Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
with perseverance for the first time
we had a set of cameras on board filming
critical aspects of the entry descent
and landing sequence on mars
cameras that were staring up at the
parachute being shot out the back of the
vehicle
don't blink because in a fraction of a
second the parachute is out behind the
vehicle
and it inflates to something that is 70
feet in diameter
slowing the vehicle down from about 2000
miles an hour down to
about 200 miles an hour if we go frame
by frame through it
you see how uniform that inflation is
how symmetric it is
the more symmetric it is the more even
the stresses are distributed around the
parachute
and the more comfortable we feel the
parachute can survive
such a crazy chaotic inflation
ultimately generating the
tens of thousands of pounds of force
that are going to be necessary to help
slow this vehicle down
we've tried recreating that testing
environment and showing that the
parachutes will work
but you can't exactly replicate the
martian environment here on earth
we've used parachutes like this on mars
nine times in a row and we've
never had footage like this so the next
one i'll show
is from underneath the rover and the
first thing you see
is the heat shield falling away from the
rover
and that is the surface of mars beneath
us we are
about six or seven thousand meters above
the surface of mars
coming down at 100 meters per second
near the top of the frame
is some of the river delta the ancient
river delta the perfect place
to try to go and search for signs of
either ancient life or
or more recent existence of life on mars
at this time our lander vision system is
taking pictures of the surface of mars
that has now been revealed
and it's comparing those pictures to an
onboard database
of imagery that we've taken from
spacecraft in orbit around mars
trying to figure out where it wants to
land and now it's going straight down
towards the surface
you can see the plumes from the engines
interacting with the surface beneath us
kicking up all of this dust with those
rocket plumes
and in a moment it will stop and the
rover will be safe on the surface
but wait there's more this is from a
camera that is on the sky crane itself
on that
that rocket backpack that is helping
lower the the rover towards the surface
of mars
it's looking down at the top of the
rover as it's lowered
down to the surface of mars it falls
away
lowered on those tethers the wheels are
deployed
last one i'll show we're gonna look at a
camera that is
on board the rover looking up into the
sky crane
that's the sky crane so the rover is
being lowered beneath the sky crane
you've got the electrical umbilical
cable there at the top the three nylon
tethers that are holding the rover there
the rocket engines on the the periphery
all of the dust and
debris from the martian surface getting
kicked out the cables are cut
and the sky crane flies away off into
the distance i've hit
replay on this movie probably 200 times
in the past two days and i'm
still getting giddy every time i see it
just insanely
awesome footage that you know james
cameron eats your heart out
[Laughter]
footage that really underscores not just
how challenging some of this is
but how well it worked affirmation that
some of our guesswork was pretty dang
good
maybe we'll see things that we didn't
expect and we can use those to refine
and update our modeling
our assumptions our algorithms to make
the next generation of spacecraft even
more capable
you undertake something like this
knowing that it won't always work
perfectly
you have to have some level of humility
no single person can do this
none of us are that smart or that
capable and it really took
just an enormous amount of of talent and
effort there's certainly pride in the
accomplishment but
the pride i feel is probably more for
the hundreds or thousands of other
engineers
you know that that all came together to
make this happen folks literally spent
years of their life for that seven
minutes to make sure that everything
the thousands of things that had to go
correctly went precisely the way that
they needed to
as engineers this is
this is what we live for it's
invigorating and honestly i'm
i'm also i'm ready for the next one
[Music]
we're just getting started
you