Mission Control Live: NASA InSight Mars Landing (360 video)

- After traveling through space for more than six months and crossing 300 million miles, InSight has arrived at its destination, the red planet Mars, welcome to Mission Control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I'm Gay Yee Hill. Less than an hour from now, InSight will begin the most harrowing six and a half minutes of the entire

mission

, EDL, entry, descent, and

landing

, the team is as prepared as can be, but who knows what Mars has in store today. The cruise

mission

support area is packed with engineers monitoring the situation, and for the first time during a Mars

landing

, you can be in the room, too.

We have a 360-degree camera in this

control

room, allowing you to experience the landing together with the team. You see it there, and to find the link, just go to the InSight view page you see on the screen. And this mission actually has two

control

rooms, the second one is Lockheed Martin Space outside of Denver Colorado, the engineers are on console two. Also, people from all over the world are tuning in at museums, libraries and other places, including this one at the Pasadena Convention Center, and that's where friends and family are watching now, there will also be an opportunity to watch in New York City.

York there. are cheering, there will also be a chance to see in New York City when coverage of the landing on the NASDAQ Tower is shown, seen there in Times Square. And of course, if you're watching, take a photo and share it with us, using the hashtag Mars landing, we'd love to see it. Now I'd like to introduce NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, thank you for coming. - Oh it's my honor, thank you for having me. - We are very excited to have you here. - Great to be here. - So this is your first landing on Mars? - It is in this job, I have witnessed this, I should say from the sidelines for many years, this will be the eighth time we have had a successful landing on Mars, everyone knock on wood. - That's how it is. - But this is my first time participating as an administrator, so it's very exciting. - Excited, nervous? - Not nervous, excited. - Aren't you nervous? - Look at the amazing people here, there is no way I could be nervous. - Alright, so we hope to have you back on set after we land and maybe answer a couple of questions about social media. - Absolutely. - If you want to ask the admin a question, use the hashtag askNASA.

And before you left, you asked about the lucky peanuts, so this is your bottle to drink there. - I'll be happy eating these. - Very good, thanks for joining us. - Thank you. - Now let's give you some background, InSight is short for Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, it is different from other Mars missions that studied the surface, InSight is the first mission to study the interior of the red planet. The basic idea of ​​InSight is to map the deep structure of March, we know a lot about the surface of Mars, we know a lot about its atmosphere, even its ionosphere, but we don't know much about what's going on. one mile below the surface, much less 2000 miles below the surface to the center, and this will be the first mission to go to Mars specifically to investigate the deep interior of Mars. - We know that Earth is habitable, we know that Mars is not, there may be something that we find out in terms of the structure of Mars versus the structure of Earth, that maybe it can help us understand why. - InSight carries a seismometer that measures the seismic waves that have traveled across Mars since Marsquakes, and maps the deep interior structure of Mars, we are also going to have a physical properties and heat flux probe, which will penetrate the surface of Mars approximately five meters or 16 feet to take the temperature on Mars.

And he has a radio science experiment that uses the radio in the spacecraft to measure small variations in the wobble of the poles of Mars to understand more about the structure and composition of the nucleus. - InSight will be the first mission to collect instruments from the deck of the lander and place them on the surface of Mars. I like to say that we are playing the game of claws on Mars without a joystick. The seismometer must be installed in one place and not moved to obtain the best seismic data. - We also have a heat and wind shield that we put on top of that seismometer to further protect it from the environment. - For the heat flux probe, HPQ, you also need to sit in one place, take a while to dig into the ground, and acquire the demonstration measurements for a long period of time. - InSight is a mission to Mars, but it's much, much more than a mission to Mars, in a sense it's like a time machine, it's measuring the structure of Mars that was established four and a half billion years ago, so we can Go back and understand the processes that formed Mars shortly after it accumulated from the Solar Nebula.

By studying Mars, we will be able to learn more about Earth, Venus, Mercury, even the moon, even exoplanets around other stars. - Landing on Mars is always difficult, more than half of the missions have failed, our experts in this field our entry, descent and landing systems engineers, speak EDL. Let me introduce two in our control room, Christine Szalai, who will be doing mission calls during landing, and Julie Wertz Chen, she's our color commentator who will help explain mission operations. Christine, let's start with you, I understand there was an update and adjustment to the funnel software, what does that mean? - That's right, yesterday we sent the latest EDL software parameter update to the spacecraft computer, this update told the spacecraft exactly when it will hit the top of the atmosphere, and also adjusted things like when to deploy the parachute , this ADL software is very important, because InSight uses this software to perform entry, descent and landing all by itself, Mars is so far from Earth that when a command is sent from Earth, it takes about eight minutes to reach the spacecraft, entry, descent and landing from start to finish takes less than eight minutes, so InSight has to do it alone. - Very well, your fate is sealed.

Now I understand that the team is about to do a prep survey, Julie, can you fill us in on that? - Sure, it will be a survey, between our EDL communications engineer and several of the different orbiters and antennas that we have here on Earth, so we have MarCO listening to us, and MRO, which is Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, will be listening to our data and recording it for us, and then the radio science engineers will be listening to our signal from here on Earth, and Sandy, our EDL communications engineer, will communicate with them, making sure everyone is ready to go, ready to support us. in just under an hour to land on Mars. - Very well, we are ready for that, for that preparation survey.

And I understand that the peanuts will be moved there very soon? - I think that's the idea, yeah, we'll be handing out the peanuts very soon after that, for those of you who don't know, JPL peanuts are a tradition, it gives us a little extra luck in our review. events, so if anyone wants to join the peanuts and give us an extra touch of good luck, we'd love to have them. - Well, there's a story behind that, when in the early days of JPL there were several missions, and there were six Ranger missions to the moon that failed, but then with Ranger seven-- -Ranger seven someone-- -Someone handed out peanuts. . - Yes, and it worked, and don't mess with what works, it's not a superstition, it's a tradition, and we just give ourselves that little bit of extra luck. - So, if you have peanuts at home, please eat some. - That's how it is. - Okay, thanks Julio.

NASA has had seven successful landings on Mars, but the EDL team never gets too confident, JPL chief engineer Rob Manning says things have to work right for a critical six and a half minutes. - Although we have done it before, landing on Mars is difficult and this mission is no different. The process of getting from the top of the atmosphere on Mars to this surface, we call it entry, descent, and landing, or EDL, takes thousands of steps to get from the top of the atmosphere to the surface, and every one of them It has to work perfectly to be a successful mission.

The process starts high above the top of the atmosphere of Mars, the cruise stage faces the sun, it also has its radio antenna facing Earth, but now we don't need the cruise stage, its job is done . The next step, just seven minutes before reaching the top of the Martian atmosphere, is to separate the cruise stage. However, before reaching the top of the atmosphere, the space capsule has to be oriented so that the heat shield is precisely facing the atmosphere. Now the fun begins, the vehicle is moving at almost 13,000 miles per hour, but it hits the top of the atmosphere at a very small angle, 12 degrees, any steeper, the vehicle will hit the thickest part of the atmosphere and it will melt and burn up, shallower the rover will bounce off the atmosphere of

mars

, at the top of the atmosphere it's about 70 miles above the surface of

mars

, and the air starts to get thicker and thicker, as it does, the temperature on the heat shield exceeds 1000 degrees Celsius, enough to melt steel, over the next two minutes the vehicle decelerates to a speed of 12 earth G's, from 13,000 miles per hour to about 1000 miles per hour, to about 10 miles above the surface of Mars, a supersonic parachute is launched from the rear of the vehicle, 15 seconds after the parachute inflates, it is time to ditch the heat shield, six devices Pyrotechnics fire simultaneously allowing the heat shield to fall away from the rover exposing the lander to the surface of Mars. 10 seconds after the heat shield falls, three pyrotechnically deployed legs are released and lock to land.

About a minute later, the landing RADAR turns on and pulses toward the surface of Mars, as the rover begins trying to measure how high it is above the surface and how fast it is going. About a mile above the surface of Mars, the lander separates from its rear shell and fires up its engines. And very quickly the vehicle must turn out of the way, so that the parachute and the rear shield do not come down to hit it, the last thing that has to happen is that at the moment of contact the engines have to shut down. immediately, if they do not, the vehicle will roll over.

So, with all entry, descent, and landing steps done perfectly and we're safely on the surface of Mars, we'll be ready to do some exciting new science. - Person later in the show, in the meantime, let me introduce someone who's been working on InSight for seven years, he's the project manager, Tom Hoffman, seven years and today is the day. - That's right, seven years, but now we are only a little over 40 minutes and we will be on the surface, it will be incredible. - Really exciting stuff. So let's talk about InSight, it's using tried and true technology, based on Phoenix, this time there's a bigger challenge with communication, normally we have an orbiter that can give us bent-tube communications, but this time it's different. - That's right, most of the times we've landed recently, we've had Mars Odyssey, which can do bent pipe communications, so we get real-time data as we go EDL, and we've come to expect that. and we really really, really want that.

In this case, our core technology, the core orbiter is the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and so what it will do is listen to us on UHF, if you watch the

video

you can see this, MRO will be listening to us and it will get all the raw data and send it back to us from return, unfortunately only three hours after we land. - So you don't give us the

live

information of the bent pipe when it happens? - It's not like that, we have a couple of other sources that we're looking at, we have the Green Bay Observatory in West Virginia, the Max Planck Observatory in Effelsberg, Germany that will give us UHF, but those just give us a couple of different points on So we did something cool this time, we brought a couple of Cubesats called MarCO, so I hope they're both running great today. - Oh, fantastic. - So we hope you will continue to work until the end of EDL, and give us feedback in real time, so we can show how it works in the next

video

here.

So you can see here InSight with their cruise stage approaching Mars, but we have two stalkers following us, they've been following us since we launched, they launched in the same launch vehicle as us, so you can see the green there. is that we send them UHF signals, and then they change that and send a much stronger signal to Earth, we can't communicate in UHF directly to Earth with this signal, that tells us what's going on in the spacecraft, but MarCO can, if it works for us untilthe surface, we will get excellent information from MarCO. - So MarCO is basically trying to fill that void that we would have had if we had

live

communication coming to us. - Absolutely. - So, if it doesn't work, does it affect InSight's mission? - Not at all, we'll just bite our nails a bit more, but right now it looks like it's going to work, but it doesn't affect InSight at all, and we have one last way of knowing. that we successfully made it to the ground, which is the spacecraft will call home, once it hits the ground, it's been seven months cruising, seven and a half minutes of terror, and it's going to call back and say "I" In appearance, I feel pretty good, so far everything looks good. - And also to prepare the audience, even after landing we are still not out of the woods, correct? - Not yet, we have one more step we have to do, we have to literally let the dust settle, we're going to kick up a lot of dust when we land, we have to let the dust settle, before we deploy our solar panels, we're 100 % solar powered, so it's very important that we get them out, unfortunately both MRO and MarCO will be out of sight, by the time we get them fully deployed, so we'll have to wait five and a half years. hours until Odyssey arrives and tells us that yes, indeed, our solar panels are off.

So we'll definitely have a celebration when we make a successful landing, but we'll have to tone that down a bit and wait about five and a half hours to be absolutely sure we're in good shape. - So, we know immediately if we have MarCO, so just to go over it one more time, what will happen to EDL? We have the video of the show, exactly how this is all going to play out in six and a half minutes. you can shoot the video. - Okay, you can see here that we are connected to the cruise stage, we leave it, we say thank you for the trip to Mars, it burns up in the atmosphere, you can see it gets very hot in our heat shield, we are going up in some places maybe 3000 degrees Fahrenheit as we go through this, we're in the heat shield for about four minutes, which dissipates about 90 percent of the energy that we need to dissipate before we hit the surface, then we open our parachute, we go to about 850 miles an hour when we pop the parachute we're at it for about two minutes then we'll drop the heat shield we'll start acquiring the ground with our RADAR much like an F-16 fighter jet RADAR the legs will spread , we will start to descend, we will fall for just a second, which is very scary for me. our descent thrusters, we've got 12 of them, they're 16-pound thrusters, he starts pushing us and dropping us to the ground, and little by little we're going down, going only five miles an hour, so when those six and a half minutes of terror , which is a little less than seven minutes, that's great to me, we go from 12,300 miles per hour to 75 miles above the surface of Mars, we hit the surface, we're doing five and a half miles per hour. . - That's amazing, that's absolutely amazing, long before you go Tom, there were a couple of pictures we wanted to show you, we've got viewing parties all over the country and let's see if we can put on one of these viewing parties. so you can see this is from Ohio, this is a person who has a surveillance party, it looks like in a classroom. - That's so amazing. - Isn't it great that people are watching with us? - Yeah, I know, people all over the world are watching this, and we really want to put on a good show for them today. - Okay, I'll let you go back to the room. - I have to go back there. - I know you're excited.

All right, take care, thanks for joining us. - Thank you. - Well, let's introduce you to the people who built InSight, Lockheed Martin Space outside of Denver, these are the people who built Viking in 1976 and Mars Phoenix in 2008, the operations team is there and the EDL manager from Lockheed InSight, Tim Linn, is standing. by, Tim, what's going on there? - The team is very excited, we are almost ready, we are half an hour from the entry and the start of the entry, the descent and the landing, so the team is really excited and focused, but also very excited about what is to come. looming Successful entry descent and landing we are approaching. - We talked about the fact that InSight is based on tried and true technology, it's based on Phoenix, but you had to make a couple of changes for InSight, what were they? - Yeah, obviously, as you said, we took a lot of Phoenix, there were a lot of great things we were able to get out of the Phoenix mission, but InSight is a unique mission, it's landing towards the equator of Mars, and a number of things are different, where we're landing, we're about a mile higher in altitude, plus what it required us to do is a little bit shallower, plus we're a little bit heavier than Phoenix, so we had to increase some of the force on part of the lander, so the parachute, we had to increase the force, we have to deploy the parachute a little higher because of some of the differences in our input timeline, and because we're landing, we're landing towards the end of the season of dust so we've also increased the thickness of the heat shield so we're about a quarter inch thicker on our heat shield to accommodate that potential jet of sand that we could see when we actually make our entry, descent and landing.

So we've changed a lot of things, but obviously we've also taken a lot of advantage of the successful Phoenix mission. - That's great, so you can customize it, because before there were some concerns that a dust storm was taking place, it was dust storm season. - That's right, we've actually had great support from our orbiting assets, MRO and Odyssey, a couple of spacecraft that we partnered with JPL and they were built here at Lockheed Martin, they've actually provided a lot of great information. about the weather on Mars, the dust storms that are potentially happening on Mars, and as of today, and actually the last two weeks have been great on the surface of Mars, we're anticipating very nominal weather, very seasonal in terms of density, atmosphere and temperature, and dust storms seem to be very benign, so we are very optimistic that it will be a great day to land on the surface of Mars. - Alright, that's great news, thanks Tim, and I know your team is getting as excited as we are.

Take care. - Absolutely, thank you very much. - It's now 11:21, it's about 20 minutes, tension is building in both control rooms, there's about 20 minutes left until cruise leg separation, it's not far away, stage separation is expected Cruise passes approximately 40 minutes past the hour. , so we are indeed getting close. So where is InSight going to Mars? It's a place called Elysium Planitia, Planitia means flat in Latin, Elysium is paradise in the afterlife in ancient Greek, it's located near the equator, north of Gale crater, not far from Curiosity Rover, the team calls it the parking lot more big from mars it is a safe place, it has a lot of sunlight that will drive the solar instruments to study the interior of Mars. - What's inside Mars?

We know a lot about what's inside Earth, but on Mars we've only scratched the surface, to find out how Mars formed we have to study its deep interior, NASA's InSight Lander was designed to do just that, by taking in the vital of the planet. signs, listening to its pulse for seismic activity, including Marsquakes, taking its temperature to see how much heat is flowing from inside, and checking its reflections to see how much the planet wobbles as it revolves around the sun. All of these provide clues as to what the planet is really like on the inside.

So what's inside Mars? InSight can help us find out by giving Mars its first comprehensive look since it formed 4.5 billion years ago. The more we learn, the better we will understand all the rocky planets and the history of our solar system. Joining us now is Bruce Banerdt, the Principal Investigator for Mars InSight. InSight is a mission to Mars, but we keep hearing over and over again that it's more than a mission to Mars. - That's right Gay, I mean we're going to Mars to study the Martian interior and map the divisions within Mars, but we want to use that information to understand more about the solar system as a whole and how rocky planets form. - And rocky planets, we have a picture to show people, so we are talking about the Earth, the Moon, Mars. - Mercury, Venus, the planets of the inner solar system that are made mostly of rocks, and all share the same basic structure with a dense iron core, a rocky mantle, and then a crust of lighter silicate rocks, but the details of the The thickness of those layers, the sizes and compositions, give us many clues about how these planets formed and why they followed very different paths on the different planets we see today. - Then explain to me, we are going to have a landing module, you will be on the surface, how can you study the interior? - We use what's called geophysical instruments, they use the principles of physics to actually see through rocks, we're using seismic waves, the same way you might use a flash to take pictures of something, we're using Marsquakes, which send vibrational waves through the planet, and as they go through the planet they reflect off the boundaries, they bend, change their speed, and it changes the ripples that you see on a seismograph, when we go around the planet you can see that hits various boundaries here, and those waves are reflected, sometimes they are bent, it becomes quite a complicated pattern, but scientifically we have learned over the last hundred years how to interpret the code of the signals coming back to the surface. , in the seismometers that capture that signal and then convert it into data that we can use on Earth, to understand what the 3D structure of the planet is. - So, normally you use three seismometers, in this case you are bringing size, that is one, how are you going to be able to obtain that information using one? - Well, we had to be a little smart, because the whole Earth usually has a lot of seismometers, you can use several seismometers to triangulate where the earthquake is, on Mars we are going to do something a little different, we are going to use not only the P waves and S you might have heard of, but we're using the surface waves, and here you can see the surface waves coming out of a Marsquake, and as it passes over the InSight Lander, you can look at the seismograph up there in the upper left corner where you have the waves, now those waves are still going around the planet, and because Mars isn't that big, they still have a considerable amount of amplitude, they haven't gotten fully damped, by the time it has gone around the planet, it passes over the spaceship again, and finally, even on the way around to the other side, the planet crosses over and hits us a third time, so we have more information about it.

The P wave and the S wave, we have these waves coming in from as waves that we can use to pinpoint the distance from Marsquake to our lander, and then we use something called polarization analysis, to figure out which direction the waves are coming from, and then to do that, we can do the same thing that we can do with three stations on Earth, just using the P and S waves. - And very quickly, there's still another DLR-built instrument that's also being carried out by InSight, can you talk a bit about that? - Yeah, that's our heat flux probe, and it's a pretty cool instrument that uses a mechanical mole, we call it, to work its way up to the surface, it's got a motor that winds up a hammer and knocks itself down just a few millimeters at a time. time, but we do that 20 or 30,000 hammer blows and it brings it down, we expect to go down to about 16 feet below the surface, and once we get there, we're actually measuring the heat leaving the planet, measuring the temperature along of the wire as it rises to the surface, and watching that temperature rise as we go down, and extrapolating that deep into the planet to understand how much energy is inside the planet to drive geology and to drive volcanism, Marsquakes, all kinds of activity. - It's amazing how much you can learn from the surface about the inside. - I think it's amazing, it's been something I've been working on for my entire professional career, and I find it fascinating. - Okay, we'll talk about it, thanks Bruce.

Bruce first thought of the mission this way as he mentions it 40 years ago when he was a grad student the rest of the team hasn't waited that long but this is a big time for them too we recently sat down with a few from the members and asked what it will be like when we get closer to the landing. - It is something very difficult to do, and everything has to go perfectly, as humans we have sent 17 different missions to the surface of Mars and 10 of them have crashed. Before we can land on Mars, we have to get to Mars.

Asdid we get to mars? - The main responsibility of the navigation team is to ensure that the spacecraft arrives at the correct point in the Martian atmosphere. The target location is about 12 kilometers in size, our accuracy is comparable to shooting a basketball from the Staple Center in downtown Los Angeles and hitting nothing but the net in a basketball hoop in New York City , which moves at a speed of approximately two feet per second and rotates around its axis. - The landing site we have an ellipse that is quite large, it is about 60 miles long. We could land anywhere on that ellipse, there's a chance we could land right on a rock, and we don't have any control over that. so that's what makes me nervous. - We tested the RADAR by flying it in a helicopter, we tested pieces of the heat shield by putting it in an arc jet setup, we tested the parachute by testing it in a wind tunnel and putting it all together in a very tightly controlled sequence where everything has to come out Well, we've never tried it, and the first time it's going to happen is once you take us to Mars. - It's approximately 11:29 a.m. m.

Pacific time, and you're watching live coverage of the InSight landing from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. We're about a half hour from landing, and people all over the world are watching, take a look at a map we have for you, we can show you right now, this is an in-person viewing map where people have viewing parties. All over the world, all over the United States, in Paris, in Berlin, even off the coast of Madagascar, and people in the Big Apple will be watching today too, the NASDAQ Tower will switch to landing coverage for about an hour, that means people in Times Square can watch too, and later today, NASA will have the honor of ringing the closing bell, and that will be in a little over an hour from now.

And if you're watching, take a picture and send it to us, using the hashtag Marslanding, here's one that I think is from the California Science Center in Los Angeles, and I'm told Eric Garcetti is visiting later today. Things are getting more active for the team now, let's go back to see Julie Wertz Chen in the control room, what's going on Julie? - Yes, we have heard from MRO a couple of times, that is Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, they are doing their best, they are ready to support us, they are doing very well, and we heard from both MarCO, MarCO A and B that they are there, they've got telemetry lock on them from the ground stations here, so they're doing great, and they're all ready to go, so we're very excited. - Great, we'll get back to Julie in a bit, in the meantime, this is a good time to tell you a little bit more about that tech experiment we've been talking about, MarCO, as we mentioned earlier, InSight doesn't have an orbiter in place to send live EDL data, so the Cubesats hope to fill that gap, that's how they'll work. - Communication between Mars and Earth requires complicated choreography, with everything in the right place at the right time.

Sometimes it can take hours before information is linked from one planet to another, which is why when NASA's Mars InSight Lander launches this year, the rocket will carry two small satellites for a test of its own technology. Meet Mars Cube One, MarCO, NASA's first Cubesat mission into deep space, these briefcase-sized satellites will travel separately from the InSight Lander while they test new miniaturized technologies, and if they reach Mars, they could link information back to Earth about InSight descent and landing, and do it in a matter of minutes. Although this fast communication is not crucial to the success of InSight Lander, this Cubesat test could change the way future spacecraft call home. - Alright, let's check back with Julie to see if the MarCOs are really ready to support and listen to InSight, Julie, what do you know? - So, they're ready to go, I haven't heard about their big bog yet, but they're ready to go, we've heard from them, they're both healthy and they're both doing great, which is just wonderful. news.

So I think they should be putting in a lot of effort, actually I think they should be putting in a lot of effort in just one minute. - We'll stand by and listen then. - All stations and systems, we can confirm we're entering -20 minutes, EDL nav two started, star tracker turned off. - The nav two software has started so when cruising we use a star tracker, similar to how sailors used to sail years ago, we look at the stars and get our relative position from them, we use a star tracker for that , and now that we're close enough to Mars, we don't need it anymore, so we're going to transition to what's called the Nav two software, and that will basically allow us to use velocity and acceleration from this point on, so we no longer need the star tracker. - MarCO clear, coast to spin or start a bent pipe. - Rotate to proper altitude for bent pipe, bent pipe mode will be entered shortly. - Okay thank you very much. - And that was obviously confirmation of the large amount of MarCO, so that's great news. - Fantastic. - So, as I was saying before, the Nav 2 software will be propagated from here on out, and we'll be using speed and acceleration, so we turn off our star tracker, we're in our Nav 2 software and everything is looking great. - Okay, thanks Julio.

Alright, cruise leg separation is only about four minutes away, and Rob Manning joins us now, Rob is the chief engineer here at JPL and an absolute veteran of the Mars landings. We're going to play a little video for you right now, you haven't seen it yet, but we'll shoot it. Let's go ahead. This is-- - Lander acceleration live, 14 carrier crash reports on-- - There you are, you were the phase leader. You were sitting since - Yes, that's how I look when it's successful. - Yes. - I'd hate to see how I would have looked if I hadn't been successful. - But speaking of that, how is EDL, why is it so difficult? - Well, it's many years of work by many people struggling to put all the pieces together, and particularly since we can't really prove entry, descent and landing on this planet, it's much more complicated, Mars has a lower atmosphere, thinner. atmosphere less gravity you just can't put the pieces together so imagine you have a big broadway production but you can't really make the show until the whole audience shows up that's how it feels so you never really know if you really you have done well. - Well, we have done it seven times, can we say piece of cake, do we know what we are doing? - No, I don't think so, we do better, and there is no doubt that we have learned, we have learned as much from the successes as from our own failures, including the failures of other missions outside of this country, so those pieces come together. in our mind's eye, and we try to piece together what we learned, and we do the best we can, and if we don't succeed, we'll learn, because we're collecting data on the way down, if something bad happens today, we'll be able to take what we learned, even if we fall to the ground after being kicked off the horse, we will get up, shake ourselves off, find out what we did wrong and get back on the horse. . - Well, there is a lot of uncertainty, just quickly give some possible scenarios of what could happen during EDL today, especially during communications. - Well, the great news about having communications, almost anything could go wrong, there is a good chance that we can solve it, but things like the parachute has to go well, you don't open parachutes on Earth going at Mach one and a half. , one and a half times the speed of sound, you just don't do that, you don't need to on this planet, but we have to because if we waited any longer, we'd be on the ground.

A very complicated RADAR system has to work from outer space to the ground and search for the ground, what if it crashes on the heat shield? Well, we have tried to avoid that problem, we fixed it. prevent that from happening, but what if we're wrong, things like that can happen, and our vehicle could have bad things, but we've worked hard to avoid them. - So we're getting closer, we're going to go to the control room for the separation of the cruise stage, Rob. - Well. I need to take off. Yes Yes. - InSight Systems, EDL COMM. - Forward? - At this time, MRO will have uploaded their electrosequences, and MarCO is waiting for the carrier to lock at any moment, MarCO B has recorded that they are in the bent pipe, still waiting for A. - Copy that, thanks. - Radio Science report, UHF carrier detected. - EDL COMM, MarCO Alpha is a bent pipe mode, MarCO bravo has been locked on carrier.

MarCO Alpha has also set its sights on the operator. - InSight cut-based systems, as expected the DSN has LS within x-band. - Copy that, thanks. All station InSight systems at the InSight core, DSN have lost InSight's X-band signal, indicated at the expected separation from the cruise stage. Pending acquisition of UHF signals via MarCO radio science. We are about five minutes from entry and have confirmation that we have lost InSight's X-band signal, this is to be expected because we transitioned from the antenna on the cruise stage to the UHF antenna on board the spacecraft . The ground stations detected a UHF signal and MarCO locked on the signal, confirming that InSight is transmitting UHF signals as expected.

InSight telemetry through the MarCO relay is not expected until approximately two minutes before input. - So Rob, that's exactly what we were hoping for here, for the MarCOs to be-- - The vehicle has also performed the turn-in maneuver, the vehicle is moving away from the altitude indicated by the sun, and it's oriented to enter. in the Martian atmosphere. - This is a great first step, just separate the cruising stage. After the vehicle rotates to the correct orientation, the cruise stage will now move further and further away until it is about three or four football fields away and burn out. in parallel as the rover enters Mars. - And Christine mentioned turn to enter, what does that mean? - Well, it's because the cruise stage has to be pushed to the side like this, the rest of the vehicle has to turn to face the atmosphere and be completely crazy when it hits the top of the atmosphere. - So, this is taking all the heat that enters the atmosphere? - Exactly, it will provide a source of drag, but also thermal protection, because it's over 1500 degrees Celsius in this heat shield, very, very hot, but on the inside of the heat shield, it's maybe only a few degrees. above ambient temperature, making it a wonderful protective device to keep our lander safe. - All right, so the next thing we're waiting for is, - It's the entrance. - Entrance. - Get to the top of the atmosphere and gradually slow down.

At this time, the vehicle is just starting, very soon it will begin to feel the atmosphere touch it, actually the inlet is slightly above the atmosphere, so it really is not until half a minute. more or less after the entrance before we really start to pick up on the fact that that atmosphere is slowing us down. - Very well, we'll be waiting. - Yes, exciting. - Rob, the entry is now scheduled for 11:47, the cruise leg is set and the entry times are set correctly. - They are, they are locked when we select the target and aim the vehicle with great precision, that allows us to know exactly when we arrive at the entry point, which is between 35 and 55 kilometers from the center of Mars. - So we know those times are closed, but what about all the other events taking place-- - Radio Science reports that the carrier power is being reduced as expected. - MarCO A and MarCO B have telemetry. - I just heard, both MarCOs have telemetry. - They are doing their job, these little Cubesats are retransmitting ones and zeros with a few seconds delay From the vehicle to these two vehicles, and they forward them back to Earth to the deep space network using X, - Y band antennas Keep in mind this was all an experiment, we weren't sure this was going to work, but we had this need that we didn't have live communication on this particular mission. - Well, we don't really need communications, we don't need your information, except if something goes wrong, we'd really like to get the data right now, we have other spacecraft. - Now we're really getting InSight telemetry through MarCO. - Ah, it's flowing towards him, fabulous.

That means the team can now see the data streaming onto their screens as if they were communicating directly with the vehicle. - These data will provide detailed information on the state of the spacecraft throughout EDL. -We were on pins and needles waiting for that, because we weren't quite sure. - This is wonderful news, if this continues to work down to the ground and beyond, we might even see a first image of the surface of Mars. - Wouldn't that be great? - Coming soon. - Atmospheric entrance to my mark, three, two, one, mark. - Here we go. - Then, in a few seconds, the rover will begin to detect the atmosphere, 22 kilometers from the center of Mars, and it will begin to slow down very, very slowly at first, but then faster and faster, until it reaches about seven Gs, I made that mistake in the video, it's actually seven Gs, not 12, but it's still going to slow down very, very quickly, from 15-- - In about a minute, InSight is expected to reach its maximum rate of heating, that's A plasma blackout may occur during the heat spike and could cause a temporary drop in telemetry, this could last up to two minutes. - The gas coming out of the heat shield as it slows down, looks like a meteor if you're on Mars watching the streak go by, that glow from the gas interferes with radio reception so it's possible for MarCO to lose that signal as it passes by for this very hot entry. - But don't be alarmed. - Don't be alarmed, it's part of the design, we fully expect it. - Radio science reports plasma blackouts as expected. - Okay, oh wow. - Ground stations have reported a plasma blackout and are still receiving InSight telemetry via MarCO. - MarCO Alpha has carrier interruption. - InSight should now be experiencing maximum rate of heating, parts of the heat shield can reach almost 3000 degrees Fahrenheit, as it protects the lander from the heating environment. - That's hot. - MarCO Bravo has carrier interruption, but still blocked. - InSight has gone through maximum deceleration, telemetry shows the spacecraft at about 8 Gs. - MarCO Alpha and MarCO Bravo keep blocking. - Aircraft carrier radio science reports detected. - Several different communications come in. - InSight now travels at a speed of 2000 meters per second. - It seems to have passed this very critical point of maximum heating and maximum deceleration.

The next big step is parachute inflation. - You can see that on our timeline at the bottom of the screen, the next event is the deployment of the parachute. - InSight now travels at 1000 meters per second. Once InSight slows to about 400 meters per second, it will deploy its 12-meter-diameter supersonic parachute, the parachute nominally deploying at approximately Mach 1.7. Waiting for the launch of the parachute. - Radio science reports sudden change in Doppler. - Ground stations are observing signals consistent with parachute deployment. - MarCO Alpha and MarCO Bravo maintain the locked state. - Telemetry shows parachute deployment, RADAR on.

Heat shield separation ordered. - This is very good news so far. - It's fantastic. - I'm on pins and needles. - We have RADAR activation where the RADAR begins to search for the ground, once the RADAR locks on the ground and InSight is approximately one kilometer above the surface, the lander separates it from the rear shell and begins terminal descent using its 12 descent engines. Altitude convergence, the RADAR has been fixed on the ground. Awaiting separation from the lander. - Carrier interruption in MarCO Alpha and MarCO Bravo. - Commanded landing separation, altitude 600 meters. Rotation by gravity, altitude 400 meters. - We're getting there. - 300 meters. 200 meters 80 meters 60 meters 50 meters, constant speed, 37 meters, 30 meters, 20 meters, 17 meters, waiting for the touchdown.

Confirmed landing. - That is fantastic. - This never goes out of style. - No, Rob, the control room just blew up. - Fabulous, fabulous. - MarCO team command there. - The MarCO team did very well, Ted Reising, one of the key designers at Lockheed. Sandy Krasner, you are a great team. This is really fabulous. - Fantastic news. - Thank you. - Lots of punching going on there. What a relief, we've moved on to the camera in Times Square, people are standing in the rain to see this. - They can't help it. This is the hardest part, getting to the surface and landing, however this thing has a lot more to do, there is a lot more to do both today and in the days to come before the science can begin, but just get a Earth vehicle. to the surface of Mars is no small feat. - And Rob, could you talk about that?

Just from the sheer achievement here that we're looking at. - You have to understand, this vehicle is very complicated, it uses 12 motors, each of those motors are pulsed 10 times per second, producing these little pulses, almost like little bullets that keep the vehicle running at a constant speed as approaching. the ground, and it's still going over five miles an hour, so those legs feel pretty squashed, we still don't know the condition of the vehicle at this point, we need to look to make sure there aren't any rocks nearby, the solar panels In about five to 10 minutes they'll start to open up, they're waiting for the dust to settle, because there's certainly a lot of dust kicked up in the air around the vehicle right now, which is now settling. - So we are waiting, after landing it waits a couple of minutes to give us an X band beep, so we are waiting for that, it is a communication that comes directly to Earth from InSight. - Yeah, and it goes to the Deep Space Network, there's also something that could be happening right now, if we're really lucky InSight might transmit an image or a partial image taken just a couple of minutes after landing, so I'm looking forward to seeing that. , but if that doesn't happen, we'll certainly get more footage later in our Odyssey pass in about five hours. - We see Bruce Banerdt waiting for him, I don't know if you see him yet. - They are waiting, they are Justin Mackie and Bruce Banerdt looking closely at the cameras to see what they can see.

They are waiting for the image to come back. - So this is the first image from InSight itself, InSight is taking a picture with one of its two cameras, it's probably a view of what's directly in front of the spacecraft, right in front of the lander, this it's a camera that it's going to use to find out if this is a good space, if it's a good place to put our instruments, so it'll take an image and then send that image to the MarCOs, the MarCOs will in turn transmit it to Earth. . - That's great, they got it.

This is great, let's see what they have. There is. - There is the picture. - That's a good spot, it's not far from where they'll be able to deploy the instruments, so that's great, I don't see many-- - Let's explain that image, now this image has a dust cover on top of it - EDL COMM, we've Lost signal from MarCO. - You can potentially see a lot of-- - Radio signals are reporting loss of UHF. - So we don't know what I'm looking at. - Thanks to everyone at EDL COMM. - Trust work MarCO. - Yes, Marco.

Congratulations. But there it is, you can see a better view, you can see that it's really rubble, there's the horizon back there, the blue sky, that's part of the landing pad in the front left, I can't make it out, but there seems to be no Lots of rocks in the field of view, but those spots you see there are most likely dust particles on the dust cover, which will be removed. - And you'll have another chance later. - Yes. And a better clearer view after removing the dust cover, the Cubesats relay communications job is done, now they're flying, now they're taking pictures towards Mars, hopefully MRO that flew overhead might have had the Lucky to catch the relegation. of this InSight Lander under his parachute, while this was going on, MRO was flying overhead recording the data, and also monitoring the transactions, and recording every bit of signal that he could, but also had the ability to take a picture, maybe like how we did with Phoenix and then with Curiosity Rover, we could see the inflated parachute. - That would be great, now we're waiting for that X-band beep, InSight calling home saying I'm here and I'm fine. - Systems over InSight core, DSM and X-band. - Radio science reports an X-band carrier detected. - Four and a half minutes with InSight in nominal mode. - Copy that, thanks. - Flawless, - Perfect, - Flawless, - We got the beep, this was a perfect case scenario in my book. - This is what we really expected and imagined in our mind, we spend a lot of time visualizing all these bad things that can happen, but sometimes things work in your favor.

And we'll look very carefully at the data and see how well it went, but it certainly looked like it was a very successful and perfect landing, we'll have to see as we get more data how well things are going, like the vehicle. Go ahead, the solar panels will deploy, hopefully they weren't tilted, it doesn't look like we're from the picture, but the solar panels will deploy safely, we hope, and we'll get confirmation of that around five. check local time here four and a half to five hours from now. - And this is such a difficult feat, as due to the one-way time lag, there is no way for any of these engineers to control the vehicle, it all has to be done in commands and software. - Yes, we have to train him to do this job by himself. - Radio science reports nominal carrier 30 seconds after first acquisition, so we are nominal on the surface. - So, the vehicle is fully nominal, it's reported nominal, it's happy, the lander isn't complaining, we had a way of telling us if it was unhappy, and it wasn't, it's not unhappy, it's in normal mode, and it is.

I'm going to spend the rest of the afternoon on Mars and finish the activities. - Alright Rob, I know you're looking forward to coming in and congratulating the team, thank you so much for sitting here and helping us out. - It was a pleasure. - And explaining EDL. - Thank you. - Very well, well I let you go, and go congratulate your friend. - Thank you. - Okay. Be careful. - EDL COMM on InSight operations recording completed at 20:04:34. - Alright, as promised, we said to bring back the administrator to give you his opinion on what it was like to be in that control room, Jim, what was it like? - Well, I'll tell you, it was intense, and you could feel the emotion, it was very, very calm when it was time to be quiet, and of course very festive with each little new information that was received, it is very different to be here than to see it on the television by a lot, I can tell you for sure now that I've experienced both, and then of course what's amazing is that as soon as it was over, I got a call on my cell phone, and the phone number had all zeros on it, and every Every time I get a phone call that's all zeros, it's got to be someone important, I answered, and it was the vice president, he saw everything, he's absolutely excited about our show, as you know, he's the president of the National Space Council and of course , he's been a huge supporter of what we do, and to have him calling seconds after mission success is tremendous, and just so everyone knows, he wants to I want to say congratulations to everyone here at NASA, and to all of our inter-partners Nationals, and everyone who has contributed to this mission, what an incredible day for NASA. - It's an amazing achievement, as this is something that is happening millions and millions of miles away, and these people can do it. - Unbelievable, and what's fascinating is that all the time I look at it I think, every milestone is something that happened eight minutes ago, because that's the amount of time to receive a signal from Mars to Earth, so it's exciting, but then you have to take a step back and realize that this has already happened in history, so it's a unique, incredible experience, just the enthusiasm here is incredible. - So what's in store for the future, looking forward to 2020? - Well, let's end December, so for the rest, we think about next December 3, we will take another American astronaut to the International Space Station, so it will be a great achievement, and it will be in a Russian Soyuz. rocket, the last time we launched a human it was unsuccessful. - That was awful. - It was scary, but we figured out what the problem is, we're moving forward, and now we have it up and running on December 3rd.

From there, we'll get the first science data from Parker Solar Probe on December 7th, so it's not too far off either, and then we have Osiris Rex, which will be in orbit around Benu shortly after. Christmas, so there is no shortage of exciting things. And then on January 1, we're going to fly the New Horizons mission, which for people who aren't in the know, that's the mission that went to Pluto in 2014, gives us some amazing images and data and science about Pluto, and now that La mission is still going strong, it's now in what we call the Kuiper belt, which is an asteroid belt way beyond Pluto, and it's going to be imaging Ultima Thule, which is an object in the Khyber belt that we've never been able to get out and taking pictures of anything at close range before, and now we're doing it, so you ask what happens next. - I'm sorry, I asked. - Right now we have at NASA, there is more underway,I probably don't know how many years ago, but it's like there's a drought, and then all of a sudden there's all these activities going on at once, so we.

We're busy, we'll be working over the holidays, but there are still many amazing discoveries to be made, and we can't wait to do it. - It's very funny, because our NASA question that you basically answered is: does the success of NASA InSight influence the timeline for future manned missions to the Moon or to Mars? - Well, certainly whatever we learn about Mars at this point will help us understand how to use in situ resources, so InSight could provide really good information about whether or not there is liquid water on Mars, and maybe even where it is. and how to get to it, we strongly believe that there is liquid water 10 kilometers below the surface of Mars, so the key is, the answer is yes, the more we learn, the more we can achieve, so to get to Mars Yes.

But lunar missions, the president's first space policy directive, is to go to the moon, go sustainably with international and commercial partners, so when we say sustainable, that means we're going to have reuse built into the system, and us. we're going to test and test technologies on the moon, which we can ultimately replicate on Mars, so we're going to retire at risk, we're going to test human physiology on the moon, which is only a three-day trip, which means if something goes wrong, you can get home safely, we saw it with Apollo 13, but we need to use the moon as a proving ground to speed our way to Mars, in the meantime, we are doing missions like InSight to learn as much as possible about Mars, InSight will also help us understand asteroid impacts, because it has a seismometer, which will help us know how often Mars is hit by asteroids, and if we're going to send humans there, it would be important to know, if those humans are going to experience imp asteroid facts. - And that's more or less our goal, you always learn from our missions and build on those missions. -- one after another, and NASA has a long history of doing an amazing job building on its past successes and, indeed, its past failures. - That's true. - I'll tell you, what an incredible time to be in charge of this extraordinary agency. - Well, we are very happy that you are here to share it with us, thanks for joining us. - Well Gay, it has been a real pleasure. - And I'm sure you should go in and celebrate with those people, but thanks for stepping up for us. - Absolutely, thank you very much. - Okay.

Be careful. Now Mars exploration is a great thing, but if you're still not convinced, talk to the scientists and engineers at InSight, no one is more enthusiastic than the people actually working on the mission, so earlier this year the team He filled out the information, got into a van and went to 15 cities in California, they called it the InSight Roadshow. - So we're here in San Francisco at the Exploratorium, and this is part of the InSight roadshow, since it's the first interplanetary mission that we've launched from California, we're actually doing a lot of public engagement activities throughout California. - We're just talking to the public, telling them about InSight and getting them excited, and sharing information that they probably wouldn't get from the website alone. - We have globes and Mars tech kits, we have replicas of the actual launch vehicle that will take InSight to Mars, we have a selfie station with fun props, people can take pictures.

Children like Mars very, very much. - We have a jumping station, where we invite the children to come in and jump, we have a little seismometer on the floor, which measures the movement of the ground, so if the students can come and jump next to it, they can actually see their own recording on the screen, and they can make their own earthquake. - I've had people come to me and tell me that this is the most I've ever understood about a space mission, I'm very happy that I came, because now I understand what you're doing, I understand why it's important and I'm very excited. - You can imagine what it looks like, but seeing it in person puts it in perspective.

He was able to explain a lot of what goes on, the cameras, what gets into the ground, it's a great exhibit, you know, both for me and for the kids who want to learn about Mars. - Well, we want you to meet another veteran of Mars here at JPL, director of hardware Mike Hawkins. You are a quest manager out of curiosity. - Absolutely, I think this is the fifth Mars mission I've worked on, the fifth Mars lander, so maybe we're finally getting the hang of it. - Does it ever get better, does it get old, is it always the same? - No, it's not like that, I think we're just as nervous all the time, the whole landing sequence, it's such a crazy moment, and we can't do anything, it's this feeling of helplessness because the spaceship is alone, and everything What we were able to do we did a day ago, and I think you always have that nervousness, but we have confidence in the team, we have confidence in the engineers and scientists who did everything they could do, and you have to put it in their hands. - And it's our eighth successful landing, so we learn from this, we learn a little more and we do better next time. - Absolutely, we have had a failure, we also learn from the failures, we learned from all the failures of all the missions, even if they are not JPL missions or NASA missions, each one of them tells you something, an extra. test that you have to do, something additional that you have to guard against in the atmosphere of Mars or on landing, and we've learned from all of these, and luckily we've been very successful recently. - And we're always trying something new, we're always trying to learn something new, we had a situation this time, Odyssey couldn't be in place to give us bent pipe communications, and thus MarCO was born. - MarCO is just an amazing success story, like you said, we couldn't get Mars Odyssey to do the realtime dubbed pipeline for EDL events, we would have had to wait a couple hours and get the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter replay as well that we embarked on this crazy idea of ​​building these two little Cubesats, and Cubesats or something that high school kids can build these days, they go up and around the Earth, these are the first interplanetary Cubesats, the first time I've ever seen it we make. they sent Cubesats out of Earth orbit, and their sole purpose was to do the relay, so they had this cool expanded flat flat antenna there, and they relayed the UHF signals in real time for us, and it was just amazing, it was built by lots of young people in their career here at JPL with a bit of adult supervision but nope the engineers just did a fantastic job at MarCO they exceeded all of our wildest expectations they worked perfectly we built two because we thought maybe one will make it there, they both got there, they both worked, it's just a great tribute to the whole team at MarCO, you saw them there, they had the special black jerseys, fantastic stuff, and it not only worked for this mission, but I think it opens the door for more little missions like that we could put cameras and other instruments on them they're a lot less expensive so I think there's a whole new door we just opened Open a door to a whole new class of planetary science, thanks to the MarCOs. - And the Cubesats were only made with standard parts. - Some combination of off the shelf parts and some new stuff we did, we had to build the special radio of course because it has to talk to the deep space network.

Antennas are a bit of a new technology, but a lot of the stuff is pretty standard stuff that you could replicate for a lot less cost. - So what do you think in terms of the future of other missions carrying their own relays and not having to rely on a bent tube from an orbiter? - They could carry relays, they could actually carry scientific instrumentation, they can do more than just make relays, they can actually take pictures, they could do spectrometry, they could do a lot of other things that we'd like to do with orbiters, so there's a chance that we could send them to Venus, we could send them to asteroids, we could send them to Mars, there's a lot of things we could do and I think we're just learning the capability of what we could miniaturize and what you could put on these Cubesats.

But this is a great first effort. - Absolutely, well we have a question for you, it's a social media question from nine year old George Kay from the UK, how long did it take to plan and build this mission, InSight? - Well, that's a great question, so I have two answers to that, InSight itself, usually our missions take, from the time we start the mission to the time we launch it, it's about four to Five years, in the case of InSight, two things happened, one in our favor and the other not in our favor. The first is that we had a lot of heritage from a mission called Phoenix.

So a lot of the design work had already been done, because it was done for this Phoenix mission, and even before that for the Mars Polar Lander, so a lot of the basic design we inherited for this mission. On the other hand, we were a bit unlucky because the instruments, the seismometer, is so incredibly accurate, it's so incredibly accurate and difficult to build that we couldn't get it ready, so we're doing it collaboratively. with the French and many other countries in Europe including the UK and Switzerland and others we couldn't get it ready for launch so we had to wait two years then it took two more years because of that Mars and Earth are just aligned to release every 26 months, so we had to wait another 26 months, so it took a little longer. - Well, speaking of the internationals, it's a perfect starting point for the next step, throughout this program we've been trying to introduce you to the people behind the scenes, and for the InSight mission it requires us to go beyond our borders. , this is really an international mission, let me introduce Dominico Giardini, an Italian-Swiss scientist who studies earthquakes and marsquakes. - And that association goes way beyond individual scientists, look at this, it's a picture of the calibration tool on the deck of InSight Lander, it's what the team uses to calibrate the cameras on Mars, and look at the flags and the logos. , its recognition of our international partnerships with the French government space agency CNES, and also with the German Aerospace Center DLR, and it is my pleasure to welcome the site's project manager, Philippe Laudet, of CNES, and member of the executive board, Hans Dittus of the DLR.

So I can't imagine a better day, what was your reaction. - A great day, yes. - So I'm very excited, I'm very grateful for all the people on the mission, also my people who are going to the team, the CNES team and the science team, now we have a basic image of the terrain, and now the work starts. seismometer deployment, so a new adventure in the best conditions, thanks for that. - Definitely a new adventure. Hans Dittus, what you feel, the HP cube is in that deck, it will be ready to go. - Yes, now it's our job now, but first the fall I'd like to congratulate our partners here in the US, and this was a great day and a great job they did, it's not easy to land on Mars, that's what that we know, and it's a dream for me too, because the first time we landed on Mars with an instrument, at least as I've experienced it, it's a great day, and it's very exciting so far, now the work begins for us . - Philippe once said, you are also a musician, he plays jazz, you see exploration and music very similar, how is that? - Yes, they are very similar, because the human management of all that activity is exactly the same, the technique is different, you have a seismometer or you have an orchestra, but the raw material to find the best talents and things like that is the same. , and deliver on time, be ready and have the best performances, it's all similar. - And we should let people know that we won't be able to collect scientific data right away, is that correct? - Yes. - We will be collecting science, in a few months? - The deployment will take about two or three months, of course we will have some data during the deployments, but the best data to do the best science will be in early March. - All right then-- - So we're getting ready now. - We prepare now. - Yes, now is the time, but so far it was also a great job for our team, and our teams, all the teams, and as you said, it takes a lot of people to get it to Mars and make a successful mission. - Well, I have to say congratulations. - Thank you. - Thank you. - Thanks for being with us.

Well here's another profile now, meet Ravi Prakash, it's his job to keep InSight healthy on Mars. - We can explore the universe and see things no one has seen before, my name is Ravi Prakash and my job is to keep InSight healthy when it's on Mars. InSight is the first spacecraft to go to Mars and try to understand howrocky planets formed A healthy InSight spacecraft is healthy batteries, we have heaters throughout our spacecraft that keep our spacecraft warm enough to function as it should. We look at these things, as well as many other parts of our spacecraft on a daily basis to make sure we have a successful mission.

There are thousands of people working on InSight, so systems engineers are responsible for understanding how changing one part of the spacecraft is reflected in the entire system, and how that affects all other parts of the spacecraft. In fact, I worked at JPL for eight years and then left for about three years to work for a non-profit organization, where I used my engineering and design skills that I learned at NASA to help people in poverty. I realize that what we do here impacts billions of people around the world, every single person, whether they realize it or not, has been impacted by NASA technology.

We are the next generation of explorers. - Alright, let's meet Ravi Prakash in person. Ravi is in our sandbox at JPL In Situ Instrument Laboratory, and wait a minute Ravi, where did that beard come from? - Hi Gay, there were about 10 of us who decided the day we launched to Mars that we would shave and then not shave again for seven months until we land on Mars, so I'm really excited that we landed. not only because we have a mission on the surface of mars but i have two little girls at home who love to pull my beard so i can finally put an end to that. - Alright, so Ravi help us, what happens next?

Now clearly, InSight is not out of the woods yet, correct? - Yes, sure, so we have some very important steps ahead, the first is that we have to deploy our solar panels, this is what the spacecraft is doing right now, it is deploying these two solar panels to obtain energy from the sun. , this is one of the most important things we have to do right now. After that, we'll do a series of checkups on our spacecraft to make sure everything survived this harrowing entry, descent, and landing on Mars, and then once that's complete, over the next few days we'll begin deploying our instruments on the surface of Mars.

Mars. - So, what exactly does the deployment of the instrument imply? - This is the first time we have used a robotic arm to place instruments on the surface of Mars. This is a process that will put our seismometer on Mars, as well as the heat flux probe, and it ends up taking about three months, which seems like a long time, but this is because we have to be very careful and make sure everything happens. the way it's meant to happen, unlike on Earth we can't send a technician if something goes wrong so we just want to get it right the first time. - Very good, and in our interview we just heard that we may not be looking until March before we have science. - That's right, we get a certain amount of science immediately as far as the environment of Mars, we get wind data, temperature data, magnetometer data, but then once we start getting seismic data, that will be in the time frame of March. - And can you explain to me Ravi, the ISL, the test bench where you are, what are you doing there? - So this is a Martian sandbox, for the last two years we have had a great team that has been testing the deployment of our instruments on a variety of different slopes and rocks, now that we are on Mars we are going to transform this area. to look exactly like where we landed, and test our instrument deployment one more time before actually doing it. - Very well thank you Ravi, congratulations. - Thank you so much. - Now that InSight is on Mars, it means some changes, InSight no longer travels to Mars, so the team no longer needs the cruise mission support area, soon the team will transfer operations to a new group located In another JPL control room, this is the surface mission support area.

It's in another building here at JPL, this is where the team will operate InSight from now on. So the delivery is the final step, and it will take place around one o'clock our time, that's about half an hour, for us it's time to say goodbye, our congratulations to the InSight team and a special thanks to our EDL. systems engineers Christine Szalai and Julie Wertz Chen expect a press briefing on NASA TV at 2 p.m. m. Pacific, 5 p.m. /InSight and NASA.gov/Mars, and thanks to everyone who shared photos on social media, it was wonderful to share this historic event with you, we have some photos for you to leave, enjoy and congratulations.

Knowledge.