( applause )

Kobie Boykins: Tonight what we are going to try to do...

we are going to take an exploration,

an exploration of the planet surface of Mars.

And we are going to look at that planet through the eyes of Rovers.

And the first Rovers we're going to talk about

are Spirit and Opportunity,

the two Mars Exploration Rovers.

And then we're going to switch into Curiosity.

A larger Rover and its job is to do something a little different.

But first we have to go back in time.

We're going to back approximately 10 years,

a little bit more than 10 years.

And we're going to discuss what happens

and how Spirit and Opportunity made it to the surface of Mars.

So, we're going to fly over to Kennedy Space Center in Florida

and we're going to go and we're going to get

real close and personal with the Delta II rocket.

Now this is the Delta II rocket,

it's built by the Boeing Company.

It has three stages to orbit.

And around the bottom side of this vehicle

there's nine air-lit solids.

So this is going to help us get a little bit extra lift,

so that we can get to Mars as rapidly as possible.

And if you don't mind counting down with me.

Five, four, three, two.

Begin ignition.

And lift off of the Delta II rocket with the Mars Exploration--

And in a minute and 30 seconds we're in orbit around Earth.

As you see, we're starting to

drop away some of the air-lit solids.

Once those air-lit solids fall back away they get recycled.

They get picked up.

Once out first stage burns out,

we're going to let that go,

we're going to light our second stage.

Once we light our second stage

then we let that first stage fall back to the ocean,

it becomes an ecosystem for the fish.

We light our second stage.

At this point the spacecraft has very little stability,

so we are going to spin it up.

We spin it up to about 12 RPM,

more or less like a quarterback that throws a nice, tight spiral.

We are going to get really good flight through the air.

We light our third stage,

this puts us on a direct trajectory to Mars.

We are going to do what we like to call quiescent period.

The boring period of travelling through interstellar space.

( audience laughter )

Okay. So now...

Seven months later, here we are

travelling at 16,000 miles per hour

toward the surface of Mars.

We lose our cruise stage because we don't need it any more.

It has pointed us directly at Mars,

we are ready to go and we are going to hit our landing site.

We are travelling at 16,000 miles per hour

and we hit the upper atmosphere of Mars.

When we hit the upper atmosphere of Mars,

the friction as we come through

literally burns a hole in the upper atmosphere.

The heat shield in the front of our Rover

gets to about the surface temperature of the Sun

1600 degrees centigrade.

At this point we're going to start

what I like to call reverse origami.

We're going to pull up a parachute,

this is a supersonic parachute

and that's going to start changing our angle

of attack from being directly in

to being more vertical with the surface of Mars.

At this point we're going to slow down

to around 300-400 miles per hour.

We are going to lose our heat shield

because we don't want that heat to come back into our vehicle.

We are going to lower our lander more or less on a shoestring.

Once we find the surface we blow up the airbags.

That takes about the blink of an eye,

about half a millisecond.

And then we're going to fire some retrorockets

when we get to about 40 meters above the surface,

slow down to zero miles per hour

cut the cord and bounce.

And we bounce...

and we bounce.

Now the first bounce of this vehicle could take us over,

I use, the Empire State Building.

we can bounce anywhere from a mile and a half to two miles.

Each successive bounce is taking away a little bit of energy,

which slows us down.

After we lose all of our energy and we come to a stop,

we are going to deflate the airbags.

So the vehicle senses that we've stopped

we deflate the airbags.

What you saw happen in a few seconds there

takes about 45 minutes in real time.

The next thing that we're going to do is

we're going to open up our lander petals.

We are going to open up these lander petals now,

what you're going to see happen in about 30 seconds

happens in 45 minutes.

The next thing that we are going to do

we are going to open up the solar arrays.

If you don't mind, I'll watch too.

Ah!

( audience laughter )

We've got one more thing to do.

Just one more part. Okay, just...

ooh... once it gets over center,

ah, okay! Well done.

I must have seen this a thousand times,

it doesn't matter how many times I see it,

I get very excited when it works.

Because my team and I were the team that designed that

and if it didn't work we had a very, very bad day on Mars.

So, when it works I get a little excited.

So, open up the solar arrays,

now we can power the vehicle.

We are starting to charge up the batteries.

The last things that you are going to see happen on this first day

is we pull up the Pancam mast, what we call the PMA.

And we deploy our high-gain antennas,

so we can talk directly back to Earth.

The last thing that you are going to see the Rover do

in this animation is it's going to take a panoramic image.

One of the things that you want to do when you've landed in a new place

is find out where you are.

So we are going to take this beautiful image,

we're going to start transmitting that back to Earth.

So the next day what we're going to do is

we're going to stand up the vehicle.

Deploy the front wheels,

and we're going to change more or less

our perspective on the surface.

When we designed Spirit and Opportunity,

we designed the eyes to be at 5-foot-2.

That's approximately the level of a human being walking

on the surface of Mars.

So, now when we take images

and we get our panoramic images,

it's going to feel like a human being was standing on Mars

looking around. We are looking for

scientifically exciting sites.

Spirit and Opportunity are roving geologists.

Their job was to follow the water,

to look for water that may have flown on the surface of Mars.

And we are going to do that through the history of the rocks.

Go up taste the rocks, touch the rocks, feel the rocks,

if you can break the rocks.

Try to figure out do the rocks tell us something

about the history of Mars.

So now the last thing that we have to do

is drive the Rover off the lander.

You are going to see the lander change it's position a little bit,

get ready for the Rover to drive off

on these things called batwings.

We drive off on those batwings

and we get six wheels on the surface of Mars.

We call Spirit the bad sister.

And not because she was bad in any way...

but we drive off the lander, we go up to the first rock.

The rock was called Adirondack.

We took out her arm, we touched the rock

and as soon as we touched the rock

Spirit did not call home.

It's like ET went, "I no phone home."

So, we were worried that we didn't understand

what was going on with Spirit.

Remember that boring period

of driving through interstellar space

that I told you about... seven months.

So, during that seven month period of time

we had one of the biggest solar flares,

solar activities that we have ever seen,

Alright? So lots of gamma rays, bad stuff...

are... the sun burped,

bad stuff goes flying through interstellar space.

So what did we do?

First time ever when we were flying a spacecraft

into deep space we actually rebooted the computer.

So we turned it off.

( audience laughter )

Turned it back on.

And it goes, "Hey, I'm here."

And we go all, "Oh goodness, gracious, thank you."

Okay! It calls back home, we are like great, great, great.

It has all of this great stuff,

it starts recording everything that it's doing,

all of it's maneuvers, it records all the things that are felt,

all the bounces on the surface, everything, everything...

eight days later drives off, touches a rock

and it's memory got full.

And once its memory got full, the computer wouldn't boot up.

And we actually told it to erase it's memory,

threw all of that stuff through quiescent space away.

And then, "Hey, here I am all happy."

"Do whatever you want me to do." "Do the rock."

And then Spirit became okay

Spirit and Opportunity were, I'll tell you,

they were designed to go to the surface of Mars

and explore the surface for 90 days.

And travel up to 600 meters.

Spirit was on the surface

communicating for more than five years.

Traveled a little less than five miles.

Opportunity, the good sister landed a month later,

has been on the surface for over a decade

and continues giving us great information daily.

And she's traveled over 25 miles.

So, why do we go to Mars? Why is Mars

such an interesting place to explore?

In the image that you see behind me on the left is Mars.

And on the right is Earth.

Looks like where river or water

may have run at some point in time.

In this image, I have switched it around.

On the left is Earth, on the right is Mars.

That image on the right is the largest known volcano

in our solar system.

The rocky planets, it's called the Olympus Mons,

it's on the surface of Mars.

It's approximately the size of the state of Arizona.

Go back to the early 70s, 76-77 when we landed

the Viking landers on the surface of Mars.

We have Mars Pathfinder, which landed in July 4th of 1997.

And then we had Phoenix.

And then you have the two landing sites for Spirit and Opportunity,

in this topographical map. Let me show it in a different way.

For those that like planetary maps

you can see where we landed.

And the other thing that you'll see in this

is the yellow places are the places that we've landed,

the ones in white were the

possibilities for Curiosity to land.

So, now we're on the surface.

Spirit and Opportunity caught

some very interesting things on the surface.

From orbit we could see things that look like large tracks,