 Hello, and welcome to TomorrowOrbit 12.28. Very glad to have you here at Station 204, and I'm going to be your host for today. Jared, you probably know me from Space News and some previous Tomorrow Space episodes as well. But I'm going to be doing an interview today with Andy Klesch from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory out here in the LA area in Pasadena, California. One of my favorite NASA laboratories, sorry, all the other ones with it, but we've got this very interesting thing in front of us that we will get to in just a second, because some of you may be looking at this and wondering, why do we have a spacecraft here? Well, we are in space, so it would make sense for us to have this. We may throw this out the airlock in a little bit. We'll see what happens. But I guess we should really just start with this, because this is sitting here, and I'm sure everybody who's watching live is maybe wondering what this is. So Andy, what is this that we have in front of us here today? So you know, this is a model of Mars Cube 1, or Marco, which we sent out to Mars last year with Insight, flew by the Red Planet over there, smallest spacecraft to ever go to another planet, perform their mission quite well along the way, and wanted to talk a little bit about it today. Yeah. And Insight was the lander that is doing seismology research on the surface of Mars, and it successfully landed the Monday after Thanksgiving, if I'm correct. Cyber Monday. Yeah, Cyber Monday. And I remember that some of us from the Tomorrow crew were at the Caltech event in Pasadena there for that. That was a lot of fun. And Marco had a pretty special part in that. So what did Marco specifically do with that? Well, you know, Insight that day, the reason why it was such a critical day was it was going through entry to sent in landing, having to go from the 14,000 odd miles an hour approaching Mars down to zero in what we call the seven minutes of terror. And we are terrified about those seven minutes because over the last 50 years or so, humanity as a race has failed more often than it has succeeded at landing on Mars. Well, we've learned through that time that if something's going to go wrong, we'd like to get the data back so we can fix things for the future. In aircraft, we use black boxes. And for Insight, or for things landing on Mars, we don't have a black box because we can't go and get it, at least not yet. Yeah. Because of that, we have been using relay spacecrafts, Mars and Constance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, things that are overhead and can pass the data back during EDL. Turned out, though, for Insight, the satellites were not going to be in the right places at the right time. Mars and Constance Orbiter could be there, but they could only record the data and send it back hours and hours later. At the same time, these things called CubeSets, these tiny spacecraft around that we've been flying around the Earth, were really building up in capability, and so we said, well, can we fly two spacecraft to Mars to be there at just that right place, at just the right moment, send the data back from Insight, and give us all the real-time information on what's going on, hopefully everything's going well, or if things don't go well, what happens we can learn for the future. That's what Marko did, get to that spot at that precise moment in time. Yeah, it sounds like that was sort of born out of the failure of Mars Polar Lander, where if I remember correctly, you had communication up until entry, and then the next communication was supposed to be at landing, but then something happened, and there was a big unknown as to what happened between the last ping and what eventually happened to it, which I guess even now still, almost 20 years after that, it's still like a mystery as to what happened. We've had all sorts of failures at Mars. We've had failures at other planetary bias, what we call these critical events on there, where you only get one shot, and you've got to get that data back down from that. So, yeah, it was kind of driven by that need to support a critical event. So what was the paper napkin moment for Marko? Because I mean, CubeSats have been a thing in orbit around the Earth for a better part of two decades now, but nobody's really ever like said, you know what, we're going to fly one into planetary. So what was that moment that pushed it over the edge? Well, there were a lot of things back in around 2011 where we were seeing that the capability was there. Scientists were saying, I want to fly my own mission. I want to do my own experiment. How can I get out there? We recognized the technology was not there. So I was the principal investigator of a mission called Inspire, or in typical NASA acronym form. Interplanetary, well, it's an interplanetary pathfinder in a relevant environment. Acronym or Bacronym? Both. It's how these things are formed. Sure. We built the technology to say we can get a transponder for the deep space network into a CubeSat. We can prove that we can survive in deep space. We can communicate back to Earth on that. And while the mission didn't fly, we did all the testing for it. And then someone said, well, now we have need for this immediately. We're going to bypass Inspire and go directly to Marko here. So it was born out of, well, the technology is here. And then suddenly a few scientists said, I would like to bring this data back from Insight. I'd like to try and do some science at Mars itself along the way. So this was about early 2014. And when you started assembly, I would imagine that you're basically taking a calm relay and packaging it into this CubeSat. What does that take in order to do something like that? We really had to start from scratch. There was an idea that we need to get this calm relay and get it to Mars. So some of you were like, well, I have this instrument or this thing. And I want to attack spacecraft parts around the outside. So how do you get it there? What does the trajectory look like along the way? If you have the trajectory right, how long is it going to take me? How do I get data back? And how do I control it there? And you just start adding these subsystems. As the subsystems get put together, suddenly you figure out that they all conflict with each other. It's too big or it doesn't fit. Or suddenly we have to be in a box. And well, we can't fly as a box all the way there. And that process is a lot of fun. It's a lot of what we call concurrent engineering with different specialties working together to solve the problem on there. Sometimes the best way to do it is just lock everybody in a room for a little while until they come up with some design. And that was a lot of the way that Marko really came together, too. And with all of these designs coming together, what were some of the really big hurdles that you had to do? Because I would imagine there was a lot of miniaturization that had to happen in order to make this work. Yeah. Miniaturization was the key hurdle to this. And with that comes power and thermal problems. Because suddenly you're heating everything up in a much smaller package on there. But for us, really, it was volume and fitting into this rectangular prism. So we have to launch in something that's the size of a cereal box. And I have tested it. It'll fit in a Sam's Club cereal box. OK. There you go. We know that works. But everything has to be compressed down to do that. The radio in the center is the heart of our spacecraft. You would call it Iris that was developed there. Daughter of Electra, which is the normal one. Yeah, that's the ones that are used on the big high gains. Right. Yeah. But we had this radio in the bottom. Somehow we needed to be able to put a structure around it. Then we needed an antenna that could talk back to Earth, this really big high gain array here. That had to fold down. And then this UHF antenna on the bottom had to fold up. So we were really constrained in how tall anything could be. And we were debating long, loud debates on fractions of millimeters and how tall that would be. So that was one of the more interesting challenges we had to face. How do we deal with a stack? Yeah, and I mean literally like your tolerances are like incredibly small in order to make this work. That's right. And yet you still want to have margins and reserves just in case something goes wrong. And your thermal blanket is slightly taller or something like that. Yeah, definitely. We'll go to our chat room real quick. We have a question from our tomorrow chat room from VTO 80, which is asking, how does the antenna work? And a lot of people had questions about the antenna specifically. And there was something interesting that you told me before we started, which is that this isn't the only antenna on it as well. Right. So Marco has a couple of different antennas on here, all based on the mission that we're trying to do. At the beginning of flight itself we use what's called the low gain antenna. And the low gain is actually tucked in the back. It's a little difficult to see back here. It has pretty hemispherical view. So you can talk to it for many different angles. But it's not as sensitive. So you have to talk pretty close. You have to be close to Earth. We also have a medium gain antenna that's on this other side, it's kind of in the center here. We have both receive and transmit capability from that. For reasons that will be more of an in a second, it actually talks up at an angle here, much narrower cone. We can talk further away, but still have pretty broad coverage. And then we have the X-band high gain antenna. Transmit only allows us to talk from Mars back to Earth at relatively high rates, at least for these guys. And it's called a reflector rate, because we're actually transmitting out of this panel over here. It bounces off, and this acts somewhat like a parabolic dish, even though it's flat. That brings the beam much narrower, so we can get that data, concentrate that power signal as we send it back to Earth. Since this can only transmit, and if we're pointing to Earth with this, we need to be able to receive commands. And that's why the medium gain is tilted up. All of this is useful for talking to Marco, but we really care about insight. And insight during entry to sentient landing has a UHF transmitter, a couple different antennas. And that talks to this loop down at the bottom here. And the whole spacecraft is actually designed so that at the moment of EDL, we are pointing towards Earth. We've got a broad beam down towards insight. And we pretty much ignore the solar panels entirely. So the batteries can handle it on their own. Yeah, so that's incredibly complicated. I would imagine you have to stabilize Marco in order to do that. How do you stabilize it? Well, on board we have reaction wheels. So we actually have these wheels that spin up and spin down so that we can change our orientation. That's the primary way that we stay stable all the way out there, or we change our direction. But we also have these thrusters. And the thrusters there to desaturate the reaction wheels, to actually spin them back down if they're going too fast in there, or to change our trajectory so that we can aim towards Mars. Because as you might know, when we're launching, we're not aiming towards Mars. If we're Mars, we're launching somewhere over there. And then we have to direct ourselves back in that direction. And with all of this, I mean, you've got to be able to make sure that this can handle getting through all of the processes that it takes to get something there. So how do you test this? Because you can't obviously launch it towards Mars and then test it. You've got to do it on the ground first. So how do you guys test something like this? More than anything else, shake and bake. We need to bring this thing up to the temperatures that we're going to be seeing on orbit or on our trajectory out there. And we need to show that it can survive in the launch with the Atlas V along the way. Now there's a lot of other testing as well, but shake and bake. Yeah. And when you were finally getting this ready to go, what do you guys have to do? Do you have to go under the same sort of like clean room guidelines as, say, insight would have had to have? Or is it kind of different? Because you're just doing a fly. Well, in this instance, a flyby simply because of what you're doing at Mars. Right. We did not have to adhere to the same cleanliness that insight did, because at the end of the day, our launch spot was next to the rocket nozzle. And we were exposed to the atmosphere. So we were going to be dirty no matter what. So we actually built in a cleaner room, but it's not what I would call a clean room. And to test the solar panels, we wheeled it outside. And actually had it sitting in this noonday sun prior to launch. That's excellent. Oh, gosh, that's so great. I just imagine you guys were wheeling one of these out on a cart up at JPL. That's exactly what it was. And being like, oh, it's working. So it looks good. It looks good to everybody. So it looks like we have a lot of questions that are asking how specifically the antenna works. Like Venet Ventura Los Grandes on YouTube, specifically saying, please ask how that antenna on the satellite works. And I'm kind of interested in it, too. Because you said it's parabolic, even though it's a flat surface. That's right. Can you, how do you, how? It does act parabolically, even though it's flat on here. So it all folds up. And you see there's a bunch of squares. You can actually see the same thing on the other side. It's symmetric on here for the viewers that can't see this because we're actually trying to balance thermal across of it. Now, all these squares are acting as tiny little antennas. And they're all different sized in here. You can actually kind of tell there's a pattern that looks like a parabolic dish of sorts. And what's happening is we're getting a wave that's coming out from our transmitter. We're actually changing the phase. The part of the signal hits each one of those squares. It changes the phase and then makes it more coherent to narrow it down on there. So we're reflecting it back with a slight change of phase, and that all adds up with some really complicated math to get us back a very coherent signal back to Earth. Very, very cool. Now, folks are asking what did Marco do? And just to kind of specify, it wasn't just Marco. There were two Marcos. There was Marco A and Marco B. And did you guys give them a name to kind of differentiate them? We did. They're actually known as Eva from Marco A and Wally from Marco B. And that was a nickname the team gave it because of our propulsion system. We use a fire extinguishing as our propellant. And so Disney movie, Wally, the rest is history on there. So unofficially, they are known as even Wally. Oh, that is fantastic. I love it. So this went out to Vandenberg, I would imagine. And was it ready for the initial launch window in 2016? We were ready with one of the spacecraft. When we received word that we were delayed, we were in the midst of putting the other one together. We were still on track to deliver at the end of January. And they delayed, I think it was December 23. All right, so when you took these out to Vandenberg, you had to attach them to the rocket. And you guys flew on a Atlas V. And that flew out of Vandenberg here in California, which you can actually kind of see it right here. Vandenberg being its name that it lives up to Vanden Fogg, of course, up there. And when was launch? Launch was May 5th of 2018, early, early in the morning, about 4 or 5 AM. No one saw it from Vandenberg. We needed to be back at JPL. So we saw it from actually one of the rooftops at JPL. Oh, OK. Saw the launch and then rushed over to mission control because only 90 minutes after launch, we had to deploy out and start our own journey tomorrow is on there. Yeah. And yeah, actually, I was going to go up to watch it. But then I saw the weather forecast was like, oh, it's only going to be like a quarter mile visibility. So I was like, I got it. So then I got up and I watched it launch from my front yard, which I didn't realize just how fast a rocket moves, because I've seen him plenty of times from Vandenberg, but never like from far away with it. So it was pretty spectacular. So your launch, that 90 minutes happens, you're in mission control. Are you in the mission control with the Insight folks? Or are you in your own separate mission control? So we had our own separate mission control. The Marco team only had about 10 or so people that were running the mission. So a pretty small room could hold all of us on there. But we had not only a deep space network, but students from Orhead State University actually listening with their dish as well. And 90 minutes after launch, Insight separates, begins its journey. We pop off to either side. Now, we've been off for two months at this point. Once we packed as we were in the box, they wouldn't let us talk to the spacecraft. So it was really nail-biting to see, would we get the signal in on time? Marco not only had to talk to us, but had to open the solar arrays before we could actually get a good signal back, had to do all these, stabilize itself. And then just after the deployment here from the bottom and the rocket is right there, the nozzle, we got our first signals back. And it was really just a beep saying, I'm alive. I'm alive. Very cool. Now, with these being deployed, what's the first set of things you're doing after the I'm Alive beep? Like, what are we doing in mission control at that time? So actually, we were only receiving data. So we're checking on how the spacecraft is doing, but we can't yet command the spacecraft itself. Each one was programmed to have two what we call beeps, basically telemetry dumps, to tell us how they were doing on there. The spacecraft is stabilizing. It's autonomously trying to find the sun and just start charging batteries if needed on there. The batteries ended up being very charged already, even before we had to do anything. So that was good to see. And because our antennas were on the outside, we didn't need to deploy anything else immediately there. Could kind of just wait. Over the next couple of days, we checked out the spacecraft, tried out all the systems, and then eventually started kicking out the high gain antenna here, which was a pretty big motion. And then the UHF antenna at the bottom as our final kick to the spacecraft. And how do you determine whether the antennas have deployed or not? Because that's one thing I've wondered about, which is that most of the time they're like, yes, this is deployed. And then yes, this is deployed. And there's nothing there to really indicate, at least to us who may be watching or not in mission control that something to actually happen. So how do you guys, how do you folks figure that out? So there's a couple of different things. The quickest one we can see is that the spacecraft will change how it's moving. So when you pop open an antenna, you're changing your moment of inertia on here. And you can see that change in the telemetry. We got a little bit more clever. And you might be able to see this on here. There's a hole at the top here. And then there's what looks like a little electronic component right there. Those are both photodials. The same thing that you would have in your TV remote. One is covered by the antenna when it's stowed and one is not. We just look at the difference. Do we now see that there is one open or not under? And we have those scattered across the spacecraft. Now, opening is one thing, but you want to make sure it's opened all the way. And we have a model of this and can actually look at when a shadow from the sun from this component would cross that and can verify that those are happening. And then finally, we have a camera up here. A wide field of view camera that can actually take a picture of part of the high gain array and the feed over here so that we can verify that that's open. Yeah, and it did take many pictures throughout the mission. And it actually took sort of like a pale blue dot kind of picture on its way when it was outbound. That's right. So when we were just a couple of days away from Earth, I mean, these cube sets have never gone beyond about 800 kilometers up. And when we would hit a million kilometers away from Earth, we turned back and we're actually able to take a photo of Earth and Moon first time something this small has ever been able to do that. That's fantastic. And how did that image look? A little blurry. Actually, for us, it was spectacular, because not only did we get the Earth and the Moon, you can see the Earth and the Moon down below. But our team actually aligned the feeds to have a shadow on the high gain array. And with that shadow, we could tell that everything was at the right angle. And the way they did that was they took a cell phone and a light and the model was spacecraft and just aligned it until it kind of worked out on there. I'm really liking how your team operates. Like, yeah, we're just going to wheel it outside. Just turned the light on the cell phone. It's kind of good. You guys are kind of just throwing anything you got at it up there. We have to make it work. And so from that, you get very creative along the line. And this was definitely an interesting project. Who were some of the people that worked on this project? Well, there were all sorts at JPL. We had folks that had been there for many years and worked a lot of different Mars programs like Joe Kojewski or Tomas Martin-Mier, those that had worked on many larger spacecraft, John S. Miller, Thomas Wernie, and then folks that were brand new to JPL, even some that hadn't been there for the entirety of Marco's build period that were coming in. Dr. Ann Marenin, Cody Colley on there. So it was really a merging of a few different worlds. Students that knew something with CubeSets, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, Morehead State, Michigan, and professionals who had been doing this for many years and landed many things on Mars. And Smokey Durg in our chat room has a really good question that I'm going to put in here, which is, did the development of Marco teach JPL how they can change any instruments or equipment that will go on other spacecraft? It absolutely. This was a technology demonstration, not only as a spacecraft, but as a form of processes at JPL to explore what could be done with these small spacecraft here. What processes could we ease up on, or how could we use commercial parts in a radiation-rich environment there? And we are still taking lessons from it and folding them into other missions and some of the technologies into much larger missions as well. And from this point, taking the photo of Earth and on your way, you're in cruise. We are in cruise at this point. Now, this was just a couple of days and so everything's going well right now, or at least reasonably well. And what are you doing during cruise? Like, are you checking on things? Are you making sure stuff's working? Is there surprises that you guys had from your two spacecraft? So we're four days into the mission. The spacecraft, both spacecraft, have checked out fairly well. Nothing is surprising us yet on here. And we have to travel six and a half months and 300 million miles to get to Mars. Interesting thing is we actually have to count for the plants that are all moving on us. We're aiming for a target that's not there yet. But right now we're aiming to the wrong place. We talked about the trajectories earlier. We need to slowly move ourselves to Mars and we do that with trajectory correction maneuvers, these burns along the way. Each spacecraft has up to five burns planned. We might change things there and the way we strategized is we're going to let insight do whatever it needs to do and once we know exactly where they are, we're going to go somewhere where they're not right there. We don't want to run into them along the way. We're tens of thousands of kilometers away, but still there's always that slight chance. So for the next couple of months, it's supposed to be a little bit calmer, prep for entry to sent in landing, do some tests and roughly 11 days into the mission, Wally limped up to his namesake and suddenly went way out of control. Started spinning like mad, losing contact with the deep space network and we quickly determined that we had a propulsive leak on board. Gas was leaking out of our propulsive system and just causing us to spin. If you've seen Apollo 13, it was a lot like that there. We kicked the managers out of mission control as they were slowly encroaching closer and closer and just had to deal with the problem. Took us about 72 hours to figure out exactly what was going on, how to relearning how to fly the spacecraft and get things under control. And when this first started, we were losing contact every five minutes. So couldn't even get commands into it to really get data back. What happened was with the propulsive system, some kind of leak occurred. We knew there was one internal. There's a couple chambers in there. We developed one on the outside there and if we just let it sit, it's liquid inside the spacecraft, it expands into a gas. Too much liquid would go in there and basically give a kick and cause the spacecraft to suddenly turn rapidly. We changed our behavior to do a commanded kick every 15 minutes. And this followed through now for the rest of the mission that we had to account for this. It slowed down the kick, it allowed us to stabilize and we also got a little bit smart and had that kick move us out towards Mars a little bit each time. So we directed a little to get us out there. And while Wally continued to fly around the solar system, he went the wrong direction towards Mars to begin with and then we got him there. He actually arrived at Mars closer to his target than even Eva did, which was a sleek, clean, beautiful trajectory all the way out there. That's fantastic. So you literally turned that problem and made it an advantage for it there. At least to some level on there. Many times throughout Wally lived up to his namesake. And Mars Mountain in our YouTube chat room is asking a question that I think is pretty relevant to it, which is did they actually need both stats or were there two just for redundancy? It was for redundancy on there. And remember, we were even redundant to the Mars-Akinesis Orbiter for at least recording the data, but we were the only real-time asset to be able to send telemetry back to Earth. And to kind of go back a little bit, Trey Harmon on YouTube is asking, can you describe the propulsion system? And you said it had an influence on how you ended up giving the nicknames to the spacecraft. Yeah, the propulsion system sits about a third to a half of the spacecraft itself really up here. And it has eight different thrusters. Four of the thrusters are for our attitude control. They're canted. They allow us to change how the wheels are reacting. The other four are for trajectories. We can use them to push our spacecraft along and get ourselves towards Mars on there. It uses a cold gas, something called R236FA, which is a refrigerant. It's also what is used in Halon replacement fire extinguishers. And the first time we played with that, we filled a tank, not particularly Marcos on here, by spraying a fire extinguisher into a bucket and pouring that into the spacecraft itself. I just love it. Like all the low, I don't want to necessarily say low tech test methods, but it literally just seems, I don't mean this as like, as an insult or anything, but it literally sounds like seedy or pants kind of going with this. Like that real kind of like 1960s, early space flight kind of way of doing things. Well, it was emerging of different methodologies on here. We thought of a lot of times as MacGyvering things. We have a limited amount of resources and funding. How do we make this test work? Or what do we need to build on here? And if we need it tomorrow, then we're going to figure out how to get it there for tomorrow. Now we have this really cool image right here, which seems pretty relevant for what happens towards the end of cruise. That's right. And that is? That's Mars. And in fact, this is an image about 24 hours out from entry to sense and landing on here. October 2nd was the first time that we actually saw Mars and could capture it. And it was just a tiny little red dot, pale red dot. 24 hours out, we've got this picture. We're getting ready for entry to sense and landing. And soon after this, actually Sunday morning and EDL again was on Monday, Wally disappeared on us. Yeah, actually lost the signal for Wally. So we had all sorts of fun that last 24 hours that not a lot of people have heard about yet. Oh, Wally was just like a problem. Well, Wally, yeah. Wally was an interesting little spacecraft, but did quite well in there. Came back 6 o'clock, 5 a.m. the next morning, which was beautiful to see right on time. But 45 minutes later, Eva disappeared. And now we're four hours away from EDL. The cameras are there. Everybody's getting ready to see this data in real time. So it's really the Marco show at that point and no one's coming to play. So what happens? Because I mean like you've got to get that ready to go. Yeah. How do you do it? So we're in 14 in the morning. Both spacecraft show up on time. We've already loaded all the sequences. We're just tweaking things at this point. And what had happened was there's a Star Tracker, basically a small telescope on here that helps us align and figure out how to orient ourselves. It was blinded by Mars. We were so close to Mars that Mars shine blinded the Star Tracker. As soon as we were even closer and the Star Tracker was kind of pointing down to the side, no longer with Mars in field of view. They're like, oh, I know where I am. Or oriented themselves, came online. And then about a half hour later, InSight hit the atmosphere of Mars. And at that point, as InSight was going through entry descent and landing, deploying a parachute, slowing itself down, going onto rocket thrusters and landing on the surface, we were getting the signal back over UHF and then sending it back over X-Band to Earth itself. And what was the signal rate? Because a lot of our questions in the chat room are basically like, how fast were we getting the data back at? InSight was transmitting at eight kilobit per second. So about 8,000 bits per second on there. We had to add a couple of frames, a little bit of information about Marco. It was still eight kilobits per second out. So while there is a slight lag along the way, there were pre-programmed times when InSight was not transmitting data. So we basically caught up and we were by the time it hit the surface only a couple of seconds behind. And what was the time delay from Mars to Earth on that day? That was eight minutes and seven seconds. Okay, so basically you were, once EDL started, InSight had, once you got the signals coming back that EDL had started, InSight was already essentially on the surface, either intact or in a crater for a whole minute by that point. That's right. And did your team have to do anything while the transmissions were coming back? Well, while the transmissions were coming back, we were evaluating what the signal quality essentially was. We had two spacecraft coming in. Everybody else on the InSight side was relying on our data coming down. So we had to tell them use Marco A or use Marco B along the way. We wanted to make sure we knew what the health of our spacecraft were. If a signal drops out, is it InSight? Is it Marco? What is going on there? And we were sending a few commands there based on what we were receiving to say, we've got all the data or we need to retransmit this actually after entry to sent and landing. You could almost say that the only ones actually flying spacecraft in the room right then was the Marco team. Everybody else was just watching the data. And how did Marco work? Marco worked brilliantly. So Wally, our problem child, got 97% of all data back from InSight. Eva was 94%. And the Margie-Kinesis Orbiter, this big, venerable, sophisticated spacecraft, they only got 76% of the data back during that. So we did very well during that. You beat something much more sophisticated and much more, should I say heritage built as opposed to something like Marco. And really, I think it comes down to we were able to take each of these spacecraft and optimize the trajectory to go by Mars, really find the ideal places for it to be where MRO is constrained to an orbit. Yeah, it's almost a little unfair to kind of compare them together because they're two different beasts doing two completely different things. But it really shows if you can build something that is specialized for a task at low cost in here, it opens up new opportunities. And what happened after that EDL that morning? What'd you guys do with them? Well, that morning was for us not only about the descent of inside itself, but we passed by Phobos in the way in, we passed by Deimos in the way out. So we had another three hours of operations that were going on in the background and we were able to take some great photos of Mars on the way in. And this is what we call our farewell to Mars on here. Inside landed just in this upper corner. And when you look closely, you can actually see various volcanoes of Mars and features there. And we're like, this is our CubeSat. This is what I carried in my backpack underneath the seat in front of me on an airplane that made it out there. We flew on. So we did say goodbye to Mars and entered into this really large elliptical orbit around the sun, heliocentric there, and maintained contact for about another six weeks with each of the spacecraft before we lost communications. And what'd you do in those six weeks with them? For us, it was mostly downloading images more than anything else. And the history of all the data that had happened during entry to scent landing. They're a tech demo. We wanna learn from these guys. And so we started to perform more experiments on how do we stabilize these? How long can we communicate with the spacecraft on here and what can we learn from them to help missions into the future? And then the eventual loss of communications, was it just because you reached so far away that it just didn't have the power anymore to transmit back? It was really what we believed to be a complicated story on here where we got far enough away from the sun that the sun sensors on their board, these sensors up here, couldn't detect, the sun was so dim, they thought it was a glint. So it kept looking for the sun and not finding it causing the spacecraft to move a little bit out of control. And of course, we were getting further away and the power was decreasing there. So unfortunately that was when we lost them. Yeah, and actually on our YouTube chat room, Roll Santos was asking how far would they work given that they rely on solar panels? And a lot of folks were actually asking about how far would these work if you could make them work well enough to survive that? Well, the solar panels gave us about 35 watts at Earth, about 17 watts out at Mars in there. And we could really decrease the power usage of the spacecraft, but it comes down to thermal. We have heaters on board, we're gonna start losing power for that and cutting down in there. Depending on how you designed or how you cycled things, you could go significantly further out, but it would change the entirety of the mission. So how do you folks at JPL sort of look at the mission internally? Do you look at it as like this was a complete success, this was a home run, this was like absolutely amazing for what we were expecting it to be? Absolutely, this really changed expectations for what small spacecraft could do in deep space, not only for JPL, but for NASA as a whole and around the world. We had messages from the European Space Agency and the Japanese Space Agency that specifically say that they're now funding small spacecraft into the solar system because of the success of Marco. So Marco was sort of like the gateway that opened up CubeSats in order to start becoming interplanetary vehicles. It certainly opened up the possibilities for those and for people to look at these missions slightly differently. There are many lessons we're taking forward, there are many pieces of technology that we're taking forward and now on the SLS mission, the first one, there will be 13 CubeSats from around the world that are launching to the moon, to asteroids and into deep space. And you know, there was tons of questions in our chat room. I mean, there's literally like 20 or 30 of you all together that basically asked, are there any sort of Marco-like missions on the books in the future right now? So those ones for SLS, like what are we looking at with those and is there anything beyond that first flight of SLS? Well, we're definitely looking for it as much as possible. One of the ones beyond SLS is Lunar Trailblazer that was just selected to at least advance towards the preliminary design review that's headed out to the moon. SLS itself has, I think, four or five missions that will go into lunar orbit there It also carries Neoscout, which will use a solar sail and head out to an asteroid. It has bioscentinal from NASA Ames that will be looking to inform ourselves on how we can help protect astronauts. They have various bacteria and such that they're looking at radiation effects on there. And from this point, not only are we doing tech demos and science experiments, but we're trying to do full science missions with these types of craft. I'd love to fly these through Plumes of Enceladus or down to the surface of comets on there, where it's dirty dollar dangerous that we can't send something bigger. We always say that for drones and it applies equally here. Yeah, so you kind of hinted at maybe doing entire missions with them, but do they work a little bit better as more like a compliment to a really big mission or are they going to reach the point where we could literally just do a CubeSat mission out to say Enceladus? It really kind of depends on what you're looking at. We see them as a way to give us new vantage points, whether that vantage point is providing a critical data support, such as for insight on there, or if you flew many of them, being able to map out the solar winds. You can't do that with a single large spacecraft. You have to distribute yourself or really into these areas that we aren't willing to send a larger spacecraft because it is too expensive, too risky to get there. So I think it's gonna be complimentary and independent depending on what you're trying to do. So we have a question from Shrews Giuliani on YouTube which is asking, why not use lasers for communication and alignment with the Earth instead of the sun? And I think that's probably mostly just because you wanna make sure the thing works first before we start getting up into the up and coming future of optical communications. And it really is up and coming on here. There are many different NASA experiments towards that and we did want to go with as much proven technology as we could as we were trying out many new experimental things and that's why we went with radio. So what was sort of like the overall thing that Marko ended up teaching JPL? I think the biggest thing that Marko taught JPL is if you use a small team on a very focused goal along the way here, you can accomplish a big mission with taking appropriate risk. And there will always be a debate on what risk is appropriate and what you're trying to get back there but it certainly showed that something's possible. And what was your favorite thing about Marko? So one of my favorite things on Marko was actually the team itself. It was a small team. We worked together really from cradle to grave with respect to the spacecraft there and that was the most fun. But the most interesting technical piece is something that we haven't touched on yet. When we lost our propulsive system due to the leak or didn't trust it as much, we needed to still desaturate those reaction wheels. And so we found we could use the solar panels and the high gain array and use photons from the sun to desaturate those wheels. So instead of one or two burns a day, we ended up with one or two burns to desaturate over the course of the mission on there. So we sailed to Mars basically. So you really cut down on the fuel usage for it and that's like a huge thing for any spacecraft to cut that down. Cause then you extend the lifetime and you allow more operations and other things like that. That's right. Wow, that is just fantastic that you guys were using to sail in on the way to Mars. That's a silent sea as they go with it. There was a really cool question on here that was, I can't see where it was at any more unfortunately, but they were asking, yes, it's Seafit there actually. I'm sorry, Seafit in our chat room is asking, considering the success of Marko A and B, will companion spacecraft become the standard operating procedure for missions similar to this one? So like, was there any consideration for Mars 2020 to have like a little Marko flying with it? At this point, Mars 2020 is not taking anything like Marko along the way there, but there has been somewhat of a consideration at NASA that as we have missions that are going into deep space, secondary missions should be considered there. And there's now a broad call called Simplex with NASA to provide those opportunities and to get science missions involved. And there was also another really good question in there too. I can't see where it's at unfortunately in here, but it was about asking if we could actually potentially use these kinds of CubeSats as landers maybe. So we've been saying everything here as a CubeSat, which is really just a standard form factor. I like to think of them just as small spacecraft in general and whether it is this form factor or something that would be better as a lander there, there's a fun concept of JPL that's been out there called MarsDrop, where they would actually go and try and land something very small on Mars, but it still kind of makes use of the secondary launch capability. So what's MarsDrop do? MarsDrop on there, they were looking at what science instruments might be carried on board. I don't think they have anything particular yet, but there's a number of papers and presentations they've put out there about it. So it literally sounds like you just basically take like a small sat and you just let it enter the atmosphere and then with the land somewhere or just. Yeah, with appropriate heat shields and other things on there. So it doesn't really look like a CubeSat rectangular form factor anymore, but it's the same idea where you're trying to do a focused mission, keep it low cost and potentially you're taking more risk with it. Yeah, and how much did the whole Marko program from start to wrap up cost total? Marko in total, which included all development, launch and operations was 18 and a half million, which for spacecraft is very, very cheap. Yes, quite cheap, especially in interplanetary spacecraft. That's right. Doing that as well. I believe insight was something like 800 million somewhere around there in order to make that work. So wow, that's just like, let's jump change with it going out there. It certainly provides more opportunities and more independent observations that we might be able to make as we pursue science and technology objectives. And Seafit in our chat room also has another really great question, which is what is the next miniaturized instrument on the horizon that could be included on a future CubeSat? And what could that teach us? Well, there's all sorts of instruments that we're now miniaturizing, not only to be on CubeSats, but we were like, wait, if we can make this smaller and make it fit in a CubeSat, that means we can carry more things on our larger spacecraft as well. There's everything from mass spectrometers to radars. In fact, the Hurricane Dorian was viewed by one of our CubeSats up around the earth down into the storm itself at various levels. So now we're taking those technologies and moving them out into the solar system as well. Oh yeah, and getting weight down on spacecraft is pretty essential, as I'm sure you guys up at JPL know. So yeah, just, and that's so cool that there was a CubeSat mission looking at Dorian. I did not know that. Yeah, Tempestee, actually there were two of them that launched together, one called RainCube and one called Tempestee, both from JPL as well. RainCube, they kind of follow each other. RainCube has a KA band radar on top. Tempestee has a radiometer on there, and it basically allows us to look not only at layers of the storm, but at horizontal piece. You can almost think like we're making a grid of the storm and being able to see the internals just with these small, shoebox-sized things. Yeah, and that kind of, I think leads to a little question from SmokeyDurg, which is asking, are you considering sending a small fleet of information to a destination with the same instruments on each in order to array their observations? Well, we kind of did that with Marco, right? We sent two information, loose, loose formation out to Mars there to have the redone seal on the way, but we're certainly looking at that in other places. And for heliophysics, there is a number of missions that we're looking at to make a constellation. So you get many multi-point observations, but together you get a whole new view of what the sun might be doing. Yeah, and one mission that pops into mind with me is MMS, the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission where you had multiple spacecraft flying information to measure the Earth's magnetic field. And because they were in three dimensions, you could get this really nice set of data with it, but it sounds like maybe we could like scattershot 20 or 30 of these sort of like Marco spacecraft and get the same data over a much larger area with much better resolution and really nailed down a lot of the science that we're still kind of, I don't want to say we don't know much about, but we could use a little more information on. Absolutely. Yeah, and just kind of go into, back to our chat room real quick, which there's some very futuristic questions happening here, like Ear Front on YouTube is asking, will this or other similar mini-sats have optical live stream cameras for our touristic needs? So I feel like that's definitely a very far out there kind of thing, but I don't think at eight kilobits per second, you can unfortunately get a nice live stream as you zip and pass Mars. That's certainly the challenge that's in there. And actually I would have loved to take more images as you were going by Mars, but we had a critical event we needed to support on there. So we pretty much turned everything else off, but who knows what we might be able to do. Yeah, and is there like actual serious consideration for using laser or optical communication systems with these? There is, actually there are some CubeSense demonstrating laser communications on orbit right now around the earth, that they're looking at how they can send data back and several different companies are working on that. That's fascinating and that's a big one too because the more data you can get back, the more you can kind of know and then also the more images and other things you can send back, the more science you get out of it, which is good, which is super excellent for everybody, both for you guys in for us as the people watching. And Kurt Kurti on YouTube has a question that I kind of want to ask, which is how excited were you to see the images taken by Marco? The first image of the earth and the moon was one that was just, it was one of the best days on Marco itself. The team that took the sequence and put it together to take that using their model on there, they weren't the ones to see the image first. I was the only one at the time that I could actually get that data and translate it. I saw it, I asked them, wait, did you set this up this way? And then they said, oh, can we see it? I was like, nope. We waited to reveal it for the entire team there and that was one that was a great moment for all of us. And the first image of, or the image of Mars itself, you may, if you watch landing, you may actually be able to see it. I forget where they cut off, because we put it on the screen in the room. I don't think we showed it to publicly until about an hour later during the press conference. Gotcha, wow. So you literally got that back in time and we're like, hey, guess what? We got a fresh photo for you all to take a look at. That's right. So that is so cool to be able to do that with just this little itty bitty thing that we have in front of us. Small but mighty with that there. When you're winding down from a mission, having done everything and losing calm with Marco and kind of working with it, what's some of the stuff that you have to do at the wrap-up of a mission in order to sort of end things? The most important thing for us was lessons learned. This was a demonstration and we wanted to pass the lessons on to a number of other folks on there and that included both internal to JPL as well as speaking to the larger community at conferences, getting papers out about this so that others can build from it. We are always standing on the shoulders of giants with every one of these missions there. And what's exciting for us is that we're seeing technology now be licensed out and being included on other missions. We're seeing the lessons that are directly going forward and even from the team members, the ones that have worked on Marco now working on other missions or larger missions that some of the lessons are being incorporated. And this seems very exciting because the possibilities are like, what can you think of basically and you could maybe do it with one of these? And this week with Rocket Lab and Momentus or excuse me, Relativity and Momentus, talking about teaming up in order to start sending very small sats, even things like CubeSats up to very high orbits, like medium Earth orbit or geosynchronous orbit and maybe like with a Marco spacecraft, maybe even beyond, it just seems like the mission potential is almost endless for these vehicles. It really is, but we have to keep in mind that there is significant risk that comes with these things and that we are choosing them to do something very focused and well. There are places for both our large spacecraft with all the different contextual instruments as well as the small ones doing a very focused mission there. And I'm hoping we're gonna be able to take advantage of both of those things as you go out and explore. But I really like the facts that I can essentially say that this spacecraft, my spacecraft, went out and was able to support us as we continue to explore the solar system. And I wanna see where everyone else wants to go as well. And what do you feel like is sort of that big hurdle that everyone still has to overcome in order to make the standard for flying out there? Well, I think it, like I said, it'll be one of many different things that we fly but propulsion continues to be a major challenge for us. Obviously, we had issues on Marco that we worked through in here, but it showed it was possible. Now as we look at electric propulsion, as we look at other things, more destinations open themselves up to us and we'll come up with new ideas. And what's the most exciting thing about these kinds of missions for you? Is it what they can enable? Is it making the technology smaller? Is it what we end up getting out of those missions? Is it kind of like a combination of all three? Oh, it's definitely a combination on there. I'm excited about what the future may bring and the fact that we can have college students build a spacecraft, launch it and get important data back as well as brand new science, brand new opportunities for us. Yeah, and I just kind of looking at the footage that we have here of you guys working on the flight hardware there. That's just fantastic to be able to see that. Yeah, this is Cody Colley. He was integration and test manager as well as the mission manager during flight on there. And you can tell the spacecraft here, this is Wally, is very, very close to what you have in front of you here. Yeah, it's fascinating. And it's so cool to see that the future is so small with all of these spacecrafts that we're starting to get. Your cell phone is a spacecraft, basically. Yeah, at this point, it could be. It has. They have actually, several keepsets have flown cell phones. Oh, very nice. My favorite is from Surrey where they actually press buttons on there with a little robotic finger. That is just fantastic. No robotic fingers involved in Marko, though, right? No, no. Gotcha. All right. So, Andy, thank you so much for coming out here to talk about Marko. This is just so exciting. And I'm very excited that we actually got a little bit of flight hardware out here that kind of show off as well. And definitely help us out with that. So just fantastic. I'm so excited for the future now. And I'm really excited to see what not just JPL is going to be doing, but what everybody's going to be doing with small satellites, especially keepset-sized satellites. So hopefully we start to see some more interplanetary small satellites. That'd be great. Sure would be nice. So in order to do these shows, we do have to get a little help from folks that watch us here. And we get quite a bit of help from all of you who do watch us. And if you would like to help us out and become the patrons of tomorrow to help crowdfund the shows, you can actually head on over to patreon.com slash tmro or youtube.com slash tmro slash join. And we really like the YouTube option now because it does what Patreon used to allow us to do, which is you can do as little as $1 per month to help support the show. So if you get something out of the show, you are more than welcome to give something back to the show as well. And in addition to that, if you want to help us out, but there's other ways you would like to do so, you can head on over to community.tmro.tv to do that. And of course, always you can hit Subscribe. You hit the bell so that way you get the little notification when we're going live is we're starting to really get into these little sort of live on the spot shows that we call Letting Off Steam or LOS. And we highly recommend it because you don't really want to miss those and there's a lot of those that are coming up pretty, pretty soon. So share the word, let everybody know, let's get everybody excited about space. So that is it for Orbit 12.28. Thank you so much for tuning in and until the next one, keep exploring.