instruments and I think at least two of them were contributed by the European Space Agency I don't remember which one forgive me because I was more on the engineering side than on the science for this mission I actually worked on a mission I worked on GG trace gas orbiter years and years ago I think back in 2012 where we were actually were partnering and sadly that whole thing fell apart because I guess one country pulled out funding and the other country pulled out funding in the US and departed entirely so on the most recent mission the 2016 trace gas orbiter that was a yeast mission but it had a communications payload which was from the US and I think it had one science instrument but unfortunately our bigger role got this destroyed because the governments didn't want to fund it and it really is the case that we need to do this so a great example of ISA and NASA collaboration is with the Cassini spacecraft so Cassini I think you heard about that recently rice it had been going around the Saturn system for you know over a decade and there was a entry system component of that which was the Huygens probe which actually went into the surface landed on the surface of Titan and that was the European contribution to that mission so we've only had success when we work together but for whatever reason we don't do it enough and I hope we do it more going forward there are still more questions rolling in my way we ran out of time okay be around to I'll be around at lunch and I'll be around during the reception too so good thank you thank you very much for anything [Applause]

Channel: GOTO Conferences

Views: 4,649

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Keywords: GOTO, GOTOcon, GOTO Conference, GOTO (Software Conference), Videos for Developers, Computer Science, GOTOber, GOTO Berlin, Anita Sengupta, NASA, Mars Exploration, Mars, Red Planet

Id: iuzZYzns-Yg

Length: 54min 50sec (3290 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 06 2017