[dramatic orchestral music]
- Welcome to NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory
in Pasadena, California.
I'm Veronica McGregor.
We're here for another
very exciting event
that's going to take place
just five days from now.
We are attempting to land
another mission on Mars,
and this mission
is like no other
that we've sent
to the red planet.
This mission we'll be studying
the deep interior of Mars,
to tell us more,
not only about Mars,
but also about how all
rocky planets formed,
including the Earth.
Our landing time is
Monday, November 26,
at about noon Pacific Time,
3:00 p.m. Eastern Time,
and I want to give you
some websites immediately,
because I want you
to bookmark these
so you come back on Monday
and you watch the landing
live from mission control.
If nothing else today,
please book nasa.gov/live,
and/or, either one,
go.nasa.gov/InSightToolkit.
The InSight toolkit
will have a link
to multiple ways that
you can watch on live,
both on NASA and on
social media channels,
including a live feed from
mission control in 360 degrees,
so you can feel like
you're sitting in there
with the rest of
the mission team.
Our event today is going to
be divided into two parts.
We're gonna spend the first hour
talking with mission managers
about how InSight will
operate on the surface of Mars
and also tell us
a little bit more
about the white knuckle event
that will take place Monday
with entry descent and landing.
Following that, we're going
to have the science panel,
that will start at
11:00 a.m. Pacific Time,
and they will describe
how these instruments
that we're going to place
on the surface of Mars
will be able to take the
vital signs of the planet
to tell us more
about rocky planets.
I'm going to start now by
introducing our first guest,
and it is Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen,
and he is the NASA
Associate Administrator
for the Science
Mission Directorate.
Welcome.
- Thank you so much.
[crowd applauding]
Hi, everybody.
Well, I'm so excited to be here,
and of course, to
recognize that InSight
is part of the NASA
science program.
Over 100 missions
exploring our planet,
our star, the sun,
planets elsewhere
in the solar system,
but also worlds well
beyond our solar system,
asking questions
that are really hard,
such as, where did we come from?
Is there life elsewhere?
With this program,
with the many missions,
we explore the secrets
of the universe
and we enlarge the space
we live and think in.
With this program,
we also protect and
improve life on Earth,
and we think of the many
people that were affected
by the catastrophes
here at this coast,
but also elsewhere on Earth,
in which we have a direct
impact in a positive fashion,
and we're so glad about it.
InSight will join these
missions that you see up there
at Mars, history, and,
please for the second visual,
a history of exploration
of this neighboring planet.
Going to Mars is
really, really hard.
As humanity, the explorers
all over the world,
we're batting about 50% or less
of successful missions there.
The exciting part
is here, though.
We're building on the
success of the best team
that has ever landed
on this planet, which
is the NASA team
with its contractors
and its collaborators.
InSight will join the
missions that are out there
that have since 1965,
at the first flyby,
and it will join missions
that are already there,
roaming around the surface
and flying around it.
And of course, you read
that just a few days ago
we actually announced
where Mars 2020 will land
on this exciting planet,
and frankly, we're really
looking forward to that,
and also think beyond that
as we go to the moon now,
and eventually to
Mars with humans.
We will, of course, take
advantage of all the knowledge
we're gaining right
here with these robots
that are there and
really teach us
everything about
this environment
that we can then benefit from.
Right now, everything is
about InSight, though,
because this exciting
mission is on the way
to becoming an active
mission on the surface,
and the person who has most
to do with this, frankly,
is the project
manager, Tom Hoffman,
I'm now happy to
introduce to the stage.
Thank you so much.
[crowd applauding]
- Thank you very much, Thomas.
I cannot express to
you how excited I am
to be standing up here
today to talk with you,
just five days from us landing.
My heart is beating inside
of my chest like a drum.
I've been working on this
project for seven years
and to be literally just
five days from landing
and starting to get the science
that we've been
working so hard for
to me is absolutely thrilling.
I'm so excited I can't
even express to you
how excited I am.
So we launched May
5th of this year
from Vandenberg Air Force Base.
We're the very first
interplanetary launch ever
from the West Coast, and
being a West Coast guy,
California native, very
excited to break the monopoly
that Florida has had on
launches to other planets.
We've been journeying to Mars.
We've gotten about 295
of the 301 million miles
that we have to go.
We've gone almost the seven
months that we need to go,
just five days left.
But we can't do that alone.
We have been working
with, really,
as Thomas said, the very best
partners across the globe
for this mission.
So if I can get the
first graphic here,
you can see we have
domestic partners
that largely built
the spacecraft.
You'll hear from
Stu Spath coming up.
Lockheed Martin is the
main spacecraft vendor.
We have components from many
other domestic partners.
But the instruments
were all built
largely by European partners.
We have representatives of those
that will be talking
in the next talk.
In addition to that, the science
team is made up of people
across the globe.
You've heard the expression,
it takes a village
to raise a child.
It really takes the whole globe
to build a breakthrough
instrument like we have today
with this InSight mission.
With that, I'd like to
go to the next graphic.
So we've been cruising to
Mars for about seven months.
What we've been doing
on the way there
is we've been doing trajectory
correction maneuvers.
Those are designed
to get us targeted
to exactly the right
spot in the atmosphere
that we need to
be in order for us
to land where we
wanna land on Mars.
So we've done four
of those so far.
We have one more
potentially to go.
You'll see that we have TCM-6,
so you say, he can't count.
We had an opportunity
to skip one of 'em
because our navigators
did such a good job,
we didn't do TCM-4.
We're working
right now on TCM-6.
We're actually
looking really good.
We might even be able
to skip that one,
'cause, again, the navigators
have done such a great job
really targeting us
for where we wanna be.
So we're gonna keep
working on that
for the next several days,
working on the trajectory
correction maneuver,
working on the final parameters
that we're gonna need to do
once we get to do entry,
descent, and landing on Mars.
So we'll be updating those
over the next few days.
So while everybody's off
having turkey tomorrow,
there'll be a bunch
of people here at JPL
working all day long,
hopefully taking
a little bit of a break
for a turkey dinner,
but largely working to make sure
we land successfully on Mars.
So when we get there,
we have lots of ways
we're gonna be communicating
during the entry, descent,
and landing process.
So far we've been talking
largely with a DSN
with the spacecraft.
We'll continue that all the way
until we get right up to entry.
At that point we'll drop
off our cruise stage,
and we'll be using
our UHF antennas
to talk to MRO, Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter.
That's our main method
of communication
for knowing that EDL
went successfully.
But MRO does not have
real-time capability
to send data back to
us so that we know
exactly what's happening
right when it's happening.
So in order to have that,
we brought along two CubeSats,
called MarCO, which Annie's
gonna talk in just a little bit.
Those will be actually giving
us real-time information
as we go through the entry,
descent, and landing process,
getting through the
parachute deployment,
heat shield separation.
MarCO's gonna be telling
hopefully real-time
that that's happening.
Once we land successfully,
then we'll also have Odyssey,
which is another
orbiting asset at Mars,
which will come by later
and tell us that our solar rays
have successfully deployed.
So really, we're using
all of those assets there
to make cell phone
calls, essentially,
to get back to Earth.
Let's go to the next video
and you can kinda see
what happens on our entry.
You can see InSight
here in the middle.
The two MarCOs that have been
following the whole time,
the whole seven months,
will be tracking us
as we do our entry,
and you can see Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter,
or MRO, coming up and
catching us as we go
through the entry, descent,
and landing process.
So that is basically how we're
gonna do the communication.
It's gonna be very exciting.
We have lots of different ways
to be hearing from InSight
as we go through entry,
descent, and landing,
and then once we're
on the surface.
So what I'd like to do next
is introduce Stu Spath,
who's the project
manager for InSight
over the last seven years.
So Stu?
- Alright, thank you.
[audience applauding]
Thank you very much, Tom.
Lockheed Martin is, of course,
thrilled to be part
of this mission.
It's been a while going
to the red planet,
and with just five days
to go we are very excited.
As Tom said, I've been on
since the get-go with Tom,
seven years ago, so I do have
a lot of blood, sweat, and
tears invested in this,
and I'm looking forward to a
nice safe touchdown on Monday.
If we could roll the
first video, please,
our role at Lockheed
Martin is to design, build,
test, and operate the vehicle.
Here you see us lowering down
into the thermal vac chamber,
and here's a video
of us installing
the heat shield
protective thermal system
that keeps us safe during
the atmospheric entry.
That was right before we
shipped to the launch site.
The image you see here now
is the fully dressed-out
version of the lander
in the Denver high bay.
Let me give you a few fun
facts about the lander.
It stands about three
and a half feet high,
or a little bit over belt high
to the technicians that you
see working on it right here.
The length tip to tip
from solar array end
to solar array end
is about 20 feet or so,
which is about a '75
Lincoln Continental.
And I should know, my dad
drove one for 10 years.
And the mass is
about 830 pounds,
so maybe think about a
Harley-Davidson, if you will,
that's fully fueled.
We will spend about
100 pounds of fuel
getting to the surface during
our descent and landing.
One of the critical things
after we touch down,
of course, is power.
So the solar arrays, as
you see in this image,
are a critical portion.
So if you'd roll the next video
I'll talk a little bit more
about power and
the solar arrays.
This video is a
time-lapse version
of the actual deployment
in our Denver labs.
You can see them unfurling
in this shot here.
This is obviously much
faster than will happen.
What we'll do when we touch down
is wait 'til about
landing, plus 16 minutes,
with no solar array deployment.
The reason we do that is we
kick up quite a bit of dust
during the landing process,
so we wanna give that
a chance to settle out
for 16 minutes, and then
we'll command the deployment
for about 16 minutes
further from there.
You see a nice closeup of
the solar arrays there.
It's interesting to know
that the solar arrays
have 3,200 individual
solar cells on them,
so it is quite an effort
to get those all installed,
and then they furl up like
a Chinese fan, if you will,
tucked up under the lander.
The power of the solar
arrays is about 1,800 watts
on Earth on a nice,
clear, sunny day.
But unfortunately,
Mars is not Earth,
so at Mars range we're
actually only about 600 watts,
which instead of a hair
dryer, 1,800 watts,
it's more like a blender,
600 watts, at Mars.
And on top of that, Mars
typically has a fair amount
of dust in the atmosphere,
so when you take
that into account,
we're more like about 300 watts,
or a little cake mixer.
So a mission like this,
on a cake mixer power,
is a big challenge.
And we achieve that
by sleeping a lot.
About 90%, greater
than 90% of the time,
the spacecraft is
actually asleep
and the science
instruments will be on,
doing their business,
and will wake up for
communication passes
and health and status checks.
Go to the next video.
Obviously landing is what
we're all about here today,
and so let me point
out a couple of views
of some of the key
landing components.
Tucked up underneath the lander
here is the main component,
that's the landing radar.
It provides us the
altitude above the surface,
and any good pilot will tell you
it's tough to land without
knowing your altitude,
so that's a pivotal
part of the equation.
These instruments right
here are descent thrusters.
We have 12 of those.
Each of them is about
68 pounds of thrust,
and they pulse about
10 times per second
to softly slow the
descent and get us down
to about five miles
per hour at touchdown.
That's a pivotal part.
And finally, the legs here.
You see it's a tripod
system, three landing legs.
Think of those as shock
absorbers on your car.
As this touches down, those
absorb the touchdown velocity
and they can actually
compress up to 10 inches,
which will account for
slopes and terrain, etc.
Tom briefly talked about
the communications.
This is the direct-to-Earth
medium-gain antenna,
and over here is the UHF antenna
that does send the data up to
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
and Mars Odyssey.
We work closely
with those teams.
The spacecraft team
operating back in Denver
and the teams here at JPL
are closely in coordination
with the InSight team
to make sure we get
all that data back.
So that's kind of a snapshot
of what the lander's all about,
and to hear more about the
actual timeline of events
on landing day, let's
go to our EDL lead,
Rob Grover from JPL.
- Well, I have the
great privilege of
leading the EDL team,
which is comprised of
some very talented people,
not only from JPL, but
also from Lockheed Martin,
Stu's organization,
and also the NASA
Langley Research Center
and NASA Ames.
And the team has been
working for many years
to make sure that the landing
goes successfully on Monday.
And of course EDL means
entry, descent, and landing,
and that means that
the team is responsible
for taking the spacecraft
from the top of the atmosphere
all the way down to the surface.
We're gonna enter the atmosphere
at 12,000 miles per hour
after our journey
from Earth to Mars,
so that is a very high speed
and the whole purpose
of the EDL system
is to take that very high speed
down to five miles per hour
when we get down to the surface.
That all happens in
six and a half minutes,
and that's gonna be the
main event on Monday.
And I wanna spend a
little bit of time
walking you through
what to expect,
what's gonna happen during
those six and a half minutes
from the top of the atmosphere
down to the surface.
I'd like to roll the
animation, please.
We will approach Mars,
and the first thing we do is
get rid of our cruise stage,
which will be about seven
minutes before entry.
We enter the atmosphere,
and of course at
12,000 miles per hour
we're gonna generate
a lot of heat,
up to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit.
When we get down to seven
and a half miles or so
we'll deploy a
supersonic parachute,
which is about 39
feet in diameter.
That'll provide a lot
of the remaining
braking for the system
before we get to the surface.
We drop the heat
shield off 15 seconds
after we deploy the parachutes,
and then the legs spring
open 10 seconds later.
Our radar starts
looking for the ground,
and when we're
about a little less
than a mile above the ground,
we separate from the parachute,
fire up 12 descent engines,
and those provide the
rest of the braking
and take us down to the surface.
We have a constant
velocity phase,
which sets us up for touchdown,
and you can see we will
then make a soft landing
at five miles per hour.
So there's a little bit of
time where the dust'll be...
Have been generated, and so
we'll wait for that to settle.
And we'll actually
take a first image
shortly after we land,
and it may look like this,
if you go to the next image.
This is what it will
very likely look like,
a very flat place.
Our landing site is
Elysium Planitia,
which Elysium means in
Greek an afterlife paradise,
although that may not
look like paradise.
But it is very flat,
which Planitia means flat.
And so it's an excellent
place for a landing.
As landing engineers, we
really like this landing site.
It's flat, it doesn't
have many rocks,
it's a very safe place to land.
Once we've landed, once
we've touched down,
we're not quite done yet.
In order to be
completely successful,
we have to deploy a
set of solar arrays,
and if you go to
the next animation,
you'll see a deployment.
The solar arrays will deploy,
they'll be commanded to deploy
about 16 minutes after we land,
and the deployment should
take 16 minutes itself.
We should have the arrays
out about 32 minutes
after landing, and we'll get
actually a confirmation of that
about four hours after landing,
that we know that
they're successfully out.
We have a bunch of
activities going on this week
as we approach Mars,
as you can imagine,
and one of the important
ones is we have a team
of weather forecasters,
basically a team of atmospheric
scientists here at JPL,
who are giving us
daily weather forecasts
or the expected weather
at Elysium Planitia,
on landing day.
In fact, I just came from
the morning weather briefing.
We have it every morning.
They use the MRO spacecraft
to take actually
temperature measurements
of the globe, basically,
and generate a
weather map of Mars,
and I wanna show you that
in the next animation.
This is a temperature map,
and the orange and yellow areas
in the temperature map of
Mars show dust activity,
so we use it to observe
whether there's dust
storms going on.
And in this animation, this
starts back in early November
and shows up until
a few days ago.
You can see there was
a regional dust storm
down around the south pole,
down at the bottom of the map,
and that slowly dissipated.
But over on the right you can
see the InSight landing site,
and it has remained very stable
and the green means
background conditions.
And so for the last month or so,
things have looked really good.
If you go to the next graphic,
which is, looks like we
may have skipped one there.
There we go, okay.
If you go to the next graphic,
this is our most
recent weather map,
so this gives a
good indication of,
in five days we're hoping
it'll look much the same,
but across the whole globe
there's not much
dust activity at all,
so we're expecting to have
a very plain day on Mars
for the landing, and we're
very happy about that.
And in fact,
surface temperature when we land
will be about four
degrees Fahrenheit,
so it's gonna be nice and cold.
Probably don't need an umbrella,
but you may need a coat,
and definitely recommend
a spacesuit, too,
if you're there at
the landing site.
[audience members chuckling]
In addition to observing
the weather this week,
we're also paying
very close attention
to where we're gonna land.
And so, if you go
to the next graphic,
we had just finished our last
course correction maneuver
last Sunday, which was TCM-5,
which is the first time
that we've actually been
very close to our landing site.
And actually, if you
go to the next slide...
Well, okay.
Up until TCM-5 on Sunday,
we were about 100 miles
away from our landing site,
our landing ellipse,
and since we've executed TCM-5,
our ellipse has
moved now very close
to our desired landing target.
Right now, in our latest...
At least our navigators
are telling us
that we're about
four miles away.
So we're very close right now,
and as Tom mentioned,
we're gonna continue to
watch that this week.
We're gonna get
more tracking data
and the ellipse is probably
gonna move around a little bit.
It'll get a little smaller
as we get more information
about our trajectory,
and we may not need our last
course correction maneuver,
which is scheduled for Sunday,
and we'll make that decision
at the end of the day on Friday.
We're very excited that
our landing ellipse
is now very close to
the right location,
so it's a great week.
Things look very
good for the landing.
The weather's cooperating
and we're very close
to our landing target.
We're looking forward
very much to Monday
after many years of work.
I'd like to now introduce
you to Anne Marinan,
who is the MarCO-B
mission manager,
and she's gonna tell
you more about MarCO.
- Hi.
MarCO is a mission
that launched with the
InSight spacecraft.
Same rocket, different mission.
And MarCO, it's a mission
of two small satellites
that will fly by Mars
on November 26th,
the same day when InSight goes
through its entry,
descent, and landing.
And that was no accident.
MarCO's a technology
demonstration mission,
so the purpose of MarCO is
to fly two small satellites
for the first time
in deep space.
It's the first time
that satellites
about the size of a briefcase
have flown by themselves...
Well, people on the Earth
are actually operating them,
but they're flying by
themselves in deep space
for the first time.
They've been on orbit,
in heliocentric orbit,
for about 200 days today,
and right now both
spacecraft are working,
the team is thrilled.
There are a lot of
firsts with MarCO.
So MarCO has to make
its own way to Mars.
It has to do essentially
the same thing
that the InSight spacecraft
does on its cruise.
We had to go through trajectory
correction maneuvers.
It has to generate
its own power.
We have to talk to the
Deep Space Network,
and talking to the
Deep Space Network
and doing all of these
trajectory correction maneuvers
in deep space,
it's the first time
that this has been demonstrated
on a CubeSat platform.
So the team is very excited,
and if you play the animation...
One of the things we
hope to demonstrate now
that the MarCO satellites
are still working
is a communications
relay architecture
with the InSight lander.
So as InSight goes through its
entry, descent, and landing,
it will be sending up
UHF data, in green,
and the MarCO satellites will
be listening to that data
and relaying it back to Earth
almost real-time, as
was mentioned earlier.
The InSight spacecraft
is not dependent
on MarCO for its
mission success.
The Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter will be flying by,
collecting that same data,
but not relaying it until
about three hours later.
If it works, the
two MarCO spacecraft
will relay the data for InSight
entry, descent, and landing
almost as it's happening,
which would be very cool
for both the MarCO team
and the InSight
team to figure out
what's going on with the
lander as soon as possible.
MarCO is a technology
demonstration mission,
so instead of having a
science instrument on board,
it has a whole bunch of
different technologies
that we're demonstrating,
and I'll talk about
those a little bit later.
But if you put up the
next image, please,
we have an engineering
camera on board,
and the camera was put on board
to verify the deployment of
one of these new technologies,
a reflectarray antenna.
And so in this image
on the right-hand side,
you can see the actual antenna,
the top third of that antenna,
partially illuminated
by the sun.
On the left-hand side you
can see the antenna feed,
also illuminated by the sun.
And the cool thing
about this picture,
if you go to the next slide,
there's Mars.
It's the first image of Mars
that was taken from a CubeSat.
It was about eight million
miles away from Mars
when this picture was taken.
We're having fun
with the camera.
We'll see what we can do
leading up to InSight EDL,
but right now the
team is focused
on getting to EDL and
supporting the InSight mission.
So that's the
closest thing we get
to kind of a selfie
of Mars on orbit.
We have a two-scale
model of MarCO here,
so when I say it's a
small satellite I mean it.
This is the actual size.
When everything is folded up,
it's about the size
of a briefcase.
Each MarCO satellite is
about 30 pounds each,
and the two satellites
are virtually identical.
And we fly two of them just
in case one of them fails.
We can have another as backup.
So this is the antenna
that you saw in that image.
It works a lot like
the TV antennas
you see on the side of a house.
There's an active
element here, the feed,
that actually sends the signal,
and then this, like the dish
on the side of the house,
reflects that and focuses
the signal back to Earth.
This antenna was specially
engineered and designed
to be completely flat
so it makes very efficient
use of the volume
and can fold up
and fit very nicely
on top of this spacecraft
when it's all folded
up for launch.
The antenna that we use
to listen to InSight
is on the bottom here.
It deploys out and is
held in place by springs.
This is tuned to the
InSight UHF frequency,
so as MarCO flies over Mars,
it will be listening to
that data from InSight
and the radio on board, which
is another new technology
that MarCO is demonstrating,
developed by JPL,
that radio then takes that data
and sends it back to Earth
on a different frequency
using this antenna.
And the camera that took the
image of these two objects
is tucked away in the
corner right there.
So as I mentioned,
MarCO has to do
pretty much everything
that InSight does.
About half of the
spacecraft volume
is taken up by propellant.
MarCO has done its own
trajectory correction maneuvers
using fire extinguisher fluid.
I'm not kidding.
[audience members laugh]
We heat up the fluid and it
comes out as little tiny puffs,
but that is enough to
adjust the trajectory
so that the MarCO
satellites fly by Mars
in the exact position and time
that it needs to listen to the
InSight signal as it lands.
So there's tiny little
thrusters on this side
of the spacecraft that
are used to do that.
We also generate our own power.
It is significantly less
than what InSight mentions.
We have 42 solar cells.
It generates about
17 watts of power,
which is a couple night lights.
So not even a blender.
[audience laughs]
MarCO has crammed a
lot of new technologies
and new capabilities
into a very small volume.
The team is thrilled with
how it's done so far,
and given how well
it's done so far,
we're really hoping that
this becomes a pathfinder
for even more small satellites
to go into interplanetary space.
We are excited for Monday.
So back to you, Veronica.
- Alright, thank you, Anne.
[audience clapping]
I'd like to invite
all of the speakers
to come back up on stage.
We're gonna take questions now.
We will take questions
here in the auditorium.
We are also taking questions
from the phone line
from news media.
If you are on that phone
line, please hit *1.
That will put you into the
queue for the questions.
We are also taking
questions over social media,
so if you have a question,
I believe we've been
requesting them all day
already on social media,
but if you have a question,
post that to your social
media account with #askNASA.
We will answer some of
those during the briefing,
and we will continue to
answer those during the day,
even after the broadcast.
I'm going to start.
Let me check here to see if
we have one in the auditorium.
If not, I will go
to the phone line.
We're gonna start with one
here in the auditorium.
Go ahead and state your name
and affiliation, please.
- Hi there.
Ian O'Neill with
Scientific American
and HowStuffWorks.com.
This is an EDL question.
I suppose Rob,
how does the EDL for InSight
differ from the Phoenix EDL?
- That's a very good question.
How does InSight EDL
differ from Phoenix EDL?
The answer is, very little.
The spacecraft itself
is nearly identical.
There are a few differences,
but the spacecraft itself
is nearly identical.
The difference in
the landing challenge
is that Phoenix
was a little more
than a kilometer and a half
lower landing site elevation.
So the InSight landing,
we have a little bit less
time to get things done,
and that's probably one
of the biggest things.
The other is that we're landing
during dust storm season,
so we've had to
design the system
to be successful in a variety
of different
atmosphere conditions,
although it looks like right now
that we're not
gonna have to have
any dust storm
activity to deal with.
- [Ian] Thank you.
- We're gonna take one
more here in the audience.
- Thank you.
Hi, I'm Ryann Blackshere
Vargas from Spectrum News.
Any chance that it'll
land early or late?
- You go ahead.
- Sure, yeah.
[audience laughs]
There is, if we're a
little bit shallower
or a little bit steeper in
our entry flight path angle,
we have a little bit
of tolerance there,
we can land a little
bit in a different time.
The landing time can vary
by about a minute or so,
plus or minus, depending
on what happens.
The fact that we're
kind of narrowed down
and kind of know our atmosphere
will make that
uncertainty even less,
so we're in good shape.
- [Ryann] Thank you.
- Okay, we're gonna take one
more here in the audience,
and then I'll take a couple
from the phone lines.
If you're waiting on the
phone line, please stand by.
Go ahead.
- Steve Gorman at Reuters.
How high up will
the spacecraft be
at the time that
it begins entry?
- Go ahead, Rob.
- Sure.
We generally consider
it about 77 miles
above the surface,
or 125 kilometers.
- Okay, and the decision on
the final course correction
will be made Friday,
even though the correction,
if you do it with TCM,
will be done on Sunday?
Is that right?
- That's right, yeah.
- [Steve] Do you know what
time Friday we'll know?
- Well, our decision meeting
is in the early
evening on Friday,
so that's when we'll
make the decision.
- [Steve] Thanks.
- Alright, I'm gonna take a
question from the phone line,
and then we'll come
back here into the room.
But let's go ahead
with Irish TV.
Go ahead with your question.
- [Leo] Thanks very
much, Veronica,
it's Leo Enright here.
I'm just wondering about
the call-outs post-landing.
I don't recall chewing my
knuckles for four hours
to know whether Phoenix had
deployed its solar arrays,
so I just wonder how
the call-outs, the
real-time call-outs,
are gonna work, how
soon will we know that,
for instance, the deployment
has happened, all of that?
- I'll address that question.
The reason that we don't
have immediate information
about the solar arrays
is, as Stu said,
we have to wait literally
for the dust to settle
for about 16 minutes, and then
it takes another 16 minutes
or so for the solar
arrays to actually deploy.
At that point MRO
has gone behind Mars,
so we can't get any
more information
up to MRO from the spacecraft.
And MarCOs have
continued on their flyby
and they're also out of range,
so the next asset,
orbital asset,
that we can communicate
with is Mars Odyssey,
and that comes up in about
five and a half hours
after we land.
So it's basically
orbital dynamics
is why we can't get information
any sooner than that.
With Phoenix, it
was at the pole,
so it got much more
frequent overflights.
So that was the main
difference between InSight
being at the equator or
Phoenix being at the pole.
I think that--
- I'll just add, Tom,
that the solar arrays, the
spacecraft's entirely capable
of taking care of itself
during that period.
It'll autonomously
command the deployment
of the solar arrays,
and if for some reason
it doesn't correctly deploy,
then it has opportunities,
three more opportunities,
on its own to re-command those
actuators to deploy those.
So it's not like
it's gonna try once
and then wait for the ground.
It'll be on its own,
and it's been tested
and ready to fly that way.
- [Leo] So if I may follow up,
we will know that the
landing has been successful?
We won't have to wait
five and a half hours
for that, I hope.
- Yeah, that's correct.
Especially if the MarCOs
are working as planned,
we'll get very close to
real-time information
that we've landed successfully.
We also have on the
spacecraft an X-band beep
that we'll be sending
roughly about seven
minutes after we land.
That'll be the spacecraft
telling the Earth
that everything looks good.
But then we'll have to
wait for that Odyssey pass
to finally know that
the solar arrays
have been fully deployed.
There's no getting around that,
just, it's orbital dynamics.
- Alright, we're gonna
take one more question
on the phone right now.
SpaceNews, go ahead
with your question.
- [Jeff] Hi, Jeff
Foust with SpaceNews.
Question for Anne.
I don't know if
there's any thoughts
about any sort of
extended mission
for the MarCO CubeSat
after the Mars flyby?
- Not right now.
The team is focusing
on getting to EDL.
[audience laughs]
- Hey Jeff, that's the
answer I asked to be given.
[audience laughs]
I'm a strong believer that
focus is what creates success,
and I think you should know
that we've had, of
course, discussions
about what's possible
and we're gonna have
these discussions
at the back end of
this exciting weekend.
- Okay, one more phone call
and then we're gonna go here
in the room to social media,
and then more questions
from the audience.
We have AP on the phone
line, please go ahead.
- [Marcia] Yes, hi,
Marcia Dunn here for Rob.
You mentioned it will be
about four degrees Fahrenheit
at touchdown.
The press kit talks
about 18 degrees.
I'm wondering, do you
have the latest forecast?
Is that's what revising
the temperatures down?
And if so, what are the
lowest lows going to be?
- Well, I'm not actually
the right person
to know all that information.
I got that estimate
from our power engineer,
the four Fahrenheit.
Which is actually at
the lander deck height,
and so I think it
varies quite a bit
depending on where you
are above the surface.
And so I think at night
it could be as cold as 180
or something like that,
minus 180 Fahrenheit.
- Yeah, I think actually
at the surface level
it's closer to like
40 degrees Fahrenheit,
so there is a huge variation
just in that three feet.
But one of the things we
actually will be doing
is we have a temperature
sensor on board the spacecraft.
We didn't really talk
about that at all,
but we have a bunch of
sensors for pressure,
wind, thermal,
and a magnetometer
that we'll be using basically
over the first week,
especially to characterize
our landing site.
So we'll be able to give
you a much better idea
of what the temperature
is every day.
- [Marcia] Great, thanks.
- Okay, we're gonna take some
questions from social now.
So Stephanie, do you have
some good questions coming in?
- Absolutely, we're having an
extremely lively discussion
in the YouTube chat,
and the #askNASA questions
are pouring in on Twitter.
Laura Reeve on Twitter
has a great question
for mission managers here.
On behalf of her middle
school students, she asks,
how does communication work
between different parts
of the design and building
teams for a project like this,
and how important is
that communication?
- Oh, I'll let Stu
answer this as well,
but that communication
is critical, actually.
Especially, as I mentioned,
we have international partners,
we have domestic partners.
Very rarely are we all
co-located together,
so we have to come up with all
kinds of different techniques
and methods of communicating
what's going on
every single day.
As we have design progressing,
or any issues that
we have to work,
we have to get together
via all kinds of
interactive things online,
plus we try to do as
many trips as we can
to actually do
face-to-face communication,
'cause there's nothing that
really substitutes for that.
So Stu, why don't
you talk a little bit
about what you do on
the spacecraft side?
- Yeah, definitely, I'm dating
myself a little bit here,
but I go all the way back
to the Magellan time frame,
and any time there was
a big critical meeting,
the entire Lockheed Martin team
would fly out to
JPL or vice versa,
and it was much more of a
face-to-face environment.
We still preserve that,
but with the new
technologies these days,
we can all be at our
home institutions,
including our European
partners, and get a lot done.
And really, it's a
good team environment
where we're able to
share information
very collaboratively.
It's really a
badgeless environment
where everyone's working
to a common goal,
so there's no turf wars
or anything like that.
It's a good team.
- Alright, and we've got
a question for Dr. Z.
MartianManish on Twitter
would like to know,
how will InSight
help potential future
human space exploration
to the red planet?
- What InSight will do
is really give a much
better understanding
of the inside of
the entire planet,
and with it, as we're gonna
learn from the science panel
coming right next,
with it, about the
history of the planet
and also its entire environment,
geologically and otherwise.
We will learn major ingredients
about the history, but
also the current state
of the planet, you
know, its geology.
And together with
the information
that we have at the surface,
really get a much
better understanding
of the entire environment
that will be faced by humans.
That's what we want.
Before we go with humans,
we want to know everything.
We want to know the
radiation from the top.
We want to know whether
there's gonna be
volcanic activities
from the bottom.
We want to understand
whether there's water
on the surface,
below the surface.
We want to know whether
there's resources.
So it's just part
of that knowledge
that's such a critical
element of human exploration.
- And Anne made it clear
that you're very focused
on the MarCO team
on getting to EDL,
but Emily Lakdawalla from
The Planetary Society
in our YouTube chat is asking,
what does happen to the MarCO
CubeSats after landing day,
and how long can we remain
in contact with them?
- That's a good question.
The MarCO satellites,
they don't go into orbit.
There's not enough of that
fire extinguisher fluid
on board to do that, so
they will just fly by Mars
and they'll end up
kind of in an orbit
between Earth and Mars.
It will start getting
farther and farther away,
and I don't have a good timeline
of how long we could
actually get that signal,
but eventually it
will be too weak
for us to actually be able
to hear from it anymore.
- Okay, we're gonna take it back
into the rest of the audience.
We'll come back to social
in just a couple minutes,
and I understand we have
a question here from ABC.
Go ahead.
- Hi, Stephen Coleman,
KABC, channel seven.
What happens if one of
the arrays or both of them
fail to deploy?
Can you continue the
mission without them?
- Yeah, we definitely
need to have
at least one of the
solar arrays deployed
because we are
100% solar-powered.
Our battery is not gonna last
more than about one Mars day
without the solar
arrays fully deployed.
If we get partial deployment,
we will have to look and see
exactly how much energy
we are generating.
Stu mentioned in his discussion
that we have a little
bit of variation
in how much power we might see
over the different
points and times,
so we're just gonna have to
take an engineering assessment
and see what kind of a
mission we still have.
But clearly Lockheed Martin
has done an excellent job
of making sure that
we are gonna get
those solar arrays deployed,
so I have full confidence
that that's gonna happen.
And hopefully we
don't have to worry
about any of the contingencies.
I don't know, Stu, if
you want to add anything?
- No, that was well summarized.
We've done a lot of testing
during the first at low period,
then a bunch of retesting
during the second
integration and test period,
so we're highly confident
they're in good shape
and they're good to go.
- Okay, we're going
back to the phone line.
Leo Enright has a
follow-up question.
Go ahead, Leo.
- [Leo] Thanks very
much, Veronica.
I hope this isn't
too much detail,
but in the video
we saw MarCO doing
real-time relay,
and MRO rising, but there
seemed to be three MROs.
Now, unless I've been
asleep, there's only one.
The two that I saw
were middle and south,
so I was a bit
puzzled as to how come
there's three MROs.
Or was there something
I completely missed?
- No, no, you did
see three MROs.
What that's representing
is the different
times in which MRO
might actually be visible
depending on exactly when
we're entering the atmosphere.
So it's basically
sort of a best-case
and middle-case and worst-case
in terms of the coverage that
we're gonna get from MRO.
So there really is only one MRO.
It's sort of in
that range of areas
where it probably will be
when we do our entry,
descent, and landing.
- Okay, any other
questions in the room?
If we don't any other questions
from media here in the room,
oh, go ahead, we'll take yours
and then we'll go
back to social.
Go ahead.
- Did you say it
would be four hours
or five and a half hours,
or is that a range for
how long it would take--
- I believe you're talking
about when we're gonna get--
- To confirm the--
- Information from Odyssey?
It's gonna be about five and
a half hours after touchdown.
- [Steve] Okay.
- Okay, we have time for
one more social question.
Stephanie, go ahead.
- Alright.
So Phil Moyer over
on Twitter says,
with InSight's
design service life
and given the record
of your Mars probes
far exceeding their
expected lifetimes,
how long do you think
InSight will live?
- Well, we have not designed
any life-limiting features
into InSight, so
basically it's a function
of how long we continue
to collect solar power
and be able to run the
mission that we wanna run.
We're designed to
last one Mars year,
so that's 26 Earth months,
and so we think that
with the accumulation
of dust on the solar arrays,
that we'll make it at
least one Mars year
and get back the science
that you're gonna hear about
in just a little bit.
But we'll have to
evaluate where we are
after that year and how
much science we've got back
and make a case for continuing
if we're making truly
groundbreaking science
that we expect to be getting.
- Okay, we're going to
wrap it up at this time
with this panel
describing the spacecraft.
We are going to be back
at the top of the hour
at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time,
2:00 p.m. Eastern Time,
to discuss the
science of the mission
and the science instruments.
So there's a lot of really
cool stuff on this spacecraft.
Please come back.
Also wanted to promote for you
that the next news
briefing following today
will be on Sunday, just
one day before landing,
and we'll get a final update
on the status of the
spacecraft at that time.
And then landing day, again,
it's Monday, November 26th.
Our commentary will begin
at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time,
2:00 p.m. Eastern Time,
with landing taking place
about an hour later.
And again, there's
multiple websites
where you can watch
the landing live.
You can go to NASA.gov/live
if that's the easiest
one for you to remember.
On our toolkit page,
go.nasa.gov/InSightToolkit,
you'll see two tabs there.
One is how to watch online.
It has a chart with numerous
platforms where you can watch,
on YouTube, on
Twitter, on Facebook.
Again, our 360-degree broadcast
will be on our YouTube channel.
There's also how to watch
the landing in person.
There are numerous events
taking place across the country.
You can check from
California to New York
to Times Square in New York.
You can even be
standing in Times Square
and see our landing commentary
on the NASDAQ Tower.
There's even some viewing
parties in Europe.
So those are all marked,
again, at that toolkit page.
Just click on watch in person.
We will resume at 11:00 a.m.,
so in the meantime we're going
to replay some of the videos
for this particular mission,
starting with a
description, again,
of entry, descent, and landing
and the nerveracking,
white-knuckle six
and a half minutes
to get to the surface of Mars.
That'll wrap for now and we'll
be back in about 15 minutes.
Thank you for joining us.
[dramatic instrumental music]
- Welcome back, we're at NASA's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
in Pasadena, California,
and we're here to talk
about the InSight mission.
The InSight mission
has a date with Mars,
come Monday, November 26th,
it will be landing
on the red planet.
That landing takes place
at about noon Pacific time,
3:00 p.m. Eastern
with commentary
broadcast live about
an hour before that.
We're gonna talk to
the science team now,
the science panel, and they
are going to explain to us
how the InSight mission
will be detecting
the vital signs of the planet.
We have instruments
that we'll be placing
on the surface of Mars
to tell us more about
how Mars formed, and in fact,
how all rocky planets formed.
I'm going to begin by
introducing Dr. Lori Glaze.
She is the acting director of
NASA's Planetary
Sciences Division.
- Great.
[audience applauding]
Thanks, Veronica.
I'm excited, I know you are too.
I was already excited
when I got here,
and then sitting through the
mission briefing this morning,
I'm even more excited
than I was before.
How exciting, five more
days and we'll be there,
we'll be landing yet
another planetary mission
on the surface of Mars.
Each of the planetary missions,
each of NASA's
planetary missions
is on a quest to answer
important questions
about how our solar
system formed,
and how it changed over
time after it formed.
We've sent lots of different
missions to different worlds
and different corners
of the solar system,
and they're each trying to
answer that same question
in different ways, different
types of observations
at different types of worlds.
Some of the most fundamental
questions that we have
about how our solar system
formed and how it evolved
have to do with how
did the rocky planets
in our solar system
form and evolve?
The rocky planets,
Mercury, Venus,
Earth, Mars, and even our Moon.
Each of them are similar,
they're rocky planets,
some of them have atmospheres,
and they have structures
that have similarities
and differences.
If I could have
the first graphic.
This graphic actually
shows a cut away
of Earth and Mars, and the Moon.
And what you can see inside
of each of these rocky planets
is that they have at
their center, a core.
And that core can be
solid or it can be molten,
and then outside of that
core there's a middle section
that we call the mantle,
which makes up the bulk,
most of the mass of each
of the rocky planets.
And each of those rocky planets
is covered with a thin crust.
What we really want to know
is what are the similarities?
How are they different,
how are they the same?
What're the relative sizes
of those different parts
of the interiors of
those rocky planets?
The different
sizes, is the core,
is it molten or is it solid?
is that the same for
each of the planets?
That we need to know.
Most of the missions
we've already sent to Mars
are either making
observations from orbit,
getting at the
surface conditions,
trying to understand
what's happening
within the atmosphere
on the surface.
Sending landers
and rovers, again,
just scratching at the surface
to understand that
surface environment.
If we wanna understand
what the insides
of these rocky planets are like,
we have to make different
kinds of observations
that can really
penetrate down into
the center of the planets.
The types of measurements
we make on Earth
are things like
seismic measurements,
understanding the level
of seismic activity,
thermal measurements, heat flow,
understanding the amount
of heat that's getting out
and being released
from the planet.
We do this on Earth
on a regular basis.
We've actually even done these
types of measurements
on the Moon.
With the Apollo program,
we had astronauts
that brought these
types of experiments
and deployed them on
the surface of the Moon.
But if we wanna make these
kinds of measurements at Mars,
we haven't sent
astronauts to Mars yet,
they will be going at
some point in the future,
and a lot of what we're doing
is in preparation for that.
But if we wanna do
this on Mars today,
we have to do it robotically.
And so with that I'm going to
introduce Dr. Bruce Banerdt,
the PI for the InSight mission,
to tell us a lot
about the science.
And when I go off the stage,
I just wanna say, go InSight!
- [Man] Yeah!
[audience applauding
and whooping]
- Okay so, InSight
is going to Mars
to study the deep
interior of Mars
in order to understand how
all the planets formed.
I mean, we know a little
bit about how planets form,
they've accrete
from a solar nebula.
As they accrete, they
get hotter and hotter,
both from the energy
of the impacts
and from radioactive decay.
And then they melt and transform
from sort of a uniform ball
of meteoritic material
into the diverse planets
that we see today.
Some of those planets
are a little bit harsh.
You know, Venus is hot
enough to melt lead.
Mercury has a sunbaked surface.
Mars is pretty cold
today, but Earth
is a nice place to
take a vacation.
So we'd really like to know
why one planet goes one way,
and another planet
goes another way.
And those answers are in
the details of the structure
that's formed very early
in the planet's history.
On Mars, that structure's
been preserved
over the last four and
half billion years,
whereas on the Earth
where we actually can
study it pretty easily,
that structure's all
been sort of scrambled up
both by plate tectonics,
by mantle convection.
And so the evidence of the
very earliest processes
has been wiped
away on the Earth.
We wanna go to Mars to do
that, to study those processes,
to look at how those
processes came about
very early in the
planet's history.
The main way that we're gonna
do that is with seismology.
And the way we use seismology,
when you wanna study something,
the first thing you
wanna do is look at it.
And they way you look at it
is you bounce light off of it,
it goes into your eyes and
your brain can interpret it
as an image and see a 3D image
of what you're looking at.
If you're looking at
the center of planet,
light doesn't help you very much
'cause it doesn't go
very far through rock.
So what we do is we use
seismic waves, vibrations,
that are created by
earthquakes on the Earth,
marsquakes on Mars.
Also meteorite strikes,
anything that starts
a planet vibrating
and sends those waves
through the planet.
If I could have the first
animation.
This shows a seismic
event on a planet,
and it's showing the waves
that travel through the planet,
the blue P waves,
the red S waves,
and these waves travel
through the planet
the same way light would
travel through a lens
or something like that.
And so a marsquake is sort of
like a flashbulb that goes off
and illuminates the
inside of a planet,
and our seismometer
is the eye that we use
to see what's inside the planet.
And by looking at
those seismograms
that you've seen on television,
those wiggles on a graph,
scientists have learned
how to interpret
the shape of those waves,
the time which they come in,
in order to
understand the medium
through which
those waves travel.
We can figure out what
the inside of the planet's
made out of, we can figure out
where the different boundaries
are between the rocky mantle,
the iron core, and so forth.
And so a seismometer allows us
to look deep into the planet
and understand the
detailed structure.
We also have a few
other instruments,
a few other investigations
on this mission.
One is a radio tracking
experiment, we actually track
the planet very precisely,
and in particular,
we're tracking the
north pole of the planet
and watching it wobble
as the planet rotates.
And the wobble of that
north pole is tied to
the interaction between
the planet and its core.
And by looking at the wobble,
its size, its frequency,
how fast it's wobbling,
we can actually determine
the size of the core and
what it's made out of.
And that's very critical
in terms of understanding
the history of the planet
and the way the planet
is operating today.
And finally we have
a heat flow probe.
It's a very interesting device,
Tillman Schwan's gonna
tell us a little bit more
about it later, it penetrates
down into below the surface,
about 10 to 15 feet
below the surface
and measures the
temperature as you go down.
And we're able to use
that to extrapolate
the center of the planet
and understand how hot it is
in the middle of the planet,
and how much heat is
coming out of the planet.
And that heat is
what actually drives
the geology at the surface.
And in particular,
it drives tectonics,
which is the quake
motion of the planet,
and it drives volcanism.
And here to talk
a little bit more
about these geological processes
and how InSight's going
to illuminate that,
is my deputy PI, Susan
Smrekar, from JPL.
- Right, thanks Bruce.
[audience applause]
[muffled speech]
Alright, well, every geologist
and geophysicist that I know
likes to climb mountains.
And if we could have
the first graphic.
You know, most of us
aren't lucky enough
to be able to climb
Mount Everest, however,
some of us are privileged
to be able to study
the mountains on Mars.
And as you can see,
the mountains on Mars
actually dwarf Mount Everest.
These volcanoes are not
only the tallest mountains,
but they're the tallest
volcanoes in our solar system.
These volcanoes actually formed
billions of years ago on Mars,
and when they formed on
Mars, they actually covered
about a 1/4 of the planet.
You can see Olympus right here,
and you can see this
whole volcanic region
that formed early in
the history of Mars.
And if we go to
the next graphic,
we can talk about how
these volcanoes formed.
And you know, for me really
the most compelling thing
about volcanoes is the fact that
they are really
conduits from materiel
way deep in the
planet to the surface.
Not only do volcanoes
spew lava on the surface,
they also release gases
into the atmosphere.
They release things
like water vapor,
carbon dioxide,
methane, all the things
that we need to actually
form an atmosphere.
So the best analogy between
the volcanoes on Mars
and the those we have on Earth,
are actually places like Hawaii.
So Hawaii is an example
of a hotspot volcano.
So material from
deep in the mantle,
actually at the core
mantle boundary,
rises up in a plume over
tens of millions of years,
and as they come up and
intersect with the crust,
it forms volcanism
at the surface.
Now, on Earth we
have plate tectonics.
So when that plume comes
up and hits the surface,
it actually is intersecting
a conveyor belt.
The plates are moving slowly,
slowly across that plume,
and so one volcano forms and
it's carried off downstream.
So actually at Hawaii, when
we see those few volcanoes
at the surface now
above the ocean,
but it really is just one
of a series of volcanoes,
dozens and dozens of
volcanoes that are now under
the surface of the ocean.
On Mars, we don't
have plate tectonics.
So when that plume comes
up and hits the crust,
it stays there in one place.
And so instead of making
it a line of volcanoes,
we have a series of volcanoes.
And you can see this
complex of volcanoes
that was formed
above a mantle plume
early in Mars's history.
So, the thing that we're
really looking forward to
for InSight, is being
able to go back in time.
Mars formed these volcanoes
in its first couple
billions of years at a time
when there was a magnetic field,
when there was liquid
water on the surface,
all of the conditions that
we think are important
for habitability of a planet.
For InSight we're gonna learn
about the interior structure,
the core, the crust, the mantle,
the heat sources
in the interior.
And with that information
we'll be able to
better understand how the
interior of the planet
affects the surface
environment on rocky bodies.
Not only in Mars, but
in our solar system
and on other rocky bodies
around other stars.
I personally have
been waiting for this
information for decades,
and I'm super excited
to start getting this
lander on the ground and
start taking this data.
Up next to tell you about
some of the instruments
that will acquire this data
for us is Philippe Laudet,
and he'll be telling us
about the SEIS instrument.
[audience applause]
Alright.
- Okay.
Good morning, my name
is Philippe Laudet
and I'm working for the
French Space Agency,
that we just call CNES, so
sorry for my French accent.
And I have been the project
manager of the SEIS instrument
for now more than seven years,
Since the preselection of
the Discovery program in 2011.
So as you have understood,
inside will make major amounts
of quakes and meteorite
strikes on the surface of Mars
and for that we will
use a seismometer,
SEIS, which is provided by
the French Space Agency, CNES,
and also by IPGP with a French
laboratory for geo-physic
research and it's French PI
for SEIS, Mr. Philip Lonionet
and as you can see, I don't
know where the film is
Oh, sorry, I didn't see
the screen, thank you.
So this instrument will
be deployed exactly
on the surface of Mars
in order to have better
and more accurate measurements
of the seismic waves.
And the major engineering
challenge we had
due to the position
on the surface,
is to protect the instrument
from thermal viations
and also from the wind of
Mars, which is very aggressive
for that kind of instrument.
So you have protection
on the seismometer itself
and another one is the
wind and thermal chill
which is being
deployed on the film
which is deployed a second
time by the same robotic arm
exactly on the seismometer.
There is absolutely no
mechanical contact between both,
because the wind shield
will move with the wind,
but not the
seismometer of course.
Okay, and as you
know, we are not
the only instrument
on the surface.
We have another one,
which is Gemon One HP3,
and I give the floor to
Tilman Spohn who is going to
talk about HP3, and so
I'll tell you goodbye,
thank you, and see
you on Mars next week.
Bye bye.
[laughter]
[applause]
- Hey, greetings from Germany.
I'm Tilman Spohn from the German
aerospace center,
DLR, and I'm the lead
of the Heatro probe,
the HP3 experiment.
DLR has been building
this instrument
and contributing
that to the mission.
Now, as Bruce already told
you, we're taking a set of
temperature sensors down
to the depths of 10-15 feet
to measure the
temperature of the heat
that's coming from the
interior towards the surface.
Now, how are we going down?
Let's play out my
first animation.
Can we have the first
animation please?
Okay, here's the mining
mechanism in the mole,
we nicknamed that
penetrator a mole,
that compresses a spring,
and when the spring
is released it hammers
towards the tip of the mole,
and then propels it
down into the ground.
Now we stop the penetration
at about two feet
and take a measurement of
the thermal conductivity
and then we continue that,
let's continue the animation.
Can you continue the
animation please?
And we heat the mole and
measure the thermal conductivity
and then we continue
the penetration,
and take another measurement
of the thermal conductivity,
and another measurement,
until we get
to the target depth of 15 feet.
When we're down there,
we will then activate
the temperature sensors.
15 temperature sensors that
measure the temperature
profile down to the
depths of 15 feet.
And by combing the
temperature increase with the
thermal conductivity,
we can actually
calculate the heat flow.
Now I'm very excited
to come here on Friday
and attend the landing event,
and then of course
the experiment.
The penetration first, and
then the measurement of the
temperature and the
thermal conductivity
and the heat flow,
because that will help us
decipher the enogenics or
the activity of the planet
and this is something that
geophysicist have been
look forward to for
a very long time.
And with that, I'd like
to head back to Veronica
to continue the presentation.
Thank you very much
for your attention.
- Alright, thank you so much
and stay where you are Tilman,
we're gonna bring the rest of
the panel back up on stage now
to do some questions
and answers.
A reminder that we will take
questions here in the room,
we have some media
on the phone line,
if you're on the phone
line, please hit *1,
that will put you into
the queue for a question.
We're also taking
questions on social media.
Just use #askNASA and
send those into us.
We'll take some during the
broadcast, we'll continue
to answer those even after
we go off the air today.
So we're gonna open it up here,
first in the auditorium,
and then we'll go
probably to phone lines
next, so go ahead.
Hi, Ryann Blackshere Vargas
again from Spectrum News.
You mentioned that
there's lots of questions
that will be answered.
What's the number one question
that you want answered
after two years?
- I think the
number one question
that we want to answer
is what's the structure
and the energetics of
the interior of mars.
So we have several things
that we want to measure.
We want to measure the
thickness of the crust,
the size of the core,
the density of the core,
and the seismic
velocity of the mantle,
which tells us what the
structure of the mantle is.
And those are kinda our
key questions, as well as
the amount of heat
coming out of the planet.
So when we proposed this
mission 8 years ago,
we put together what we call
our level one
science requirements.
And these are the things
that we promised NASA,
that if you choose our
mission, these are the things
that we're gonna
measure, and that's
kinda our list of measurements.
And then we're also
gonna measure how often
Marsquakes occur, and how
often meteorites strike Mars,
which is kinda a bonus.
- Then a follow up question,
how does all of this
help us to understand
life here on earth?
Will we understand
better about earthquakes?
Will we understand
volcanos better?
Will we understand...
you know, what everyday
parts of our lives here
will the InSight mission
help us to understand?
- Well what it really
helps us understand is
how we got to
where we are today.
How we got to an earth that
has an atmosphere which is
breathable, and
environment which is
in a temperature range which
is comfortable for life,
how we have a planet
that's covered with water.
These are all things that
are related to the activity
and the structure of the
inside of our planet.
It's not obvious to
everybody, but the fact
that we have an atmosphere
is because we've had
all these gases that have come
out the inside of the planet.
The reason we have an ocean
is because water has come out
from volcanic activity
over billions of years.
So that activity is tied
to the initial conditions
of the planet, so we'd like to
understand how that happened,
how we got to
where we are today.
- Thank you.
And if I could just add to
that, life started on earth
we think very early on, in
the first half billion years,
and that crust is almost gone
on the surface of the earth.
Whereas on Mars, that very
early crust is still preserved.
Those environments that
have formed super early
in the formation of
planets of our solar system
and so we can kind
of go back in time
and study those environments
on the surface of Mars
and understand how the
conditions inside the planet
created those environments.
- Okay we're going to take one
more here in the auditorium
and then I'm going to
go to the phone lines,
and then we'll be coming back.
- Hi, Ian O'Neill for
Scientific American
and HowStuffWorks.com.
Going back even further
than that question, how does
your assembly of
instruments and experiments
help explain the origins
of planets themselves?
I mean, it's almost like
a time probe looking back
four billion years ago,
but how do you hope that
this will add pieces
to that puzzle?
- Well, as you said, the
structure of the planet
is really formed in the
first few tens of millions
of years after the
planets accrete,
so we're not gonna have
much to say about how
the planet actually
accreted, but once it gets
formed from the solar
nebula, how it changes from
a uniform ball of
meteoritic material
which is all kind
of the same stuff,
into a planet which
is differentiated
which has a crust of
relatively light rocks
and a very dense core,
and a very complex system
of transferring he
heat from the center
of the planet to the surface.
These things are all
set up very early
in the planet's history,
and for the earth,
we don't really
have any evidence
of that system left anymore.
What we have is a
very evolved system
and so we want to
go to Mars to see
what that system looked like
very early in the process.
And so to better understand
the physics and the chemistry
of how you go from the very
initial set of conditions
with this sort of solar
dust and ice that's accreted
into the very complex
climates that we see today.
- And just one follow up, in
regards to meteorite impacts
how many meteorite
impacts do you expect
to detect with your
instrumentation?
Yeah, that's the question.
- One of the things
that we want to find out
is to actually
measure how many...
We're sort of expecting
maybe half a dozen
to a couple of dozen in the
two years that we're on Mars.
- [Ian] Cool, thank you so much.
- Sure.
- Okay, were going to
the phone lines next,
we've got about three
different callers right now,
we're gonna start
with the AP, go ahead.
- [Marsha] Yes hi, This
is Marsha down in AP,
I have a question I'd
like both Philippe
and Tilman to answer.
NASA has a long and rich
history of exploring Mars,
and as the relative
newcomers to this,
I'd like to know
from both of you,
what you find so
captivating and magical
about Mars versus other planets.
- I don't know the catch,
could you repeat it to me?
- She want's to know
what you find fascinating
and captivating about going
to Mars and studying Mars?
- Everything is captivating.
First, it's a dream, and
after there's a big challenge
because that instrument was
supposed to be so sensitive
that in the beginning it was
just impossible to build.
But we did it, with the
help of our partners
part-a-grey and GPL,
thanks for that.
- Would Tilman also
like to weigh in?
- Okay, to me, Mars
is a planet that is,
on the one hand, very
different from the earth,
and on the other hand
its quite similar.
You know, it's half
the size of the earth
but it's environment
on the surface is more
Earth-like than, for instance,
the atmosphere and the
environment on Venus.
And understanding the
difference between the Earth
and Mars will help us
understand the evolution of
terrestrial planets in general
and in particular, the Earth.
And this is what makes the
motivation for going to Mars.
And in addition to
that, it's easier
to explore Mars than Venus.
And therefor, Mars
is the first target
to do a physical observatory
like we now do on Mars.
So in timing, it's very
justified to do that now.
- Okay, our next question on
the phone line is from AFP.
Go ahead please.
- [Ivan] Hi, this is Ivan
Kronev of a-ju-so-france press.
You mentioned marsquakes
and meteorite strikes,
can you talk in detail abouts
about the other possible
sources of vibrations
that you might listen to?
- Sure, so those
are the two primary
sources of vibrations
that we hope to see.
We also will probably
see vibrations due to
the interaction of the
atmosphere with surface.
So when you have weather on
Mars, you have turbulence,
that actually is pushing
the surface up and down,
and that will create,
oh one hand, noise
that makes it harder
to see the marsquakes,
but on the other hand,
when you start beating
on a planet like that,
it will actually start
resonating at
certain frequencies.
And those resonances are
affected by the structure
of the planet, and
so we may be able
to get some
information from that.
And finally, what we should
also be able to measure is,
this is not exactly
a vibration, but it's
the motion of the
surface up and down
due to the tidal pull of
the martian moon Phobos.
So every time Phobos goes
overhead, it actually pulls
the surface up a little
bit, and then it goes
back down after Phobos leaves.
So we can actually measure that.
It goes about a
centimeter and a half,
a little over half
and inch up and down
when Phobos goes over.
It turns out that we can
use that measurement as well
to look at the
inside of the planet
because how much
that goes up and down
depends on the
elasticity of the planet
and whether the corse
is solid or liquid.
So we'll be able to use that
measurement as it happens
every seven hours or so on Mars
to probe the inside
of the planet.
- [Ivan] And if I may,
could there be some
magma movement at
all from the inside?
- There could be
Magma motion on Mars.
The are that we're landing
in is pretty featureless.
I mean, it was a lava
plane, but it was put down
several billion years ago.
So we're not
expecting any active
volcanic activity in our region.
It's possible that it could be
happening somewhere
else on Mars.
It's conceivable that
we could pick that up
with our seismic instruments,
but we're not expecting it.
- Yeah, but we are
in a good place.
It's about a thousand
kilometers to an area
that may have been
volcanically active in the last
10 million years, so for
Mars, that's like yesterday.
So we can hope.
We can hope that we might hear
some magma deep
under the ground.
Not at the surface,
but deep underground.
- [Ivan] Thank you.
- Okay, we're taking one
more from the phone line
and then we'll come
back into the room.
We're going now to
Space.com, go ahead.
- [Meghan] Thanks for
taking my question,
this is Meghan Bartels
from space.com.
I had a question for
Lori, I was hoping
you could talk sort
of big picture.
Why is it that we're
so fascinated with Mars
and we keep returning
with science missions?
What is it that really
captures us about the planet?
- That's a great question,
and Mars is an incredible
natural laboratory right
next door to earth.
And as I was eluding
to at the beginning,
we really want to understand
how we came up with
this diversity of rocky
planets in our solar system.
They're all very different.
Each one of them is
unique in it's own way
and trying to understand
how they ended up
so differently is a
really important question.
And Mars is a great
natural laboratory.
It's right there, it's
reasonably easy to get to,
we demonstrated that we can land
successfully on the
surface, we can conduct
scientific experiments for
long durations on the surface.
So it's very amenable to trying
to do these types
of investigations.
And in addition to that,
Mars has another piece of
intrigue for us, in that it
could potentially have had
a significant amount of
water there in the past.
We see lots of evidence
of that in the geology,
and so we do believe that
there was a lot of water there
and it could have
potentially been a place
where life could have formed
very early in Mars' history.
Of course, trying to
understand how life is or was
distributed across our
solar system is one of the
major questions that we have.
Are we alone?
Were we alone
sometime in the past?
So Mars is an
intriguing destination
for that purpose as well,
trying to really understand
what those conditions were
like 4 billion years ago.
Did life actually begin on
Mars in that time frame?
And if it did, is
there any preservation
of that left on the surface?
Of course, that's not the
focus of the InSight mission,
but it is the focus of a lot
of the other investigations
that we're interested
in on Mars.
So trying to better understand
Mars in that context
is important.
And then finally, as it
was alluded to this morning
in the mission briefing
by doctor Za-bu-ken,
we'd like to eventually
get humans back on Mars.
We're interested in a
campaign now in returning
humans to the moon,
and eventually,
getting humans to Mars.
Again, another destination
in our solar system
where we feel it is amenable
to human exploration
and a place where we could go
at some point in the future.
And science drives our
understanding that allows us
to get humans to
a place like Mars.
So the more exploration we
have, the better we understand
that environment, and
the better prepared
we'll be to send humans
to Mars in the future.
- [Meghan] Great,
thanks so much.
- Okay, we're gonna bring
it back into the room here
for questions from media,
and then from social media,
I see our team over here working
furiously collecting
your questions.
So stand by for that.
Go ahead with your question.
- Hey, Charley Shelton
with C. B. Weekly.
I have a question about
the Olympus Mons formation.
What is it that's
different between
earth and Mars about
tectonic motion?
Why do that plates not
move, and allow something
so big to build up?
- That's part of
what we hope to learn
from this mission in fact.
The shorter answer is
that Mars is a lot smaller
than the earth, and so it
doesn't have the same amount
of radiogenic material,
the same amount of heat
that it starts out with, so
just by being a smaller planet
it looses its heat more rapidly.
So you need to have a
ovigerous convection,
a lot of energy
inside the planet
to drive that motion
of plate tectonics.
People have proposed in the
past that maybe very early
in Mars' history, it
had plate tectonics.
Now, we don't have any
direct evidence of that,
and we don't expect to
see evidence of that
on Mars with our
mission, but you know,
it's always the things
that we don't expect
that turn out to be
the most intriguing.
So who knows what we'll
find in the interior.
- A follow up to that,
is there any way to tell,
either from aerial view
or from a mission like this,
maybe in a different area,
if there is a previously
active subduction zone
or any of those other things?
Or can you tell even where any
of the transform faults are?
- So people had proposed
that there might have been
subduction, and we do see
evidence transform faults
from the high resolution
typography data that we have.
In the past people had proposed
that there might be
subduction zones on Mars.
We think that...
that's not the leading
hypothesis for how the
Northern Planes formed.
It was previously
proposed as an option for
how that low typography in the
northern hemisphere formed.
We now think it's likely
due to the presence
of a huge impact early
in Mars' history,
and we've come to that
hypothesis based on
the typography, the
gravity data, the geology
and the faults that
we see at the surface.
InSight will actually be
adding to our knowledge
of how these to
hemispheres formed.
We'll be understanding
the thickness of the crust
which we don't
know very well now,
We'll see if
there's a difference
in the composition
and the thickness,
we know that there's a
thickness difference between
the north and south, but
getting the exact difference
between those two will help us
better interpret
these hypotheses.
We assume it's going to
support the impact theory,
but again, we'll find out.
- [Charley] Thank you.
- [Woman] Alright,
we're taking a question
right here, go ahead.
- Hello, Steve
Gorman from Reuters.
Two question: One, how
long after InSight lands
if it arrives safely
and settles safely,
will it begin to conduct
the seismometer and the
heat probe begin
to do its thing?
And also, a very
specific question
about the sensitivity
of the seismometer.
I believe you said in
the past, Dr. Banerdt,
that it would measure
seismic waves as small as
the diameter, or
half the diameter,
or half the radius
of a hydrogen atom.
Could you give me
that one more time?
- Yeah that's right.
The sensitivity of
the seismometer is,
in acceleration units,
our requirement is 10
to the minus nine meters
per second squared.
If you turn that into
displacement, that comes down to
less than 10 to the -10,
which depending on exactly
how you define it,
it's about half
the radius of a hydrogen atom.
- Radius?
- Yes.
And we're actually a
little bit better than that
over part of the frequency band.
Thank you very much Philippe.
[laughter]
We're about a factor of
five better than that
in some parts of the frequency.
So yes, we're pretty
dog on sensitive.
One of the issues
that that give us,
is that it makes us
sensitive to everything else
that's happening
in our environment.
If there's a little bit of wind,
if the temperature
changes a little bit,
even if a little
pressure front goes by,
it's gonna change the
seismometer around.
So that's why we have a
weather station on board,
which we haven't
talked about much today
because it's not a part
of our core mission,
but we have a very
competent weather station
that's gonna give us
temperature, wind,
and barometric pressure
24 and a half hours a day,
[laughter]
everyday on Mars.
So in addition to
doing all this science
about the deep interior of Mars,
we're actually gonna
be contributing a lot
to understanding the surface
environment of Mars as well.
And in terms of how
long it's going to take
to get the instruments going,
InSight's kind of a laid
back, slow motion mission
compared to a lot of things
that we've done before.
We have a two year
mission to do our science,
so to get that mission
started, we have to get
our instruments on the ground.
It's gonna take us about
two or three months at least
to get our instruments
down, and that's because
we have to do a survey
of the area in front
of the spacecraft, and
make sure that we don't
put the instruments
down on a rock,
or in a hole, or
something like that.
Then we're very careful about
how we put the instruments down.
You saw the animation
that had the robotic arm
going and picking up
the instruments and
putting them down.
It actually goes a lot
more slowly than that,
and we have a whole set of
activities that we go through
to ensure that when we put
those instruments on the ground
they're gonna be in a place
where they can operate properly
and get these kinds
of measurements.
So it's gonna take us,
probably a month or two
to get the seismometer down,
and another month or so
to get the heat flow probe down
and penetrating down
into the surface.
We're gonna get
some photos and some
preliminary data
back before that.
In order to really
get operating,
we're probably looking
at early next spring
when we're really gonna
start bringing back
that kind of science from Mars.
- [Steve] Thank you.
- Okay, we're going
to turn it over to the
social media team to tell
us some of the questions
that've been sent in.
- Well, Bruce anticipated
one of the hottest questions
out there, that
everyone was asking,
was how long until
we get the data.
And you mentioned the cameras.
Des-vain on Twitter asked,
"does InSight take pictures?
And if so, will we
be able to see them?"
- It does take pictures,
and you will definitely
be able to see them.
We have two cameras onboard.
We have one called our
instrument context camera,
and that's gonna take a picture
just a few minutes
after landing.
It's bolted to the
bottom of our deck
and it has a fisheye
view, so it's gonna show
about 120 degrees,
130 degrees of view
right in front of the
lander, and perhaps
even up a little bit
above the horizon
very close down
to the spacecraft.
That shows the entire
area that we're gonna be
trying to map out to
deploy our instruments on.
Then we also have
another camera,
it's actually attached
to the robotic arm.
It's a higher resolution camera,
and we use the arm itself
to point that camera, and
we're gonna be able to
put together mosaics of
both the area in front
of the spacecraft,
and the entire region
around the spacecraft.
And those images are gonna
go out onto the internet
more or less right away,
as soon as we get them.
So we'll have raw images
out on the internet
for people to look at as
the mission progresses.
- Fantastic.
Okay, so Winter, in our
youtube chat, wants to know
"how will the InSight
seismometer be able to map
the internal structure of Mars
in 3-D with just one sensor?
How is that accomplished?"
And Rabicooper over
on Twitter, follows up
"Don't we need two
or three to determine
the inner composition?"
- You would think, wouldn't you?
[laughter]
So usually, if anybody knows
anything about seismology,
you know that you need at least
three seismometers
to do seismology.
And that's true, unless you
get really clever about it.
So we had to get clever.
I mean, we actually had
lots of concepts of missions
that had three landers
or four landers.
We even had a concept with 18
landers on Mars at one time
and none of those got funded
because they're very expensive.
So we had to go back
to the drawing board
and figure out how
can you do seismology,
real, quantitative seismology,
with a single seismometer?
It turns out there are
quite a few techniques
that are available to us.
And people have used
this on the Earth,
but they get eclipsed
by the array seismology
that we normally do.
One of the things we do on
Mars, is we use the fact
that Mars is small
to our advantage.
And what happens is that,
in addition to the P waves
and the S waves that
you normally hear
about in seismology
is there's also something
called a surface wave.
That's a separate kind of
wave that travels along
the surface of the planet.
So in addition to the P
and the S wave, we also get
the surface wave, which
travels to the seismometer.
And there's another one
that goes the other way
around the planet, and
comes in the long way.
So there's two extra,
what we call rivals.
And finally, the one
that's gone all the way
around the planet
can go around again,
and hit our seismometer.
And these things can
keep going around.
They get a little bit
smaller and smaller
each time obviously.
So we use that extra information
to be able to figure out
how far away the marsquake
is, and we can actually use
what's called polarization
analysis to figure out
which direction
it's coming from.
So instead of having
to triangulate on it
using multiple seismometers,
we're able to use the
extra information that's
contained later on
in the seismogram in
order to get the distance
and the direction.
And it gets more
complicated than that,
but that's sorta
the basic method.
- We've got a mountain
of questions Veronica,
how much time do we have?
- I think we're good,
go for one more,
then I'll do a final
look in the room here
to see if there's
other questions.
Go ahead.
- Okay, I have a two-parter.
Oscer wants to know, is
there an opportunity for
citizen's science to
participate with this mission?
- Well, we will be putting
the seismic data out
on the internet within a few
months after acquisition.
If you're a citizen seismologist
you can certainly work on it.
[laughter]
We'll also be putting
the images out
and there's a very
vigorous community of photo
interpreters out there
that have been doing
photo interpretation on
Mars images for many years,
and our images will be
available for that as well.
We also have something called
Seismometers in the Schools,
and we're actually gonna
be sending the seismic data
out to schools who are
participating in our program
at the same time that our
scientists and our team
are going to get it.
So the students at various
middle schools and high schools
are gonna be getting our
data in close to real time
and they'll be able to try
their own interpretations
on it and so forth.
We're hoping that they
don't beat us to the punch
in any of the big discoveries.
[laughter]
But we'll see what happens.
- And additionally we have
the Mars weather service.
So you can get information about
the weather daily at our site.
You can get wind,
atmospheric temperatures,
surface tempuratures,
so you'll also
get a daily weather
report from our site.
- Okay, let me ask one more
time out here in the audience,
yes we do have a question here,
we'll get you a microphone.
- Scott Sullivan from
the Weather Network.
I'm really interested in knowing
about the weather on Mars.
So as far as I understand is
the first continuous weather
monitor that we've put on Mars.
Previous missions
have had weather,
but it's very distinct
measurements every day.
This is going to
be, as you said,
24 and a half hours of everyday.
Do you anticipate learning
anything really new
about Mars' weather that we
didn't know about before?
- The short answer is yes.
I don't know what it is,
we'll have to discover it,
but yes.
Every time we go to a
planet and look at something
differently with a
different set of instruments
in a different way, we always
discover something new.
This is, as you said, going
to be a unique data set
of continuous measurements.
Temperature, berametric
pressure, wind,
speed and direction,
all day long,
all night, over the
entire Mars season.
And that's obviously
going to, I think,
have an enormous wealth of
scientific information for us.
- Okay, we're gonna take one
more social media question
and a reminder that if you
have sent in a question
with #askNASA, we'll
continue to answer those
after we go off the air.
Go ahead Stephanie.
- Alright, so this is for all
of our scientists here today.
Anna M. on Youtube
would like to know,
"what would be more
exciting for you?
A result that meets
your expectations?
Or something
completely unexpected?"
[laughter]
- That's an easy one
unexpected is always
a lot more fun.
- Yeah, I would agree with that.
Absolutely.
- Meeting your expectations
gives you a nice, warm feeling
and then you say
well, what's next?
If you see something
that's unexpected,
that always opens up a whole
new doorway into something
that you never had
thought of before.
And that's what a
scientist lives for really.
- Yeah, that's the coolest part.
What we don't know now
is the coolest part.
- I was just going to say,
that's what we do as explorers.
That's why we're here, that's
why we're doing what we do.
It's to find those unexpected
treasures that are out there,
the new discoveries that
are going to drive the next
mission and send us to
the next destination.
- Yeah, the root motivation
is exactly what they said.
I have nothing to add.
[laughter]
Except perhaps when
pointing to a precise...
There is a technology
called things,
there is the challenge of
the science of the discovery
that we are going to
make and there is also
a very interesting
thing during all of the
development and also following.
And it is to work together
with a different culture,
with different languages,
different money.
[laughter]
and it's definitely very
interesting that people
on earth are able
to work together
before we wanted to talk
with Martians, for example.
[laughter]
- Okay, that concludes
our briefing for today,
thank you all so much
for spending time here.
[applause] Thank you
Tilman for joining us
all the way from Germany, we
look forward to having you
out here for landing.
- [Tilman] I'll be
coming on Friday!
- Okay!
Now, I want to remind you
about all of the different
activities we've got going
on up through landing.
So, to watch our
schedule on Sunday,
which will be our final mission
news conference before landing.
Then also that afternoon we
have a NASA social program
that will also be
televised on NASA TV.
So we have the news briefing
at 10 a.m. Pacific time,
1 p.m. Eastern time, followed
by the NASA social event
which again, is a great Q &
A, another great opportunity
like this to send
in more questions.
That will be at 1 p.m. Pacific
time, 4 p.m. Eastern time.
And then landing day itself,
Monday, November 26th,
we want you to join us.
The landing itself takes place
at about noon Pacific time,
3 p.m. Eastern, and
our commentary begins
one hour prior to that.
And there are multiple
ways that you can watch.
The easiest way
is NASA.gov/live.
Bookmark that now so
you have it for Monday.
You're gonna be
online Monday anyway
for cyber Monday, you're
gonna be shopping,
just have that
extra screen open.
We also have a very good
toolkit with a lot of
in depth information
about the mission,
a lot of fact sheets,
and a very good list
of multiple ways you can watch.
That url is
go.nasa.gov/InSightToolkit.
There are great tabs
there, you wanna click on
Watch Online, you will
get a full list of all
the different platforms where
you can watch our broadcast,
including our 360 degree camera
from inside Mission Control.
You will also find on that site
a tab that says Watch In Person.
That includes a long
list of public viewing
events across the country.
You've got viewing events
from here in Los Angeles
at Cal Tech, and the
California Science Center,
all the way across the
country to New York
in Times Square on
the Nasdaq Tower,
and all the way into Europe.
So please go to that site
if you want join into
a real conversation
about landing, do that.
And we look forward to
having you back here
on Sunday for the news briefing,
and Monday for landing.
And as we go into this
Thanksgiving holiday
in the United States, I
just want to wish everyone
a very safe and
happy Thanksgiving,
and thank you again
for joining us.
We'll see you on Sunday.
[applause]
We're gonna play back all
the graphics you've seen
in the news conference
today, stand by.
[camera clicking]
