finished building a spacecraft that's going to Mars.

This is Ask NASA and I'm here to answer your questions.

As humans we're naturally curious right? We're natural born explorers it's

in our curiosity that we want to explore outside of Earth and explore Mars,

understand what type of resources they have,

can it sustain human life. Personally my biggest worry is just making sure that

the pieces that I designed and i worked on work.

We've gone through extensive testing and it's become your child and you just want

to see it do its best when it gets to to perform on the surface of Mars.

So there are a lot of really cool instruments on board the Perseverance

rover. One in particular that happens to be my

favorite is MOXIE. and the purpose of MOXIE is to try to

take some of the Mars atmosphere and convert that into oxygen and the

oxygen - the pure oxygen - can be used to generate fuel for a return flight

home in the future from Mars, or could also be utilized for humans

breathing air when we do have manned missions.

I think the biggest challenge is making sure that you're

setting up your tests to represent the environments that they're

going to see. There's a very large temperature gradient

from the floor up to the top of the rover. We have a chamber that simulates

the heat and the radiation from the Sun so we need to make sure that all the

hardware and components that are on there

can withstand a wide range of temperatures. We get

wind on Mars which blows up dust so we veered away

from solar panels to power the rover. And the atmosphere that we'll see

on the journey to and on another planet are very important.

I joined the ATLO team which is assembly test and launch operations

and that's where all the piece parts of the hardware that all the individual

engineers have designed built and tested come together. And we as the ATLO team

put all those pieces together to build the spacecraft. I was responsible for

building the aeroshell, and the aeroshell consists of a back

shell on the top and a heat shield on the bottom and

that's the capsule that the rover and the descent stage sit

inside.

The Ingenuity is mainly a proof of concept to test new technology on the

surface of Mars, right, we've never flown anything on

another planet before, so this will be the first

time that we do. And it's also going to give us some really cool aerial

shots from up above and allow us to see the terrain ahead

for the Perseverance rover. So the Ingenuity helicopter

is actually stored at the bottom of the rover underneath,

we have what's called a belly pan that ejects with pyrotechnic devices

to then allow the helicopter to drop onto the surface and stand up once the

rover drives away. And then it'll take flight from there

So they're more like robot brothers, but they serve

- they're both stationed on two totally different

locations on the surface of Mars and as slow as they go,

i don't think it's very likely that they'll ever meet up.

But they both have very important but different

jobs to do on the surface of Mars. So Perseverance has

this really cool robotic arm and at the the end of the robotic arm it has a

drill and a bunch of different drill bits, so

based on the type of dirt or rock that we want to

to take samples of, it selects the right bit.

And then it starts drilling these these samples that will be,

we call them core samples. So they're these little slender

core samples from the dirt that get put

into a test tube looking metallic tube, and then sealed airtight

so that we can preserve the sample for when we do come and pick them back

up. I think the name Perseverance has been very suiting

and has been - has hit really close to home for me,

because everyone who worked on it did have to persevere

in order to make this mission a reality. This year there's support from

other countries who help build instruments,

from colleges from we have interns and co-ops we have scientists we have

engineers. I mean there's so many people who come together

to make a mission like this happen. I'm honored to be a part of this team

who have built something absolutely amazing,

and that's traveling to another planet. Like how cool is that?

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