We're Going to Mars!

01I had just started on the team.

02This was about maybe six months to a year in.

03The science office, they said, you know what?

04We need to send the engineers to the Mojave Desert.

05There was one, I think this was towards the tail end of the trip, they took us to a site, they gave us a map, and they said, okay, you are now the rover, and this is the only information that you have.

06These are just images, aerial images of the area nearby.

07Go tell us where you would find evidence of life.

08It kind of made me think, like, ah, like one day we could be walking on the surface of Mars and maybe doing the same exercise.

09So that was kind of cool.

10This is NASA's Curious Universe.

11I'm Patti Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide.

12My name is Christina Hernandez, and I'm a payload systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

13Christina is one of the engineers that helped build the Mars Perseverance rover, which will soon allow us to explore Mars in a way we've never been able to before.

14Ever wonder if there's life beyond our home planet?

15Some key answers might be locked up a little further into the solar system, on Mars.

16And over the past few years, NASA's been building a rover that might just hold the key.

17When I started, we were still at a paper design, and we were just focused on trying to understand if it was the right design and how we were actually going to build this beast of a rover.

18And now, right, in the recent years, we've transitioned to what I love the most about engineering now is, you know, building hardware, testing hardware, and eventually building the flight rover and flight instruments.

19It's taken 10 years to get the Mars Perseverance rover ready for launch day.

20This summer, the rover will embark on a hunt for signs of ancient life on Mars.

21The historic mission will be the first step in a round-trip mission to Mars.

22It will collect rock samples for future return to Earth.

23The Apollo lunar samples, collected by astronauts decades ago, are still allowing us to make discoveries about the moon.

24There's no telling what samples from the red planet could teach us.

25And that's why these samples are at the core of the mission's four key goals.

26So the first goal is, did life ever exist on Mars, right?

27Is there evidence of past life?

28And we have so many great science instruments that are going to help us answer those questions.

29The second goal is to learn more about the climate on Mars.

30What's Mars climate like, right?

31We want to know how it became what it is today.

32And at the same time, learning about Mars climate could also help us understand our own Earth climate, which is, you know, always important.

33The third goal is to understand the geology of Mars.

34The sort of thing that Christina was learning about on that trip she took to the Mojave Desert.

35And then there's the last goal.

36Which is the goal that, you know, as a little kid, this is the one I always dreamt of, is we are finally preparing for human exploration on Mars, right?

37It's an actual goal, right?

38It's always been a vision.

39It's always been a dream.

40But on this rover, it is one of our four science goals.

41And so that's why we're going to Mars.

42And that's why folks like me are so excited for this mission, because this is cutting edge stuff.

43But Perseverance still has a ways to go before it starts on these goals.

44In late July, the mission's launch window opens.

45After leaving from the Kennedy Space Center, it will take the rover seven months to travel to Mars.

46That means it'll get there in February 2021.

47At which point, it will have to complete one of the most difficult parts of the entire mission.

48We're talking about Entry, Descent and Landing, or EDL, the EDL process.

49It's known as the seven minutes of terror.

50For that period of time, NASA will not be able to communicate with the rover.

51And the computer will have to move the mission through a perfectly choreographed set of motions without any help from the ground.

52Mitch Schulte, the Mars Exploration Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters, will walk us through what the EDL process will look like for Perseverance.

53The entry part is when the rover first hits the top of the atmosphere of Mars.

54The heat shield then starts to interact with the atmosphere, creating a lot of friction.

55This creates a lot of heat, but it also takes some of the energy out of the spacecraft as it's coming into Mars.

56The heat shield eventually drops off after we've gotten through enough of the atmosphere and slowed it down enough.

57At that point, we have a parachute that deploys out of the back shell that opens up at hypersonic speed.

58So it's going faster than the speed of sound.

59And we have a very large parachute then that helps us slow it down even further.

60And then by the time that the parachute slows us down enough, the rover will drop out of the back shell that's carrying the parachute.

61So we'll be free of the parachute.

62At that point, what will happen is that there's a radar on board the rover that will detect where the ground is and fire the retro rockets that will finally allow us to get the rest of the way down to the surface of Mars.

63So we're going to a place on Mars called Jezero Crater, J-E-Z-E-R-O.

64This is actually a crater that was once filled with a lake.

65And it's in a really ancient part of Mars, about three and a half billion years old.

66This area of Jezero Crater, which is now dry, there's no liquid water in it now.

67But there's evidence in the rock record that there was a liquid water lake there three and a half billion years ago.

68And everywhere we go here on Earth where we have liquid water, we find life.

69We in the Mars Exploration Program like to point out that we've been sending things to Mars for quite some time.

70And we'll be happy when the humans finally get there.

71But we've got an entire planet inhabited by robots at the moment.

72What we're really trying to establish on Mars is whether there was life there in its ancient past.

73So now that we've established that there was liquid water early in Mars' history, we think that it could have been habitable like Earth was and is now.

74So we really want to get after this idea of establishing what kinds of places on Mars were habitable and whether life actually did get a start on Mars.

75And so what we're doing in sending all of this technology and these technology demonstrations and this hardware to Mars is really helping us move forward in the technologies that will enable humans to visit Mars.

76Now you might be wondering, what will Perseverance look like as it's roving around Mars?

77And what will it be doing?

78Well, it looks very similar to Curiosity.

79Because it's the same design.

80And the reason that we use the same design is, one, we know it works really well on Curiosity.

81Imagine a car-sized robot with extra limbs and a camera for a head.

82We have upgraded the wheels.

83It turns out the rover actually is pretty heavy.

84Perseverance clocks in at 2,260 pounds.

85So that's been putting some strain on the wheels.

86We've corrected that, redesigned the wheels, and so the wheels are going to be much better this time around.

87One of the great things that, you know, we do have is data to try and understand the different types of terrain and also the slopes that the rover could see.

88The Perseverance is equipped to kind of handle different types of terrain because of the wheels.

89And we even have requirements to say, look, we need to be able to travel up slopes that are, you know, 20 degrees high, right?

90Because we need to be able to just be prepared for if there is something interesting that's really going to drive us over there, we have to be ready.

91Christina likes to think of the different pieces of Perseverance as they relate to the human body.

92So for example, you know, within the rover, right, within that kind of that big box, all the vital organs, all like the sensitive electronics that kind of give life to the rover, that's where that's kept.

93When you think about, you know, the rover, right, the rover is kind of like a robotic scientist, right?

94We try and pack as much as we can of what a geologist would do, what tools they would bring, and put that on the rover.

95We've got the brains, which is obviously the electronics and the software that control everything.

96We also have the neck and the head, which on the rover, we call that the mast, the remote sensing mast.

97And the remote sensing mast on Perseverance has all these really neat cameras that are going to help the rover see.

98And ears, we have a microphone provided by the SuperCam team on the rover, which is like a first and really cool.

99And, you know, obviously the wheels, right?

100We got to rove around and go check things out.

101And as Perseverance is doing all of this, it's got to keep us in the loop.

102And the way we talk to Earth is through our antennas.

103And so that's what we use to speak to Earth and also allow Earth to say hi back and check in on us.

104So that's kind of like the overview of the rover.

105It's always exciting to get messages from the rovers through those antennas, receiving pictures and data as it explores the red planet.

106But this time, we're hoping to get something else.

107We've successfully landed eight robots on Mars before, two of which are still working.

108And each of them have helped us understand the planet a bit better.

109But Perseverance is taking us a step further.

110Unlike other missions that have brought samples back from celestial objects before, like comets and asteroids, this time we're bringing samples back from a planetary body, Mars, that may have had life on it.

111We're trying to bring pieces of another planetary body all the way back to Earth.

112And we're hoping that those pieces, the samples, might help us answer a question.

113Did life ever exist on Mars?

114We want to make sure that we do the best job in collecting these samples, and we're going to be doing it from 150 million miles away.

115It's kind of like when Christina and the other engineers went to the Mojave Desert, and were told to look for rocks that might show signs of life.

116But instead of a short drive across California, we're talking about a seven-month journey through space.

117And instead of our own two hands, we've got a car-sized, semi-autonomous robot doing the job.

118So they've built in a lot of technology that will enable careful handling of the samples and make sure that we get the best possible samples that we can get.

119And when you bring a sample back to Earth, you can give that sample to institutions across the world, have them use their labs, have them study it for decades to come, right?

120And it's huge, right?

121We've never done this before.

122And it may just stick with it.

123While sample collection is one of the most exciting parts of the rover's mission, Perseverance will be quite the multitasker.

124One of the instruments will test out how we might convert carbon dioxide to oxygen.

125This could fuel future rockets to get them back to Earth in the event that, you know, we get humans there and they want to come home.

126Another instrument will monitor the weather on Mars, keeping track of temperature, humidity, and dust size.

127Each of Perseverance's instruments will help us achieve the mission's main science goals.

128This will also be the first rover to bring along a companion.

129We are going to send, okay, and I got it like, really, like you got to really process this.

130We are going to send a helicopter with the rover, right?

131So for the first time outside of Earth's atmosphere, we are going to be flying on another planet, right?

132And so Ingenuity, which is our Mars helicopter's name, you know, is going to take flight once we land on Mars.

133And that is pretty amazing that, you know, some crazy team at JPL, right, put together this helicopter and we're like, yeah, let's bring it along.

134Let's go and figure out if we can fly on another planet because that is going to even increase our capabilities even more.

135And so...

136So we've built a little house for the helicopter on the underside of the rover.

137And so after the rover lands, it's going to get lowered down to the ground.

138It's folded up inside this house.

139It's going to get lowered down to the ground on cables.

140The cables are going to get detached from the rover.

141The rover will drive away and then the helicopter will unfold itself and be ready to fly.

142Ingenuity will be able to give us an aerial perspective of Mars, making observations that could tell us how we might use the planet's resources one day.

143We have lots of cameras on Perseverance, so we'll be able to take all kinds of great pictures and probably some video of the helicopter doing its thing.

144We'll also have a video camera on the helicopter itself, so it will be taking video as it's flying.

145Imagine this.

146In the future, when humans are on Mars, they may call on helicopters like Ingenuity to scout out new locations and investigate cliffs, caves, and deep craters.

147The helicopters could even carry small payloads of supplies.

148But before any of that happens, a test vehicle has to prove that flying on Mars is even possible.

149And that's what Ingenuity is going to do.

150So at the moment, we have five demonstration flights planned, each one a little bit longer than the last one.

151And so we're going to first make sure that it actually lifts up off the ground and can actually fly.

152And then we'll test and see how long we can do that.

153And then if we get creative, we can start to maybe maneuver it around a little bit.

154Mars Perseverance is a pioneer, a robotic scientist that will travel to Mars and attempt to learn its secrets.

155The rover will launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center soon.

156The launch window is set from July 30th to August 15th.

157But no matter when it launches from Earth, if all goes as planned, roughly seven months from now, on February 18th, 2021, we'll get some photos back from Perseverance as it takes its first look at this foreign landscape.

158And it'll be clear, we're not in the Mojave Desert anymore.

159I keep kind of thinking about the launch and, you know, I know I'm going to cry.

160I know I'm going to laugh and jump and just be super excited because this project has really meant everything.

161Like everybody on this team has given it their all.

162And, you know, we've all made the sacrifice of, you know, not being home on holidays, weekends.

163You give it your all because we know it's going to be such a rewarding thing to see this thing launched.

164Perseverance means everything.

165And this was my first flight project, right?

166I've never sent anything outside of Earth before.

167I couldn't have picked a better name for this personal and this team milestone.

168I mean, to me, perseverance means grit and passion.

169When we say, like, do you have the right stuff?

170To me, part of it is perseverance.

171It's understanding the sacrifices, understanding that everyone's in the same boat, being empathetic to your team members when they're having rough days, and building this robotic vehicle that's going to go and collect samples and do cutting edge science and, yeah, let's throw a helicopter in while we're at it.

172Like, this mission, this name, it manifests the last five years of my life, like, in all aspects.

173You know, this is what engineering is and this is what science is and I couldn't have done this anywhere else.

174That's what it means.

175This is NASA's Curious Universe.

176The Curious Universe team includes Klaus Meyer, Michaela Sosby, and Vicki Woodburn, our executive producer is Katie Atkinson.

177Special thanks to Ryland Hegey, Joby Harris, Jim Green, Andrew Good, and Liz Landau.

178If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving us a review, tweeting about the show at NASA, and sharing us with a friend.

179For more interviews about NASA's search for life, check out the latest season of our Gravity Assist podcast, hosted by NASA's chief scientist, Dr.

180Jim Green.

181Search for it in your favorite podcast app, or find it in other podcasts at nasa.gov slash podcasts.

182Thank you.

183Thank you.

184Thank you.

185Thank you.