*Intro music*
H: Hello! Welcome to SciShow Talk Show that day on SciShow we talk to intresting people about intresting stuff. Today we are talking to my very good friend Bryan Von Lossberg, we went to school together. And we indeed sat next to eachother on the first day of graduate school and you had googled me.
B: I had googled you, I had stalked you a little bit online.
H: I have not done that to you, but you were like "You're into Mars!" and I was like, I am into Mars, and we talked about Mars a bunch because Bryan worked on our first ever rover mission to mars; Pathfinder. Which, when I was seventeen years old you were working at JPL; it was a really really big deal for young me.
B: Yeah.
H: So I appreciate you doing that.
B: It was a pleasure.
H: And you also worked on some other stuff at JPL; the hovel mirror replacement?
B: Yep! On the camera system that was on the hovel that restored the visioning.
H: Yeah! The Hovel was great, and we can see... a lot less than we expected...
B: So we took the camera out, put a new camera in, big exciting multi-day space walk, well, we didn't do it, the astronauts did it. But we worked on the camera system that fixed the imaging issue.
H: But let's mostly talk about mars if that is ok with you.
B: That would be great.
H: It is my favorite planet aside from Earth. What parts of Pathfinder had your fingerprints on them?
B: So I worked on what we called the Martian Igloo; if you've seen The Martian, there is this big white structure with the JPL logo and the flag on the back of it, and Mark Watney goes out to retrive it to use it to restor communications with Earth. And it is that white structure called the ISA, the Insulated Structural Assembly. And it had to keep the electronics on the inside insulated from the martian temperatures and it had all the stuff mounted on the outside including the higan antenna and the camera system that took the three-D pictures of Mars

It was that structure and when I got assigned to be the project lead on that, it's like; Ok, we need this thing. It needs to occupy this sort of space, it needs to- here's a budget. We are going to launch; you know, there's a launch window to get to Mars. So, we're going to have to test these things months, or years down the road. And, it needs to survive this landing, where it's gonna like, come down, and it's gonna bounce around on the surface of Mars.
H: Right 'cuz the --
B: And you can't use any metal.
H: Oh, none at all, Because it's too heavy?
B: Actually because it would have been a thermal short; a thermal conductor from the inside enviroment to the outside.
And so,

B: Pathfinder did some science, it opperatated, you know, a few months, it was aimed at proving that we could get there this crazy way. And um, we were succesful at that. Because, at that time, you know, it was, I mean, even engineers in the mission were like: this is insane. The idea of not doing a controlled landing on the surface-
H: So it was just parachutes and bouncy balls.
B: it was parachutes, it was some rockets. So as it got to Mars, it didn't even go into orbit, it just got to Mars, right into the atmosphere. It took seven Months to get to Mars-
H: So to get to M-, to get out of earth orbit and on a trajectory to Mars, your going FAST. Your going fast. And sometimes what you do is you try to get into a stable orbit, slow down some-
B: Nah
H: you just like, im a bullet headed to mars.
B: why waste time with orbiting. Lets get there as fast as we can, we get there, path finder didn't even go into orbit. It just went right into the atmosphere. And now, its suddently the problem is the opposite. Its, we gotta slow down-
H: your going to fast
B: quickly. And the first thing was deploy this parachute and it had a heat shield. And so you are using friction from the thin atmosphere.
H: Its good that the atmosphere is there
B: yeah
H: because if you are going very fast, its enough. Its still like hitting a brick wall. 
B: its something. And the parachute made it go from very, very, very fast just you know, very fast. And then the part that gets even cool is it got to a certain point off of the certain of Mars and its using a radar system to detect how far up it is. Nominaly this thing is sort of hovering, and boom, the airbags inflate, and then they fire and disconect from the parachute and the rockets and it just drops. And I think it wound up bouncing, so it sort of drops, bounces way up into the atmosphere, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce. I think it bounced like at least 15 times, something like between 15 and 20 times. And its bouncing and its rotating and its spinning. And inside of these airbags, its this tetrahedron with these three petals that can unfold

and a base pedal is what we called it.
And the structure my team was responsible for is sitting on that base petal. So the next thing you start thinking through is you don't know which petal you are going to land on. 
H: Right, this was my thought as a 17 year old. I was like: how are they gonna know which petal it lands on- like I didn't say petal, but-
B: one in four chance
H: yeah, like cross your fingers
B: and so each of the petals, the hinge mechanism, was strong enough that if it landed on the wrong one, it could flip itself onto the right one. We got lucky, it actually did land on the base petal. And so, I was sitting on a couch in the bay area of California in my boxers watching a NASA feed on TV, and you waiting-
H: This is how you find out?
B: yes
H: you don't get to go to like go to the special rooms
B: I think i could have but at that point I had already left JPL so I was no longer working there. So, Im watching this in the privacy– fortunately for all of the neighbors of my living room– and at that point you are waiting for a signal, I think they call it a sum of four, saying from the space craft: 'I landed and Im alive'.
H: There are parts of me that still work.
B: Yes. 
H: These parts.
B: And, that signal came in and that was your, you know, now everybody has seen multiple of these moments of all of mission control standing up and crying. And I lept off the couch, I was screaming, I was crying, I opened the st-- glass door, ran into the backyard. 
Then all of these other magical things started happening, which was unrolling, you know, the pathway for the rover to actually, like, get down and then roll of one of those petals. 
H: This little, like, runway comes down.
B: little runway, yeah.
H: [laughs]
B: yeah, and its like, lets start, you know, doing science. And then the camera system went up, and its got two eyes to give you that depth perception and it starts doing its thing. 
H: Its very- just talking about it is very nostalgic for me.
B: [laughs]
H: because it was a huge deal of me, like, that summer was a great nerdy time in my life.
B: That makes my heart happy. 

H: Good, yeah.

H: So what's sort of like, day to day, when you were working on this? I mean, is there always sort of a sense of like, like how... I always feel like "boy I sure am putting a lot of energy into something that might just turn into dust, when it hits a planet going twenty thousand miles an hour.

B: Yeah. Yeah, I mean day to day on that mission was uh... an adventure because some days, it's just like "okay, we gotta, you know, get this much designed or built, or we gotta get this to this testing, or whatever. But I think the thing that goes unappreciated probably from the outside is just how many twists and turns there are in that process. I think I was telling you a story--

H: Like how many problems need to get solved.

B: Yeah. The first big test of the air bags, which wasn't my system, but I remember the engineer coming in and showing a videotape: catastrophic failure. And the inspirational part of that was that--

H: So like the bag popped and it was just over

B: Yeah, the bag popped and-- The first full-scale test of the air bag, with an upside down catapult that fired this--

H: (laughing) Right, because it's still going fast--

B: This model, with these air bags. It hit a Martian rock, you know that we had created--

H: You'd just put some rocks down.

B: Yup, and it just failed. But the beautiful thing was that we all sat around and watched this videotape on an old VCR of his test, cause it happened somewhere in Texas, and then there was just like an hour of brainstorming

H: Mm-hm.

B: And the awesome thing was the redesign of the air bags that came out of that brain storming an hour later is ultimately what successfully flew on the mission and worked.

B: I had numerous experiences with my teams at the ISA, where we thought we were going to built the structure this certain way, and I remember where we did the first full-scale test assembly of how we were going to-- and total failure. And so when you ask "what was it from day to day", so that day suddenly everything changed and we went into redesign mode for months. Some days were predictable

H: Yeah

B: A lot of days were not.

B:  Um, and you're interacting with all of the other engineers who have other things that touch yours, or attach to yours.

H: Yeah.

B: I couldn't possibly have appreciated it enough when I was there, and now in retrospect it's amazing.

H: Alright, well I think we're going to hang out with something, I don't know what it is, it's definitely not from Mars.

B: And, or... carbon-based life-form

H: Some carbon-based life-form, yes.

H: Hey, Jessi.

Jessi: Hey.

H: What you got?

J: I have a little tiny guy

B: Uh-oh

J: He's really cool.

(all laughing)

H: From Earth.

J: His name is Goma.

H: It's a tardigrade? Cause that would be difficult.

J: Alright, he's sleeping right now because he's nocturnal.

H: Is he a bunch of leaves?

J: (laughing) Yes. No. No, he's going to live in a bunch of leaves, and he's going to try really hard to pretend he is a leaf during the day. So he has amazing camouflage.

H: I mean you say that, but he looks like a friggen piece of winter green gum

J: Well, this isn't the exact plant he would be living on.

H: Okay, yeah.

J: Um, he would live on, like, bromids.

H: Bromeliads?

J: Bromeliads, thank you, I can't say it. But yeah, do you know what he is?

H: He's a frog

J: Definitely a frog. Tree frog.

H: Yeah.

J: So tree frogs, they live in the trees, um, and they do not swim.

H: But they are wet. Like they--

J: They always have to stay wet, so they're amphibians, yes. So they always have to stay-- There he goes, there he goes

H: My eyes are very bright. Oh, whaaaaattt? That is an unexpected change.

J: Isn't that amazing? That is called deimatic behaviour. So, when an animal that's mostly camouflaged all of a sudden tries to freak you out, you know, it tries to scare you. I used to think of like those butterflies or moths that have the eyes, like the owl eyes on them.

B: Yeah.

J: Or the frilled lizards that, (blows lips) you know. So this is deimatic behaviour, and those big, bright, red eyes are going to try and scare you away

H: And look at that, blue arms--

J: Isn't that amazing?

H: He's got weird stripes, orange feet, you are nuts.

J: He's beautiful. Isn't he amazing?