Hi on August 5th in a couple of days time, One of the coolest autonomous engineering space projects of all time is going to culminate and attempt to land. the Mars Science Laboratory or better known as the Uh Curiosity Rover is going to attempt to land on Mars and it's unlike, uh, a lot of other. Mars Landing Some successful, some unsuccessful. this one is incredibly complex from an engineering point of view of trying to land this thing on Mars This 900 kilg the size and weight of a small mini car.

they're going to land this Rover on Mars Hopefully fingers crossed and it's going to be incredibly exciting from an engineering perspective. Engineers Around the world is going to sit there dumbfounded, you know, glued to the TV just waiting or the internet. what? However, you want to watch it streamed live to see if they can actually pull this thing off because it sounds crazy what they're going to try and do. So let me just try and run through what they're attempting to do here.

Please forgive me if I get something wrong and there's hundreds and thousands of little detail things in addition to all of this complex stuff which has to happen with no margin of error. uh, in sequence in order to land this thing on Mars Well, first of all, was building the thing, testing it, getting funding for it that's half the problem and then launching the damn thing. you know how many you know Parts things can go wrong and getting it up there, but they got it up there heading off to Mars and it's almost there. In a couple of more days it'll be making the entry into the atmosphere.

All that stuff's done and dusted. looks like everything's going sweet. So when the entry procedure starts, you get have uh device separation from the rocket that's taking it to Mars. So bang it! You know the Rockets have to fire.

it's got a separate and everything's hunky dory. Then it's got to fire some more little uh pyrotechnic Rockets which Jetter some some weights off there cuz it's got to balance the mass. Center Line Get It Just right. and uh, all this stuff they worked out in the Apollo program with slide rules got to be tweak it just right.

It enters at the right angle based on the mass and the heat shield and all that sort of stuff. Then it starts hitting the atmosphere at 13,000 mph, heats up to 2000 C nothing. You know, terribly unusual there. All of the probes have done this, some successful, some not have heaps of experience in this, so it's all going pretty ordinary.

Uh, so far. And then we've got Hypersonic Arrow maneuvering where more Rockets fire and you know, steer the thing because they want to land it in a specific location. and then they've got to jettison some more weights. Bang bang, more pyrotechnic stuff fires.

There's like 76 pyrotechnics total in this whole Landing system. It's crazy. and then they have to deploy the parachute and now nothing unusual here. They've done this on the Viking and the Pathfinder missions and all those other Uh missions that have landed probes on the planet.

No problems, but this is the biggest and has to sustain the most. Force We're talking 65,000 pounds of force. This parachute has to actually take because it's still going. It deploys at Mark 2.

Crazy. It's got 80 lines tethering the thing and you know it's got to hold and it's got to slow it down. Now then you've got the heat shield separation. You know, more parot techniques has to fire.

It's going to blow away because if you don't do that, you can't see the radar, can't see, can't land, You can't deploy the Rover Nothing right? So that's got to work perfectly. And then the radar has to operate. You know, bounce off the ground and get the right radar readings, figure out where it is, the height, and all that sort of stuff. Do tons of computations and we're talking.

there's 500,000 lines of code in this entry. All of this entry stuff. All of that has to work. It's crazy.

And then we've got the backshell. uh separation. We' got to separate the uh back shell because the parachute. You can't land it.

It's still going 200 miles hour. That's the slowest. The parachute can, uh, slow this thing down so you can't land the thing on the surface under parachute at 200 mph. So you got to jettison that and it's got to go into powered descent so it's got to break away from it fire little Rockets whoosh and then it has to do a maneuvering procedure that flies out of the way.

otherwise it's just going to slam into the damn uh, the shell and the parachute. Crazy. And so it's still going 200 mph. And then you've got these eight rocket thrusters which have to fire, slow it down, and balance the thing.

This technology already existed, they did it on Viking so nothing new here. Still, you know we're still doing the same old stuff we have for the landing. But then comes the critical procedure which they haven't done before. It's called the sky crane and this one folks is just crazy from an engineering perspective, but ever so cool.

Now because the Curiosity Rover is so big and heavy they couldn't land it with traditional Uh systems like the airbag ones they did for the path finder systems wasn't going to work and they couldn't do the Viking sort of powered Landing descent like that because uh, the Rockets the eight rockets on there would just blow up all this dust and ruin all the instruments on the Mars science laboratory. And you can't do science if your always sensors are covered in dust and crap. So some smart cookie at JPL or somewhere else came up with the idea this sky Crane. So what happens here? We've got the Uh descent stage with the eight Rockets maneuvering and then it drops the Rover on this tord.

it drops 7 m down boing and well, don't think it goes boing but it drops down and then it's got to deploy its legs. It's you know, its little wheels and they've got to lock into place if they don't lock into place. it's screwed. It's just going to sit there and go o I don't know what to do I can't move anywhere so all that's got to work lock into place.

It's got to survive the 8 m drop and uh, then it's got to slowly maneuver it down to the surface until it detects that it just touches. So it detects that with the lack of weight. Because it's touched down, there's less weight on the cord. Then it's got to recognize that and fire some more Pyic to cut all the lines and fly away.

If there one line still hanging on, it's not going to work too well. All that has to work and hopefully you left with the Curiosity Rover Just sitting there on the surface nicely. It's got its legs propped up on its wheels and it's little head pops up and has look around signals home that we're all okay and all this has to happen in sequence with no margin of error. Got to land on the surface with this thing the size of a car with an untested sky crane.

Landing Procedure It's crazy Now this ENT ire procedure takes about 7 minutes from when it first enters the atmosphere to when it soft lands on the surface and The Descent stage flies away and crash lands into the surface a couple hundred meters away. But unfortunately due to you know that pesky speed of Light stuff, it takes 14 minutes for the signal to get back to Earth So by the time the operators and us are watching live down on Earth and we get hopefully get a signal back from this thing, it will have already been on the surf surface for 7 minutes. So what's hanging on the line here? No pun intended. It's only about a $2 billion project and uh well, imagine how many small little Rovers they could have sent for that.

but hey NASA they're going for broke this science Mars Science laboratory and the Curiosity Rover is the Ducks guts in terms of analysis. But you know a thing's the size and weight of a car and they got to land it successfully. It's it's almost insane. But is it insane in a good engineering way or insane in a bad engineering way? As in there's no margin of error.

it's just going to fail dismally like a few other. Uh Mars Landers Have we don't want to mess up the metrical imperial units? do we? No. So there's so many things. the complex system Engineering In this, it's just ridiculous To the point of you know In Insanity Imagine sitting around the you know table.

uh, brainstorming at the design review meetings. Oh, how do we get this 900 kilo thing to land on? Oh, we can't. The dust is Flowing up. Let's do a sky cran where it drops down and you know and everyone's going.

Oh yeah, that's really interesting. Then they got to figure out how to get it to bloody work. And did they get to a point where, well, that was the only option to get a thing this size and weight on the surface? uh, without damage. Was it the least risk option? or was it the most risk option in that they decided it was so cool they just had to go for it or that were so far down the design time frame that they didn't really have a choice.

Who knows. But man, it's just incredible. The amount of system as engineering that goes into this and success or fail I it doesn't matter, it's just cool engineering. I Love it now.

I've worked on a similar system orders of magnitude less uh, complex of course and Earthbound but is similar in terms of uh, how you have to have a complex sequence of mechanical operations and electrical operations in order for you know the complete thing to actually work. Now what it was, it was an underwater son boy, one of these you know, sonar detection systems that was deployed from a a plane or a helicopter. So it had to be in this long tube which you could put into a deployment cylinder so it was all packed in there. all the mechanical arms and everything in the batter and the sensors and the you know, the whole works and the flotation bag and it all had to be packaged in there.

you know in a specific way. So it deploys out of the plane or helicopter. it has to survive the big thump into the water and trust me, hitting water can be like hitting concrete. if you hit a flat surface terrible amount of force then the cylinder has to drop off like this.

and then it had five arms on the thing which had to deploy out so they had to. you know there's counter weights on there and it pulled, pulled them in. the counterweights had to pull These Arms out cuz they were stuck into a tube like you know, only like a meter long. but they were 5 m long arms so they had to all deploy and if they didn't one of the sensors would be at the wrong distance and it wouldn't work so all of that had to work.

A bag had to uh, inflate some Uh sensors had to detect that it hit seawater. so it had a seawater battery sensor that detects and then it uh punched a uh a compressed air cylinder which would inflate a bag which keep the thing floating if that didn't work, it would just sink straight to the bottom and uh, then it had to. Once the arms were deployed, it had to uh do system checks to make sure it's all sort of you know, working and this thing and then it was on a bungee cord which then uh, the sensor array of course has to uh sink like you know, 50 M below the surface where the arms would be deployed. so you have to ensure that doesn't break and you have to ensure that there were no Nicks in any of the wires cuz if seaw water got in and ruing the whole thing.

and oh man, all this stuff had to work and we had the advantage of being able to trial this over and over and over again in a uh big test tank. a big you know, a big 20 30 m deep pool. We could do this over and over this, but getting this uh Curiosity Rover onto Mars is just it is crazy. It's a it's a One-Shot deal I mean there's various uh, you know they've done.

They built two completely separate curiosity Rovers One was actually going to go there, one was for testing. so they'd actually do the proper uh, drop testing. And they do. You know all sorts of.

They test everything, they tested the parachutes and the world's biggest wind tunnel and a man. but still, it's a onot deal. We could have done it over and over again until it was perfected and then we put it into production. and we had to manufacture 15,000 of them.

But hey, you know man, engineering ain't a cakewalk, that's for sure. So this thing's just so crazy that it can't possibly work. which is probably why I Think it will work? Find out in a couple of days? Beauty.