WEBVTT FILE

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[somber music]

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On 21 August, 1993, a tragic event occurred.

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Communications with the Mars Observer
spacecraft were lost

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during a sequence referred to as the pressurization sequence.

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This was a sequence in preparation

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for insertion to orbit about Mars.

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Once again, I mean, we are always trying things

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because they're hard,
not not because they're easy.

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And so once in a while,
we're going to have a failure

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because we are trying hard things.

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But I had been fully anticipating that we
could have problems with this instrument.

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This was a new ballgame completely, okay.

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But I was not concerned
about the spacecraft.

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It never crossed my mind
that the spacecraft would let us down.

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So this was a blow in the sense of, wow,

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something I completely didn't expect.

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[music]

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You know, we held out hope for a while,

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that maybe it would come back,

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maybe they'd find it or recover it
or something, and then

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eventually that settles down
and you realize the mission was lost.

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I was devastated.

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I think we all were.

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And it was--it really wasn't clear at the time

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whether we were going to have a

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follow on to actually

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do what the mission was supposed to do.

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So that was extremely hard to take.

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What made it easier
is the amount of time we had for grieving

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was actually pretty short.

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NASA decided that we want to continue
this and go back to Mars,

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and so we had to snap out of it
literally and get back to thinking about

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and fighting for the next mission, which was Mars Global Surveyor.

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It was a difficult time, and

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it was the first time I think I really felt

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I had to get in there and argue with my colleagues.

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But as the PI, particularly for me,

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that we needed to get to back to Mars
and we needed to get back

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with this instrument,

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knowing that they couldn't carry all six
or seven instruments, only four would go.

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The laser altimeter had to be one of them.

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Okay.

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The engineers had a chance to kind of

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just, not change it, but, you know, do
certain things a little bit better.

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That's what engineers like to do is

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fix all the first round mistakes

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in the second round and make new ones.

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We were asked immediately, how long will it take

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you to rebuild another copy of MOLA?

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How much is it going to cost?

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Can you get your team back together in time?

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Do you have the parts?

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So there was immediately
a flood of things we had to do.

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Jim Abshire brought me in
for the detector engineer

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who would just left
Goddard at the time.

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So I was lucky to join the team
working on the detectors.

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We were only given, I think, three years
to rebuild it, which is shorter than usual.

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And everyone,

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all the management knew that means there's
no wiggle room in your schedule.

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But the team was largely still there
and everyone's

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geared up to redo it
since the first one didn't make it.

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So everyone really want to do it again,

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and do it right.

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While the Goddard team was building
MOLA-2 for the Mars

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Global Surveyor mission,
a small team seized

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a long awaited opportunity
to hitch a ride on the Space Shuttle

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with an experiment
known as the Shuttle Laser Altimeter.

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I think confidence
comes from demonstration.

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Sometimes you have to do more.

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Sometimes you have to do less.

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Working personally to build that instrument.

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We built it at Goddard in our lab down the hall

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without any fancy paperwork
or flight procedures or anything.

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We just built it.

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I was hired then

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to come on board working on the Shuttle Laser Altimeter,

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and I was brought in specifically
to work on precise positioning,

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precise pointing and precise geolocation
of the surface footprints.

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And we tested it on the roof,
shined it over to a bank building

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eleven kilometers away, lined it up,
and it was ready for the Shuttle.

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It was a Hitchhiker Special
that we flew with

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help from NASA Headquarters on the Space
Shuttle Endeavour.

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Booster ignition
and liftoff of Endeavour in pursuit

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of a Japanese satellite. [radio chatter]

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They turned it on for us and
the first time they turned it on,

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the Shuttle's upside down with the laser
pointing at Earth.

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We were over the Middle Pacific.

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First light showed all this fuzz
over the surface of the Earth.

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We're all looking.

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We thought we got something wrong.

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We realized later we were seeing
the boundary layer clouds over the ocean.

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When we came over land,
the fuzz was the height of the trees.

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All of a sudden the laser pulses

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got shorter and shorter distances.

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The first landfall of the Shuttle Laser
Altimeter and the first orbit

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went right over the summit of the Mauna
Kea volcano in Hawaii.

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Well, we're extraordinarily delighted
to report that the Shuttle Laser

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Altimeter experiment--it's a Hitchhiker

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experiment on STS-72--has performed absolutely nominally.

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In fact, everything has worked even beyond our expectation--

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And that was a genuine first light

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experience with MOLA technology,

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but on Earth.

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Really had to get those datasets out there

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and you had to get a couple people
that really bought into it

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and built on it
and convinced others that this worked.

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As the data from the Shuttle Laser
Altimeter began to convince some skeptics.

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The Goddard team finished the MOLA instrument.

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Again.

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Our MOLA team
really came through, was just really

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another great experience for many of us,
including me.

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We're able to deliver to the Mars Global
Surveyor project and it got launched.

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And we have liftoff of NASA's
Mars Global Surveyor

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as America begins
its journey back to the Red Planet.

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[radio chatter]

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When Mars Global Surveyor
started getting closer to Mars,

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we were going to go into this
aerobraking phase.

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That was an opportunity that we had

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to go ahead and turn on the lasers
and see if we could track the surface.

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[room chatter]

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In Station 45 was having problems
locking up to the two tape data.

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What was that?

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You said 1607 or 16--

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Can you tell

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if MOLA is turned off?

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[radio and room chatter]

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Is that the nadir event?

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That must be the nadir event.

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I'm hungry. You didn't really want those sandwiches--
[room chatter]

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Look at the laser beam coming back, Rob.

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[Lots of chatter].

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It's going to be too fast,
and I've got too much data coming in.

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[cheering and applause]

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Look at that!

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Yeah, look, there's a little tiny terrace.

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This is the first profile of a crater
we've ever seen on a planet.

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Rob, nice laser!

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We have Mars finally!

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12 years!

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All right, let's take a look.

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[room chatter]

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Over a decade later

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the Goddard team had proof:

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planet-scale laser altimetry worked.

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It could map distant craters and valleys and mountains.

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It changed the game.

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Today, we've ushered in a new era
in the remote sensing of Mars.

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And this particular dataset
that we've acquired has in fact enabled us

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to generate what we consider

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a very detailed description
of the shape of the planet Mars.

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This has significant implications
for the flow of water early on Mars.

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We believe this is one of the

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youngest features on the planet.

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We're seeing a planet
is very different from Earth,

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and is telling us something
about the Earth in an indirect way

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that says that not everything works
in the way that we originally had in mind.

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The kind of measurements that we're making
now are allowing us to,

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you know, characterize Mars
on timescales of days to years now,

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and then the next step
is to try to go back eons and

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try to figure out what changed on Mars.

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I mean, at that time, we used to brag that
Mars was mapped better than the Earth.

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The accuracy of MOLA was so good,

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and and after a couple of years,
the coverage was so good,

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it was definitely a more accurate map
of a planet than any planet.

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And this came out of
"it can't be done" in the mid eighties

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to a tool that we now accept as the standard.

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For those of us that worked on MOLA,

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it was transformative.

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It wasn't a destination or a place

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that we were as much as a place that we would become.

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In some ways, we were in demand

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to consider whether we could

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provide a laser altimeter

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to another mission.

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Things were not working
the way we expected them to,

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and there were mysteries,
and we weren't expecting--after MOLA

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in particular--to have mysteries at that point.