Robotic rover

Rover, come here. Rover, come here, you son of a bitch.

What are you, a compulsive rover boy?

The Human Genome Project, or a Mars Rover mission.

Unfortunately this Rover is, like, ten times the size of the, you know, mass wise, of the other Rover, or three times the mass.

And that Rover will be more kind of like a chemist.

The first Rover was being sent up. The question was legitimate.

This is one of the first pictures we took there with our rover,

I work for the Jet Propulsion Lab. I'm building the next Mars Rover.

But the problem with airbags is, the airbags you see here, which landed the smaller rover it's like 400 pounds, the entire rover were about the size of this room.

Basically, this big rocket sits on top of our rover and when we're ready to land, the rocket hovers in place and we slowly lower the rover to the ground.

If I zoom on it, you can see that's the Rover on the surface.

And this next Rover that we're flying is about the size of a car.

Our next question comes from the flight director of the Mars Curiosity rover mission,

And soon, NASA wants to send yet another rover to hunt for past Marsian life.

Now, in that case, because it was a very big Rover, we couldn't use airbags.

So we'll see where Curiosity takes us not just our rover, but our sense of exploration.

So, specifically what we are doing now is that Rover is going down in that crater.

And also to help you, to help the community so you can do ads on that Rover, we are going to train that Rover to actually in addition to do this, to actually serve cocktails, you know, also on Mars.

So you can imagine the size of airbags it would take to land a two ton rover on Mars.

And the first time I figured out that way was in this little single person submersible called Deep Rover.

It turns out there's an enormous amount of information already available on that subject, which is the Mars rover problem.

When the dog would try to leave the mat, she would say, Rover, on the mat, on the mat, on the mat.

As we discussed in the previous Countdown episode, the Curiosity rover has gathered ample evidence that liquid H2O once flowed on Mars.

And on the right side, that's the Rover just before we finished its testing to take it to the Cape to launch it.

So, that was taken from orbit we had the camera zoom on the surface, and we actually saw the Rover on the surface.

So we are in the process, as we speak, of actually designing the next Rover that we are going to be sending to Mars.

But we really made sure we tested those Rovers before we got them down or that Rover and made sure that it's all working well.

What we are going to be doing with that Rover as it drives around, it's going to go and analyze the chemical composition of rocks.

I was lucky enough that one of my algorithms was selected to be implemented in a Mars rover. So we're going to learn it, pretty much in detail.

I first developed this technique working from a little single person submersible called Deep Rover and then adapted it for use on the Johnson Sea Link, which you see here.

And we shrunk it all down to something that weighs about as much as I do, and then put it inside of this rover that weighs as much as your car does.

And we didn't want to take it propulsively all the way to the surface because we didn't want to contaminate the surface we wanted the Rover to immediately land on its legs.

And that rover is now on the surface of Mars, but it's so heavy, and so it kind of takes a special challenge for us to make it all work and come together.

The amazing Pathfinder mission that went in '97, and the MER Rover missions that are on Mars as we speak now and the European Space Agency's Mars Express, has taught us a number of amazing things.

It turned out that every once in a while there are dust devils which come by on Mars, as you are seeing here, and when the dust devil comes over the Rover, it just cleans it up.

Actually, the lander will come down to about 100 feet and hover above that surface for 100 feet, and then we have a sky crane which will take that Rover and land it down on the surface.

So what you are seeing here are the layers on the wall of that crater, and the Rover is going down now, measuring, you know, the properties and analyzing the rocks as it's going down, you know, that canyon.

You see someone in the park and I'll cover my mic when I say this, because I don't want to wake you up and there's the owner in the park, and their dog's over here, and they say, Rover, come here.

And we actually used the combination of the satellite images and the Rover to actually conduct science, because we can observe large areas and then you can get those Rovers to move around and basically go to a certain location.