How 'NASA' successfully landed on an asteroid

How 'NASA' successfully landed on an asteroid

Hey, family places left where we can just go and see something we've never seen before. The continents have been explored, the oceans have been crossed, but I can get a team of people incredibly smart, motivated, hard-working people, and we can build someThing and send it into space where no one's ever gone and take pictures of things no one's ever seen and that incredibly rewarding and then exciting and you wake up in the morning and you can't wait to get to work to figure out how to do it and do something that people are gonna remember. Most asteroids are in a zone of the solar system further out in Mars and closer than Jupiter and most people think that there was a planet that was trying to form in that zone and it. Whatever reason never quite formed and so most asteroids are orbiting the sun out and beyond Mars in this asteroid belt and they're just piles of bubble and rock. It never quite made it into a planet. There's another class of asteroids that formed much farther out in the solar system. Solar systems and they've remained very primitive. The new one is probably one of those. And what makes them especially interesting is we think they have organic material. What makes that even more interesting is that those asteroids fell to earth and brought primitive organic compounds that made very well have been the building blocks of organic materials that eventually led to life on earth and eventually led to us For most of my career, I've been studying Mars and for the last 25 years, my team and I here at Arizona State University have been building instruments to do just that. And then a few years ago, our colleagues down at the University of Arizona Asteroid spacecraft. That'll be used to study. The mineralogy and thermal processes on the asteroid. Well, Cyrus racks well, studying bend for a year. So, we launched in 2016 September. We will get there in about 2 years. We study the asteroid for a year using the various instruments onboard. With those data, we select the optimal muscle For the sample site. Once that sample site is selected, we'll do multiple maneuvers above the sample sites. Try that. Make sure the spacecraft and the instruments are capable of achieving that sample. Once it's time to do the sampling, the space graph will descend slowly to the surface. Collect that sample, put it into a storage container, and return it back to Earth. So, the main objective of this mission really is to bring 60 g of this asteroid back to the earth because it's that sample. That scientist will use it for decades to try to understand the composition and theological history of these objects. One of those key aspects of it. When you're going to an object you've never been to. You wanna take as broad, a sweet of instruments as you can cuz you really don't know what you're gonna find. There are five science instruments on Osiris Rex. The Ola or Osiris laser altimeter is Designed to map the shape and topography of the new and that will allow us to land safely. There's a student instrument called Rexus that was part of a competition in a group at MIT. We're selected to build that instrument. And then there are the three primary remote sensing instruments. So Camera system cameras that view from a distance and up extremely close then there's the Osiris visible near-infrared spectrometer it measures near and threads light. Measures organic compounds and other materials on the surface. And then finally there's Otis or the Osiris Thermally emission spectrometer that we built here at ASU. From that sweeter remote sensing instrument, this weekend Figure out what the most interesting place is: find the safest place to land and pick up our sample and bring it home Fred Spectrometer based on the Mars Rover instruments that we built that were called the mini test instruments. Those launched on the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers back in 2003. And I've been working on the surface of Mars since. The idea was to adapt that instrument to the Osiris Rex mission so that we can do comparable science at the Ask Traders. We've done it on Mars. But Otis does it measures the emitted infrared light and then it breaks that light up into a spectrum. Let's like if you take visible light and you put it through a prism, break it up into his colors. Now, every mineral, every rock, every color, Has a very unique diagnostic spectrum. So we measure the light. We break it up into the spectrum. And then we compare that spectrum to a library of spectra. We've measured every known mineral. And it's sort of like fingerprints you know here. Here's a spectrum from A new what is it match in our library so that's its role that's what it does mission is exciting for ASU because in the past all the previous jobs that we've done here at ASU have been done with partners in the aerospace station This is the first time that we've actually been able to build an instrument on campus. We've built non-flight test instruments in the past but nothing that's gone into space. Being built on campus obviously adds a lot of infrastructure needs that we didn't have on the university campus. So ASU has created this new building and it includes many laboratories. That building includes a class of 10 thousand clean rooms which is comparable to what we use in an aerospace company to do this type of work. We started with a completely empty large room. And we started saying We've been buying that stuff to fill up this room and I thought I knew what goes into the instrument like this but I've been amazed at the amount of stuff that is Eggs. They build an instrument of this complexity. And so we just constantly are buying the equipment, the tools, the facilities that we need. It's just an amazing amount of stuff. I am just being able to do this. Perhaps the best thing about this team is the remarkable span of experience. The heart and soul of this team are still in the chase. Stillman is our system engineer. He's the lead engineer. He really sets up The tone for the entire project. And he has been my mentor and role model over the last 40 years. Just a remarkable man. At the other end of the spectrum on our team is Ian Kubic who's our mechanical engineer and their bulls who's our mission assurance engineer. They were both undergraduates here at ASU. When they started on this project and now they're professional members of our engineering staff. In between the core of this group Greg me home. Who's our project engineer? He's really the leader of this group. He's the one who's ultimately responsible. For making your decision Overall optical-mechanical design makes sure the thing works the way it's supposed to. And then Bill O'Donnell who is really the hands of this operation. He's literally the guy who put Every single one of our instruments together. Collectively, this group is remarkably different. They have different personalities. They have different skills. But those differences actually lead to the creativity and the innovation that makes a project like this So, so powerful and so much fun to be a part of. I am here for the oh test. Critical design review. Also, call the CDR. CDRs are an important date for each of our instrument teams as well as our spacecraft team as we go through what we call gates to the next level. The critical design review for Otash is really a milestone in which we can be assured that they've demonstrated that the design meets the requirements necessary. To perform the measurements that we need at Venue the Asteroid to help us with our sample site collection as well as A lot of points now where we've completed our two primary reviews of the design the preliminary design review and the critical design review we passed those reviews with plenty of external peer review with excellent standing very few issues or brought up that we should be concerned about we all know from experience that a patient Mechanical, physical design, or two different things. So, the challenge now is mostly to make sure what we put on paper gets built properly. Every instrument that you build is unique. It's a one-of-a-kind instrument. So, for these types of developments, there's a lot of unknown, unknown. So, you really don't know what to expect until you actually have Technical challenges. You're gonna run into subcontractor challenges. You run into environmental challenges from various test facilities. All those things happen. You can't really predict them. So what you do is you put enough margin in your schedule to accommodate those potential issues. So we laid out this schedule at the beginning of the project and we ensured that we took a conservative approach on the schedule yet we put a lot of places where we could slip and still maintain our delivery date right now mid-June is our target we hope to deliver a couple of months before that of 2015. Installed on a spacecraft in August of 2015. And then we launched in September 2016. So the last couple of months we've gone from a lot of paper engineering and talking about what we were gonna do. Building an engineering practice model. She actually has to build up the real flight instrument. And that's a lot harder. Maybe it's like a dress rehearsal versus a real thing. All of a sudden, hey, if I break this or drop this or get a beat of blue in the wrong place. It's not just a test model anymore. It's the real thing. We're at the stage of the rubber beaches. We're building a spectrometer. And this involves mechanical components and optical components, mirrors, things like that. So, our job day to day now is to make sure the stuff comes together. It is built properly. And so, what? Carefully assemble in a line and do various measurements to ensure that each piece of hardware is rebuilding at functions as we expect. Meet and requirements, that sort of thing. And so, today, for example, Bill completed the assembly of what we call the moving mirror assembly. It's a little complex. Piece of hardware that its personal life is to just move back and forth. It moves the mirror and it's got like 100 components in it. Very complex, small, detailed work in that. Probably took several weeks of his time to get to the point where it's together and built. We tested today and it was a real milestone. The first piece of light hardware we put together looks perfect. So, it's time to celebrate. The team now is getting energized cuz this is the exciting part. You know, we're building something that's gonna fly in space in a couple of years. Our DNA is part of that hardware and it's gonna be flooding around space for the next decade. Hopefully, doing great science. 321. Power on. Show a plan. You think you think you know what the problems are gonna be and sometimes you're writing, sometimes you're wrong. Well, the biggest thing I'm worried about is our 1 day off schedule margin. We have 250 tasks laid out. Each one a day, 2 days, half a day, 3 days. Can you put all that out and okay? We're done on June 16 and they need it on June 17 and that's not much. Margarine. You'd like to have 2 or 3 weeks Of margin. So, what we're gonna try to do is work weekends and work evenings and build in some margin but we'll get there. We're in the home stretch. This is the combination of, you know, all that work over the last few years. There's been a few bumps in the road but pretty minor just enough to keep it interesting. From an engineer's point of view. So, we've gotten over those. Probably the biggest hurdle has been in an ethic that's always happening but electronics are very complicated on these instruments and they take longer than expected. So, it's all hands-on time. Spending a lot of time in the cleanroom and at the level of detail of this stuff is kinda crazy. If you put a spot of glue here, you gotta write it down in a book and say what kind of clue it was, when you mixed it, all that kind of stuff. So, it's a level of detail that you need to be, you know, congressman because sometimes things go wrong and you have to kinda Go back and look through all this documentation and term what you did wrong. Most of the time things go fine but we've learned this over the years and god heard Nasa kind of expects that we observe that level of detail and everything we do. So it's pretty exciting for us cos now we're gonna start a phase called the environmental test program. And in an at phase what we do is we simulate all the environments about our space. So we put the instrument to vibration. We put it through electromagnetic interference. We put it through a thermal vacuum test. And stimulate all those environments that the instrument might Encounter in space. So right now we are doing what's called electromagnetic interference testing. We're trying to make sure that our instrument doesn't produce electrostatic noise or that we're not sensitive to the noise made by this photograph. It's like the old days when you turn your blender on. We don't wanna do that so we're in a chamber that's completely isolated from all electrical noise sources and the only thing on in there is Otis That problem or if we come It takes a while to get all the bugs out so far last night we had a little scare we saw something funny in the data and Be worried about it overnight and then we realize that the instrument's fine. It was sort of a software guy air and I'm the software guy. So, it's good something happened. Hey, everybody. Sleepless nights and I'm sorry. But anyway, so we're Over the nails that we're doing about the same part to simulate space. We're trying to build an instrument that not only can survive launch and work in space. Need to be incredibly precise and get very accurate answers. We're trying to measure the temperature of this asteroid to a fraction of a degree and so to do that, you need a very accurate instrument and we have been doing all of our detail tests Unfortunately, in addition to that, we have to be able to get it very hot, very cold, so we have heaters, there's these pipes that carry liquids, nitrogen, into my supposed to be a vacuum, and you can imagine all those little sittings they they tend to Extremely cold so things get brittle and we're trying to create a vacuum so we've been for 3 or 4 days now chasing down these small little leaks these are literally leaks that you know Atoms are coming out of over close I think we're like one leap the way from from Simulating space so we make sure the instrument works we do all the calibration of it so we can interpret the data so it's it's taken a long time but it's gonna be worth it and then that's the last big test After six long weeks we just took Otis out of the vacuum chamber it has been in there for a really long time and we've exercised it we put it through all the cases hello my little friend The good news is we're done. We're out of the chamber. We got the data that we needed but we still have a whole lot of things we have to do. We have to do the final testing. The way Nasa works as we test it here. Get a baseline. Is it at work? Send me Take it to Locky Martin and we kissed it there and you make sure it's identical and then you put it on the spacecraft and you test it and you make sure it's identical and then we say it's yours if any you know any changes from now on you know or something that's happened on the locking side. So we have to do those final sets of tasks. It takes a couple of hours and then the biggest challenge is just to get all the stuff ready to ship. We have to ship computers and power supplies and targets and tables and then we put them in the box So, I was happy. This is actually a huge day for us. Otis is our first instrument that is having its pre-ship review. Meaning that we are going through all the data and making sure compliance with all of its requirements and we're gonna accept it to review two more accept it and then take it to Locky Martin's face craft manufacturer and integrate with the spaceCraft and we're very excited cuz Otis looks like it's a phenomenal instrument. One of the best ones, SUS produced. So, we're very excited. Hey, at this point in time this team of people is absolutely exhausted. They've been on a very long roller coaster journey of elation and frustration and agony when things haven't worked well. We've had problems. But after all of that, It's done. The instrument is beautiful. It's working extremely well and there's this incredible sense of elation and pride and happiness as we've completed our job. We've done what we've said we're going to do and Otis's heading out. The door to continue its journey to the spacecraft and then on this way of the new so after 4 years of very hard work we finally have delivered the Otis to You lucky Martin here in Denver it was a big deal to get it here we brought it in delivered it they checked it out and we spent the last couple of days getting tested and now we just put it on the space graph behind me is Otis sitting on the Osiris This is about as good as it gets. We launched out of Cape Canaveral, Florida in September of 2016. So, for the next year and a half, our team on Otis will be here at Locky Martin working with the Lockie team to ensure that the spacecraft is actually operating the way it should. We'll go through all those various qualification tests to make sure all the flight hardware performs as expected and hopefully September next year we have a beautiful successful launch from Florida on that Atlas five rocket Combination of years of blood, sweat, and tears. For us to be together as a family, not only our personal family but the group as a family. It's really exciting to celebrate such an accomplishment. So, in Florida, You know the anxiety builds, you never know if they're gonna launch and that's probably the riskiest part of the whole mission. It's always been my dream to actually build an instrument here. And so for me, Otis was a fulfillment of that dream and it was Hey Bill is on its way to someplace in the solar system. This is What it really is: the combination of all that great hardware development work. And now we hand it off to the scientist to let them have some fun. We did it. Very exciting. Nice being here with everyone else. To experience it. Together. We're fired up. It was amazing. Any rocket lines that are successful, that's great. That was probably the most exciting thing I can think about. I can't wait to do it again. So, It's Just an incredibly exciting experience to be part of this project to build an instrument to explore all the systems to send it to this unique little asteroid it's been an incredible adventure and one that I really hope that we get to do again someday. Thank you for reading.