[Music]
>>There's a lot of people, a lot of professors
that will tell you that aerospace has become
a very staid, or even conservative, and that
there's nothing new to learn, and I would
say to those people that you're not trying
hard enough.
Mars is just such an alien world in so many
ways, and so designing a little airplane to
be able to fly there, that's a pretty good
trick, it's been a lot of fun.
[Servos moving]
The hardest part about designing little PRANDTL-M,
we initially thought it would just be the
aerodynamics, but that we sort of had handled,
we ran into another problem, where we ran
into a very unusual instability, it comes
up every once in awhile, and it's a function
of the mass distribution; we struggled for
months trying to figure that particular problem
out, and it turns out that the real answer
in that case is to use a stability augmentation
system, and we have a really brilliant guy,
Ryan Dibley, who was able to design us a little
piece of software in order to do that for
us.
>>Alright, standby, here we go...
...three, two, one, release!
[Background propeller, power generator]
[Music]
[Background radio calls]
>>Dropping in three...two...one...release!
[Music]
[Background chatter/radio chatter]
