Intro music.
GEORGE DILLER: This is Atlas launch control, T minus 1 hour, 15 minutes, 15 seconds and counting,
EISEN: Well, in 2007 we're launching the Phoenix Scout Lander, and that lander communicates to Earth through a UHF radio.
leading toward a launch this morning at 9 a.m. Eastern Time.
We've heard that the liquid oxygen loading on the Centaur stage is complete and Atlas loading of liquid oxygen is now under way.
We have about 15 percent onboard, so everything is going well and according to the timeline.
Right now, here in the Atlas Space Operations Center, we have with us Howard Eisen,
who is the flight system manager for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Howard, welcome. HOWARD EISEN: Good morning. Thank you.
DILLER: The MRO has, has been here at the Kennedy Space Center for about how long now?
EISEN: We've been down for about three and a half months. We came down on April 29 from building up the spacecraft at Lockheed Martin in Denver.
And we've been working here in the PHSF, the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, since that time.
DILLER: And how many people have been working on it, as a rule of thumb?
EISEN: There's a steady crew down here of about 50 to 55 people at any one time, but for particular operations we bring down whoever we need.
So we might run through another 10 or 15 people on a temporary basis.
DILLER: Now, well, we'll know we'll be able to monitor the spacecraft out at the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory through the Deep Space Network after separation.
Has the team got any unique visibility into what's going on here through their equipment at the ground station here at the Cape?
EISEN: O.K. we do through the boost phase, when we're still attached to the Centaur.
That data actually comes straight down here into the ASOC where we are.
That data is routed out to the MOSB where our team is, and as well as out to Pasadena and out to Denver.
So, all the teams can participate in the early operations.
After separation, the data goes through the Deep Space Network and it's also routed back here to Pasadena and to Denver.
DILLER: So actually, while the Atlas is in flight, you can see what the health of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is as it's going up.
EISEN: That's correct. The only outage we expect is immediately following separation.
It takes about two minutes before the Japanese station picks us up.
DILLER: We've got some tape now that we'll look at of MRO at the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility and here's our arrival.
EISEN: We flew out of Denver very late on the 29 of April. It was a cold and snowy day there and so it took a very long time to get loaded up.
This is a C-17 aircraft provided by the Air Force, landed at the Shuttle Landing Facility
and the spacecraft is in this main container here is the main bus.
Other elements of the spacecraft are in other separate containers.
There's no single container big enough to take the entire spacecraft out here.
After we unloaded from the plane, we went out to our facility, the PHSF,
and the large container was offloaded from a flatbed truck and brought into the airlock area of the facility.
You can see everybody is still in street clothing.
The point of the airlock is to separate the outside environment from the clean environment that we normally work in.
We've now lifted off the cover, we're moving from that airlock into the clean area.
You see everybody in their bunny suits removing protective coverings from the spacecraft.
We can go ahead and do a basic inspection, and we will then lift the spacecraft from this
transporter onto a rotation fixture where we can work with it in a much better environment.
The spacecraft as you see here came with its solar panels and its science instruments and engineering subsystems attached,
but there are a few elements that weren't installed yet.
The solar panels are so large that they limit our access into many of the spacecraft electronics.
So one of the very first things that we wanted to do was do the operations
that required the solar panels to be in place, and then get them out of the way. The team here is working on installing
a "gimbal" mechanism, and that gimbal allows us to attach it,
goes between the solar array and the spacecraft and allows us to articulate the
solar arrays so they can track the Sun as we're going around Mars.
Here the gimbal is being lifted by crane into position. It's being attached to the spacecraft.
Here it is being fastened to the array itself.
And once that installation is done, we're going to take the solar array away now so we can get to the electronics bays that are behind it.
So here a technician is removing the restraint devices that hold the solar array to the vehicle for launch.
We wanted to inspect the solar arrays, make sure they survived the shipment,
and so they're put on a fixture here. The release device is about to be pulled and the array deploys under its own power.
This is very similar to the deployment speed
that we will see in space in hopefully a little bit over an hour and a half.
Excuse me, two and a half hours. It's a little bit slower here because there is air that acts to dampen that movement,
and the array is so large that it represents a large space there.
We're now taking a look at the high-gain antenna. This is a 10 foot across dish.
This is one of the elements that allows us to send back data at a very high rate.
You may have heard that from this spacecraft, we can send data back equivalent to four T1 lines, or
15 times a typical DSL connection someone might have at home.
In this picture, the very lightweight but very large antenna is being attached to the spacecraft.
This is now a bit later, this is a deployment test again.
What you just saw there was the release of two of the bolts that hold the system together.
And there you see the left ones fire. There they go.
The separation nuts are fired, releasing all four elements that hold the array back.
The gimbal that we talked about earlier is articulating the array away from the vehicle.
This is to give it clearance to our ground-support equipment. The sequence in flight is in a
little bit different order, and here it is again deploying.
This image is great 'cause it lets you see the whole size of the vehicle.
That's a 10-foot dish and you're looking at a nine-foot by 20-foot solar array.
And of course, there's another solar array of equal size on the other side.
Due to limitations of processing, we can only deploy one at a time.
Here's the spacecraft now pretty much fully assembled. The big red items there are covers that are
protecting sensitive instruments or thrusters,to make sure we don't damage them on the ground.
We've now completed building up the spacecraft and most of the blanketing.
You can see a lot of the silver and gold blankets on the vehicle.
And now we're transferring over to another stand, which lets us work with the propulsion system and simulate various mission phases.
When we're on the rotation fixture, we can't get to the engines, which you just saw.
On this other stand, we can simulate launch, Mars orbit insertion, trajectory correction maneuvers,
or any other mission phase. And here they're able to verify the operation
of the thrusters in that environment. Once we've finished all of the functional testing,
we're then in the, to the point of getting it ready specifically for integration
with the launch vehicle. And one of the things we need to do is understand where the center of gravity of the system is,
and control it by adding ballast to keep that center of gravity aligned with the thrust axis,
right in the center. So in this case, what we're doing is, we've now moved from the test stand over onto a spin balance table.
So here's the mating operation as we're bringing the spacecraft down, technicians are guiding it in place.
It's attaching to a mockup of a launch vehicle adaptor.
And in a second you'll see the whole vehicle spinning. We spun it up to 5 RPM,
and when you spin a vehicle like that, the offset of the center of gravity from the
physical center of the vehicle produces an off-setting force, and that tells you where to add ballast.
Here we are now, you're seeing the launch vehicle fairing.
We are now on the flight adaptor, and the fairing is being put around us. Once we're mated to the fairing,
they close out the various openings and we get to go out to the pad.
And this image is from two weeks ago, early in the morning, where we rolled out to the pad.
DILLER: Well, Howard, I noticed, in one shot in there, it looked like several thrusters in the bottom. Tell us, once we get to the planet,
how does it get into orbit, and then how does it control itself once it's there?
EISEN: Sure. We have a series of different thrusters on this vehicle. The big ones in the center are
what we call our MOI engines, for Mars Orbit Insertion.
And those engines were actually taken from another mission,
[they] were taken from the Mars Lander that was built to fly in 2001 but never flew.
So those six engines fire together to provide the large amount of thrust that we need to capture into Mars orbit.
Around it are six more engines that are used normally
for the smaller maneuvers that we make: correction maneuvers on the way to Mars,
orbit adjustment maneuvers once we're there. Those engines combine to give us control
while the MOI engines may provide the main thrust. In addition, there are other small engines placed
around the spacecraft that provide attitude control functions when we're not on wheels.
Most of the time, we use things called reaction wheels, which are basically large gyroscopes, and we have four of those on the system
and they allow us to maintain control without using thrusters.
DILLER: Based on how much fuel's on board and, and other things,
what's the nominal length of mission that this will have, and how much longer might it go?
EISEN: Well, the nominal mission for MRO has been defined as about two Earth years of science observation,
followed by two years of relay operations for the missions that we're
sending to the surface in 2007 and 2009. But we've looked ahead and we know these vehicles tend to be very reliable,
and so we've loaded at least enough fuel to be able to run the mission out through 2015.
And in fact, when we delivered the vehicle, it turned out we were kind of light.
And so we loaded enough extra fuel for a few more years,
so there's no reason to believe MRO won't be at Mars for 10, 12, 15 years, continuing to provide science and relay.
DILLER: And, and that's a good point about the relay. It is going to be relaying from what, to what?
And that UHF radio on the lander talks to our
UHF package, which is called Electra. So we receive their data and then we forward it to Earth through our big antenna.
We can do the same thing for 2009,
where the Mars Science Laboratory is going, and any other missions NASA decides to send in the upcoming years.
DILLER: So besides being a science orbiter, it is a relay station, as well. EISEN: We are a Mars communication hub.
DILLER: Well, Howard, thank you very much and we wish all the best.
I know you're going to be very interested in what data you're seeing as the spacecraft is
flying along with the rocket for the first, what, 55 minutes or so.
EISEN: Absolutely. DILLER: Thanks very much, Howard. EISEN: Thank you.