Hey, everyone.
I'm Marina Jurica, and I am joining you live from NASA's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory here in Southern California.
And we're going to talk to you a little bit today about the SWOT mission,
which launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base last month.
Now, the SWOT mission is a joint mission
between NASA and the French space agency, CNES.
And it is going to track water on the earth's surface at over
90%, which is pretty amazing.
Now, joining me in just a few moments is Christine Gebara,
who is a test and integration engineer here at JPL.
And she's going to tell us a little bit about basically what SWOT has been doing
since launch.
She's going to give us an update and we're going to be just eagerly
awaiting all of this SWOT science data that's going to be coming down here
in the next few months.
We're also going to be answering some questions from you
that have come in over the last couple of weeks
and we're going to be discussing SWOT with Christine here in just a few seconds.
So just bear with me because I'm going to invite her in here
to our chat from our sister station,
which is at NASA Earth. And then we're going
to come alive and be able to tell us all
these really interesting things about what it's doing orbiting the Earth right now.
So we just invited her in and there she is.
Hi, Marina!
Hi, Christine. How are you? Good.
How are you? I'm doing great.
Well, I've got a one-third scale model of SWOT behind me here.
So you're going to be able to talk a little bit about that.
But you're in a really interesting, cool location on lab.
So tell us where you're joining us from.
Yeah, I am at the top of the hill here at NASA JPL in the Advanced
Deployable Structures Lab.
This is actually where
the deployable antennas on SWOT were first prototyped and tested.
But we test all sort of deployable space structures up here.
So right here is a little paper concept,
kind of origami of a technology we're developing here called Starshade.
And what we do for all our projects here is we start with small prototypes
and we make them bigger like this origami behind me.
So this.
So it's like it's like a flower waking up.
Absolutely. So I just closed it.
But in reality it's meant to deploy in space.
And then over here on the right is an even higher fidelity,
more mature technology prototype that we have here.
And so, yeah, that's what we do in this building.
And when you say it's on the top of lab, it really is.
Is it really, you know, hundreds of acres here.
You have to hoof it all the way to the top of the hill to get where you are.
So you're in super shape.
Absolutely.
We call it the Alps, the Advanced Large Precision Structures lab.
And it's a it's a it's a pot, but absolutely.
Climbing up the Alps for sure.
And that's also where the KaRIn instrument was born, right?
Absolutely.
So the KaRIn instrument is a radar
interferometer that uses two deployable antennas.
And the antennas kind of are one on each side of the satellite and deploy out.
You can see one kind of behind your head poking towards you.
Yeah.
And this building has a grid of structure on the ceiling
and we can hang things off of it
to simulate the microgravity of space or of orbiting Earth.
And we'll test the deployments using that grid.
So we actually built a prototype of the booms in this building
and made sure that we could deploy it before before we actually built the real
thing to send the space.
Now, SWOT
stands for Surface Water and Ocean Topography.
So tell us a little bit, Christine,
about what it is and what your role was in this mission.
Absolutely.
So SWOT is an Earth-orbiting satellite, and it’ll do the first global
survey of Earth's surface water.
And so what that means, it will tell us to a level of precision
and accuracy that we haven't had before, where the water is moving,
how much water is where and how that water may be ebbing and flowing in our lakes.
rivers, seas, and oceans.
And what I did on the project, I've been working on a great team
of American and French engineers,
along with many other partners, to help integrate and test the satellite.
What that means is I helped assemble the mechanisms
when they were a tiny piece parts and starting with like a Lego kit
all the way up to a giant satellite, we would assemble something,
then test it, then it would get bigger and go to the next level
and assemble it and test it until we had the entire satellite.
And what we would do is we would put it through environmental testing,
which means putting it in a thermal vacuum chamber to simulate space
or putting it on a vibration table,
to shake it, to simulate the rocket and make sure nothing would break.
So when we sent it to space, we're confident it would work.
And that's what it is doing right now.
So tell me a little bit about where SWOT is right now and
and what are the next steps that have to be taken? Absolutely.
So we launched SWOT a little over a month ago.
And since then, we've deployed the solar panels.
We've deployed the antennas - or some of the antennas.
There's lots of antennas on SWOT that don't deploy.
And the team in mission operations in Toulouse,
France, has actually been slowly turning on the satellite,
making sure all the temperatures are reading right, making sure
all the instruments are behaving the way we expect them to, and kind of learning
how the satellite operates in space, because it's in a new environment.
And it's been really exciting to get the updates and say, oh,
this instrument's on, this instrument's on here's
the first little bit of data and seeing something that we've worked
on the ground for years doing its job and outside of a clean room.
And for folks who are just joining us, we're with Christine Gebara
and we're talking about the SWOT mission,
which is a satellite that we just launched over a month ago.
And folks at home, they don't realize
this is a pretty lengthy process to turn this thing on and get it working
and then make sure that it's working properly and correctly.
Yeah. Absolutely.
So SWOT actually is kind of in the commissioning phase
and will be in a calibration orbit for almost six months
where it's kind of going over the same part of Earth
over and over again and calibrating itself to known targets on the ground.
And so that when it finally starts doing data for all over the world,
we really know that that data is good data and true science.
And as you mentioned, we have a video camera at launch, which is pretty cool.
And as it was getting deployed and you can see a bit of the solar panels
right here behind me, as you pointed out,
Christine, and a bit of the KaRIn instrument,
which is the main science instrument on board.
Tell me a little bit about
and if you didn't get to see the video, head back to our social media accounts
and watch it, because it was it was really cool.
It's the first time we've had the video on an Earth satellite, which was awesome.
But tell me a little bit about how these instruments deploy
and tell me a little bit about the instruments
themselves on the spacecraft and why they are next generation.
So I'm going to talk about the deployments and I'll talk about the instruments
a little bit.
Our French partners at CNES actually built the solar panels that deployed out,
and those provide the power and those are actually huge.
They're about the width of a tennis court.
And so they deploy out.
And when you see that, you know, the satellite's going to get
power, is going to stay warm.
And it's always like a you're like, okay, game on a little bit.
And the KaRIn antennas deploy and those allow us to do the good science.
The new novel science of the KaRIn Instrument will do.
And actually those antennas are so big that we can't fully
test them on the ground.
We test them kind of in segments on the ground.
And so seeing the cameras on orbit
and seeing them deploy was amazing because that antenna
hadn't fully been tested on the ground as one giant assembly.
It had been tested
very deliberately, very carefully, very intentionally on the ground.
We were sure it's going to work, but seeing it kind of in space altogether
was really wonderful.
And on
that same topic, how fulfilling has it been to see something
like literally spread its wings for you after all those years of work
that you put into it?
Oh yeah.
So personally, I'm very used to seeing the satellite
in a clean room in a very controlled environment.
We're all wearing
hairnets and gowns and gloves and we're cleaning it and making sure
that everything we add is very documented and perfect or as perfect as can be.
And seeing it in space, it's very gratifying.
But part of me is also like, who - who let this happen?
Why is it outside of a clean room?
Because to me, I'm so used to seeing it in a clean room,
but it's so exciting to see it doing what it was meant to do, right?
It's going to be doing science that’ll help us understand our home.
So that'll be great.
Home is where the heart is for sure.
And Christine, you've had so many exciting adventures
and also the SWOT team had a lot of hurdles
because COVID happened right in the middle of really your processing.
Yeah.
So SWOT has gone through
lots of phases of integration and testing kind of in the middle of all of it,
the pandemic hit and our partners, half of the satellite was built in France,
and so it added some new challenges of how do you build a satellite
with our partners who can't travel to us and we can't necessarily travel to them.
And we figured it out over time.
But at first it took a lot of flexibility.
We learned how to video conference in the clean room so our French partners
would watch us assemble various parts of the satellite that they had.
They had some authority over.
And it was really exciting, but it was sometimes difficult to be like, Oh,
this team in France is the one or the experts on this thing.
But we need to be doing this here in L.A.
or in Pasadena and it just caused some flexibility.
But it was definitely an adventure.
Yes. An adventure worth taking for sure.
And now we're just starting to see the results.
And we got some really great questions over the last couple of weeks
from our viewers.
And you would just be the perfect person to answer some of these.
Are you up for it? Yeah, Let's do it. All right. Okay, great.
First question comes from Mohammed on Twitter.
Congratulations on a successful in-orbit deployment of SWOT.
How long does it take to fully deploy the solar arrays?
Is this spring back effect normal in solar array deployment?
But I have to say, I'm not an expert on these solar panels
because they were built by our French partners.
But the solar panels - what it does, it has about two phases.
There's like an initial kickoff, so the solar panels are kind of kick off
and then there's like a spooling like a wire
that gets spooled in and that deploys the solar panels fully.
It takes like 20 to 30 minutes about in that order of magnitude to deploy.
But that is relatively quick when you want to be very careful in space
and make sure these work.
But our partners have done this many times.
So it's exciting to see that they successfully deployed.
And it takes a little while, doesn't it, Christine?
It's not just automatic.
In 60 seconds they're deployed.
I mean,
it does actually take some time and even some time over the course of days.
Yeah.
So we don't always have communication with the satellite.
And so you carefully plan activities so that you know that you're going
to do really big activities like that one, like deploying a solar panel.
You do a lot.
You could do preparation for weeks just to do it for like 30 minutes to deploy.
And the other part of it is
you don't want to break anything or you don't want anything to snap.
With deployables, snagging is always a concern.
And so we design away the chance of snagging.
But the faster you deploy something, the more likely something is to crack
or snag or something.
So you want to kind of do it in a controlled way as much as possible.
But that initial kick off is important because you kind of want
to get away from the body as quick as possible.
Awesome. Okay.
So our next question comes from Travis Ramirez on YouTube asking:
if you could have included
one more instrument or experiment to do with SWOT, what would it be?
Okay, so I'm an engineer.
I like engineering and building things.
I'm not a scientist, so I don't have a good understanding
of what sort of climate science might be the most valuable.
But SWOT creates a lot of data, and that data is hard to get to the ground
because we only have - we can only talk to SWOT during some time.
We can't we don't have livestreaming from SWOT all the time.
And so what I would do is actually add another technology
called optical communication to SWOT,
which is essentially using lasers to communicate data back to the ground.
And that helps us get a higher bandwidth of data to the ground.
So I think it'd be really cool to to have SWOT communicate with lasers
back to the ground.
Space lasers are always kind of fun to think about, but that's what I would add.
But I'm not a science expert.
I'm just an engineer who wants as much data as possible.
I think lasers in any capacity sounds really cool.
Absolutely.
And it's a technology that JPL is going to launch on the Psyche mission soon.
So that's it's coming.
It just didn't make it on to SWOT. Great.
Next question comes from Rachie on Instagram.
What made you want to become an engineer and do you have any advice
for anyone out there who is interested in this field?
Yeah.
So I was super, super lucky to be a student in the Girl
Scout sailing program in Houston, Texas, as well as a First Robotics student.
And those two programs - well sailing taught me aerodynamics and mechanics
of a sailboat, and the robotics taught me engineering and a little bit of that.
And so I got exposed to a lot of STEM concepts without even knowing
I was being exposed to it.
I just thought I was sailing and I didn't know I was learning STEM and
through those programs, I slowly learned that I wanted to be an engineer.
Now, the advice I would give to someone is to follow your curiosity.
I was really privileged to have access to those programs,
but if you're curious about something, follow that curiosity
and don't let a lack of skills always stop you.
There's plenty of resources
online, on YouTube, on all sorts of places where you can learn something
and don't be intimidated that you might not know how to use a tool.
Someone is always willing to teach you.
Or you can maybe find a resource in your library to follow your curiosity
and learn the tools you need to follow your curiosity.
So brilliant, Christine.
And I was a girl guide in Canada as well.
And so I absolutely loved even just going on nature walks and
and just just getting out there and figuring out what it is
that you're passionate about and and what you love.
All right.
We've got some more questions coming in.
So how far from earth is SWOT?
And that's from AccowieReturns on Instagram.
Yeah.
So SWOT as you said, is about 550 miles above Earth.
It's kind of in a low-earth orbit, which allows us to collect
that really good science data without being too far on it.
And is it always going to stay at 550 miles?
It'll be about there for the rest of its life,
but it will switch from like a holding orbit for calibration
to a slightly different orbit that lets it see all of Earth's surface water.
Okay.
And then we've got another question coming in from Jeremy on Instagram.
It's hard to tell from photos how big SWOT is.
Can you help us better understand how big this thing is?
And it's hard too because this is the one-third model behind
you can't even hardly see it because basically it's it's
just the center part of it and it's not everything that's included.
Yeah.
So a lot of people will compare it to an SUV before it deploys.
So it's about the size of like a really large SUV before it deploys.
When I think about it, I think of it more as like a small school bus.
So that's about how it is when it's on the top of the rocket.
And then when it goes to space the solar panels and the antennas,
the KaRIN antennas deploy
and it ends up being about the size of a half tennis court.
So it becomes quite large, like it has a large footprint once it's in space,
but that doesn't fit in the rocket.
So it has to kind of go up all packaged together.
And then everything
slowly, surely, as it's been doing over the last 40 days, starts to unfold.
Yeah, absolutely. Piece by piece.
All right.
So now I know that you are a big advocate of women in STEM.
And I heard you talk a lot about your you're in France.
We got to spend a lot of time on Instagram together
and I loved seeing all of your posts.
So tell me a little bit about how that experience
was spending the year in France working on SWOT with that team.
And it was a team.
The mechanical team was made up of women, which you also said was just fascinating.
Yeah, absolutely.
So me, along with some of my colleagues, we actually moved to France for a year
to help integrate
the American half of the satellite with the French half of the satellite.
And that was an incredible experience.
We had worked with our French partners remotely over the pandemic,
and meeting them in person was really exciting.
And personally, it was really exciting because I got to explore
France and I got to work in a new facility and see how they built satellites
and kind of mesh JPL's processes with our partners processes at CNES.
So that was exciting.
And then
the JPL mechanical team is mostly women, and we actually got to go to France
and meet many of our counterparts who are also women.
And STEM is a male-dominated field.
But it was exciting to see
that some of the CNES project was managed by an awesome woman.
And I love rock climbing and I actually talked to her and she's
a manager high up in her career, and she had grown up
rock climbing in France and we got to bond over that
and just learning and seeing all of our colleagues on the French side
and the American side
kind of merge cultures and work together in various ways was really exciting.
And science has no boundaries.
And that's what's so amazing about projects like these.
Absolutely. Especially Earth science.
We all care about
making
sure that Earth - we know as much as we can about the climate.
And so our partners are as invested in that as we are.
Well, thank you so much for joining us here today, Christine.
It's been such a pleasure working with you.
And I know that you can't wait for that data to come down.
Every little piece that comes down is just as exciting.
Yeah, we've gotten the first little bits of data, but I can't wait for this.
The satellite to be calibrated.
We'll get real data and it's been an honor and a pleasure to work on SWOT
with the entire team here at JPL and across the ocean.
Well, thank you so much, Christine.
Thanks to all of you guys for being here with us today.
If you want to learn more about the SWOT mission, you can follow us here at NASA
JPL and also at our sister station at NASA
Earth that Christine has been on today and is a really great mission.
So I hope you have the chance to go back in and forward with us as we look
forward to that first science data coming down here in just a few months.
And remember, at NASA Earth Science, your home is our mission.
Thank you so much for joining us here today and go SWOT!
Go SWOT!