(upbeat music)
- With Perseverance, for the first time,
we had a set of cameras onboard, 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 7,000 meters above
the surface of Mars, coming down
at a hundred 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 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 rocket backpack that is helping lower 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
and the wheels are deployed.
Last one I'll show, we're going to 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,
the three nylon tethers that are holding the rover there,
the rocket engines on the periphery.
All of the dust and debris from the Martian surface
getting kicked up, 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 still get giddy every time I see it.
Just insanely awesome footage that you know,
James Cameron eat your heart out. (laughing)
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
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 also I'm ready for the next one. (chuckling)
We're just getting started.
(uplifting music)