Well good evening everyone and welcome to the 2021 virtual Grand Canyon Star Party.
I'm Ranger Rader Lane, the National Park Service coordinator for the event, and for 31 years
running, Grand Canyon has been celebrating our pristine night skies through the annual
Grand Canyon Star Party. Now ordinarily we invite hundreds of astronomers and thousands
upon thousands of visitors to the park for eight nights to enjoy some of the darkest
night skies in the United States. Now each evening is typically kicked off with a special
guest speaker in our theater followed by telescope viewing, constellation tours, night sky photography
workshops, and much much more. Next year's Grand Canyon Star Party is June 18th through
the 25th, 2022, and mark your calendars and hopefully we'll be able to celebrate that
on site next year. This year we are bringing Grand Canyon Star Party into the virtual realm
once again and we're really excited we have a whole host of incredible speakers and telescope
viewing sessions for you to enjoy, and before we introduce uh our special guest speaker
this evening, I just have a few entities I would like to thank from the National Park
Service for help in supporting this event. Number one I would like to thank Grand Canyon
Conservancy. Now they're the park's official non-profit partner and they do amazing work
helping to preserve the dark skies in Grand Canyon and beyond. I'd like to thank the International
Dark Sky Association, they're the entity that certified Grand Canyon National Park as an
International Dark Sky Park back in June of 2019. Thank you to the Tucson Amateur Astronomy
Association, they're the entity that comes up and has been coming up for decades at this
point to volunteer their time, share their telescopes and equipment and expertise to
the visitors of Grand Canyon for this annual event, so thank you so much to them. And finally
for the society, thank you to the Society for Cultural Astronomy in the American Southwest.
They are a group that has helped us to organize many of our special guest speakers this year.
And with that, I want to introduce tonight's special guest speaker. Tonight we are honored
and excited to have with us Aaron Yazzie. Now Aaron Yazzie is a mechanical engineer
at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where he designs mechanical systems
for NASA's robotic space research missions with a focus on planetary sample acquisition
and handling. His most extensive contributions are for missions to the planet Mars. Aaron
was born in Tuba City, Arizona and was raised in Holbrook, Holbrook, Arizona right, right
here in Grand Canyon region. Aaron is a Sequoia Fellow and professional member of the American
Indian Science and Engineering Society. In 2016 Yazzie was honored by the Navajo Nation
council for, quote, "serving as an inspiration to Diné youth and citizens," and in 2019
Aaron Yazzie received the NASA JPL Bruce Murray award for "Outstanding and consistent dedication
in promoting inclusion and excitement in science and education, especially among indigenous
communities." Aaron thank you so much for joining us we are so excited to have you.
Oh I'm so excited to be with you guys too. I mean virtually, but it's really nice to
hear from people back home.
Absolutely, take it away.
Okay so I'm, once again I'm really
excited and happy to be with you guys tonight. I am going to be talking to you guys a lot
about my recent mission, the past five years that I spent working on the Mars Science Laboratory—oh
sorry, not the Mars Science Laboratory, the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover . I'm gonna pull
up some slides, there's a lot of them to get through, so hopefully we can get through them
pretty quickly and have some time for a chat afterwards.
Okay...
Okay. First off let me just reintroduce yourself, uh, myself in my own language.
Yá’át’ééh, everybody! [Hello, everybody]
Shí éí Aaron Yazzie yinishyé. [My name is Aaron Yazzie]
Ashįįhí nishłį́. [I am of the Salt Clan]
Tódích’íí’nii bashishchiin. [I am born for the Bitter Water Clan]
Kiyaa'áanii dashicheii [My maternal grandfather’s clan is Towering House]
Tó'áhání dashinalí [My paternal grandfather’s clan is Near Water]
Ákót’éego diné nishłį́ [In this way, I am a Navajo man]
T’iisyaakin déé’ naashá [I am from Holbrook, Arizona]
Shimá dóó shizhé’é éí Shirley dóó Kee Yazzie wolyé [My mother and father are Shirley and Kee Yazzie]
Hi everybody, my name is Aaron Yazzie. I'm of
the Salt Clan, born for the Bitter Water clan. My mother's father's clan is the Towering
House People, and my father's father's clan is the Near the Water People. I was originally
born in Tuba City, Arizona, right close to the Grand Canyon. Actually my mom's side of
the family is from Cameron area, Shadow Mountain, and there are small parts of the canyon that
reach all the way out into that area, so I feel very at home there. My father's side
of the family is from Black Mesa Kayenta area which is up near Monument Valley, so I'm from,
I have deep roots with my family back on the Navajo Nation, and I just have been blessed
by being surrounded by just beautiful natural wonders of the world like that. And I think
that now my job at NASA working with stuff that are exploring Mars, it's just another,
another extension of exploring beautiful rock formations and land forms and geology. So
without further ado, let's start.
So this is a picture, or a slide showing side-by-side images, one on the left of Mars. This is the
foothills of Gale Crater on Mars taken by the Curiosity rover. Picture on the right
was taken by my older brother of me standing on the Navajo nation near Tuba City, Arizona.
If you've ever driven between Flagstaff and, say, Page, just before if you were going towards
Tuba City you would see these foothills off to the right, the Painted Desert area. You
can see the similarities between these two landforms—the colors of the hills, the way
they look like they were formed, there's also just the way that the pebbles are laying at
the feet. Here's another great picture to compare. So on the left is a picture of me
standing on a little cliff near Lake Powell, Arizona, and then on the right is a picture
of Vera Rubin Ridge taken on Mars by the Curiosity rover. Once again similar shapes of the cliffs,
rock formations, the layers, the way that the colors of the layers show up. Here are
two more pictures taken by the Curiosity rover of Mars. You can see some mesas, some hills,
some little sand dunes, and then here's a picture of, actually, the area where my grandparent's
house is near Shadow Mountain, Arizona, actually very close to the Grand Canyon. And I really
like to show all these pictures side by side to really bring home the fact that Mars and
Earth are related planets. I like to call them cousins—they have the same origin story,
they're related, the way that they developed over billions of years is the same. So here
on Earth the way rock formations and land formations like this might form is through
billions of years of forces like earthquakes, volcanoes, erosion caused by wind and weather
but also by water flowing over certain areas. All of that stuff exists on Mars as well.
So just like Earth has earthquakes, Mars has marsquakes. Just, they have volcanoes, they
have, they have a little bit of wind, but they also had flowing water all over Mars,
and that's what helped shaped the way that the deserts of Mars look today. Which is why
they look so similar to a region like Northern Arizona. So both of them are terrestrial planets,
they're both rocky planets, and when we study Mars we're actually trying to study the way
that it developed over billions of years, and then more importantly now, the way that
life might have developed on a planet like Mars over billions of years. And so we're
learning a lot about a planet that is very similar to ours, we're learning a lot about
our own history, and so that's why I think it's important that we study Mars. And in
the past we've, we certainly are infatuated with Mars, so we've sent a lot of missions
there. Here's just a sort of a family picture of a lot of past missions and present missions
that we've sent to Mars. The one at the bottom is the little robot called Sojourner. It's
about the size of a microwave on wheels, and it was really just the first robot we sent
there to prove that we could drive anything on that planet. Mars is kind of a harsh place
for robots, it's very cold, and it's very dusty, that can get inside mechanisms, and
so we wanted to prove that we could drive anything there, and Sojourner proved that
for us. And so once we did that, we wanted to go with more science on a robot, and so
we sent the Mars Exploration Rover. We actually sent two of them, those are the ones that
we've named, or they're known by the twin rovers, and their names were Spirit and Opportunity.
Those two rovers were sent to Mars to search for signs of life—er, sorry, they were searching
for signs of water on the planet, and they were able to successfully achieve that mission.
They found that Mars once had lakes, and it had rivers, flowing all over it, which is
really exciting because we know that if there's water on a rocky planet like Mars, that there's
a possibility that life could have existed there. And so that's what got scientists thinking
that maybe we should send a bigger rover, with its own laboratory inside of it, so we
sent the Mars Science Laboratory rover, which is the big rover you see in the back. It's
about the size of a small SUV, weighs about one ton, it stands about seven feet tall,
and so in the body of that rover is an entire laboratory that is that is able and capable
to study rocks. And the way that we study those rocks is by acquiring samples of them
by drilling into the rocks with a giant drill on an arm. It creates this powder that we
then pass off into the science instruments, and it was looking to see any signs in, within
Mars's rocks, in geology, If they're, if all the conditions were right and appropriate
for life to even exist on that planet. Because we know that water was there, at some point,
but what about everything else you need for life to exist? That's what Curiosity was looking
for. And it achieved its mission. It said yes, it has everything that life needs to exist
in, as as we know it, on a planet. And so what we really wanted to do was find out once
and for all if life existed there at some point. And so that's why we sent Mars
2020, the Perseverance rover. Perseverance you can see, it's the one on the far left, it
looks exactly, it looks very similar to the Mars Science Laboratory, and that's because
we used a lot of the same designs. The wheel rocker-bogie system, the "mast"
which is sort of like the rover's head, is very similar, a lot of the cameras are the
same, the arm design is the same, the body of the rover is the same, the batteries
are the same. What's different about it is that, with the Mars 2020 rover we wanted
to drill into rocks again with a giant drill on the end of an arm, but we, instead of turning
it into a powder and studying the powder on Mars, we wanted to extract a nice preserved
core of rock from the rocks that we drill into, save them inside sample tubes so that
we can bring them back to Earth, and study them here on Earth and look for signs of ancient
life. So that's the purpose of Perseverance.
And so that's the major question that we're
trying to answer with this rover, "Was there ever life on Mars?" and so, the reason why we
think that this is possible, that there was life there, is that, here on Earth we
have examples of living, what we call microbial life. These are what we call Stromatolites
that existed a really long time ago. It was the first forms of life that ever came to be on Earth,
and they formed inside water. And so you can see a picture of that, there on the left. We've
also found examples of that in its fossilized form, so that means scientists were able to
see, "Oh yes these microbial life, these stromatolites existed on Earth at the earliest point of
its development," and so they believe that if we can find the same thing on Mars, because
Mars and Earth were on a similar origin story, a similar track, there's a possibility
we could find those fossils on Mars as well. And so how do we do that? We drill into the
rocks, and we get cores. So similar to the ones you see on the bottom, geologists here on Earth
will extract rock cores from, from all the rocks that they want to study. And it nicely
preserves all the layers, and that's how we can study and and look for all of those ancient
microbial life forms. So that's what we wanted to do on Mars.
So we are sending the Perseverance rover to an area on Mars called Jezero Crater, which
was a giant crater, created by a giant impact very similar to Meteor Crater near Flagstaff,
Arizona, and at one point they believed that this crater was filled in by water, making
a giant lake. And this giant lake was probably about the size of Lake Tahoe, and at one
end of it, you can see the area that is circled in green there. If you look at the very
left edge of it, it looks like there's a tiny little, maybe like, canyon that might be snaking
into there. We believe that was some kind of river, or some waterway that was flowing
into that big lake, and that created a nice alluvial fan at the bottom of that lake. And
so if we were to send our rover right there, we could study all of the rocks in that area,
the geology in that area, and not only see what might have settled down at the bottom
of this really old lake, but also all the sediments that were coming down from the foothills through
from that river. And here's the way we're going to do it: the rover, the Perseverance rover.
This big rover, like I said, has an arm with a big drill at the end of it, and the drill
uses a set of drill bits, to drill into the rocks and get the three different
types of samples that we want. So we're actually able to get three different, we're actually
able to use the drill for three different types of sampling. One of them is to grab
a rock core. The rock core is, once we extract, is going to be about half an inch in diameter
and maybe two and a half inches long, and you can see that picture down in the bottom left,
in the middle is a type of bit that we use to get loose sand. And so if you were to
barrow this this drill bit into, say a sand dune or something, you can extract an amount
of loose sand. And then on the right is what we call a rock abrasion. So this is another
type of drill bit that we use to just really remove the top layer of a rock so that
we can get a nice, use the other science instruments on the rover's arm to get
really nice images of that unweathered, protected layer of the rock. And so that brings
us to what my actual part was on the mission: I was the lead engineer for all of the
rovers drill bits. So here is a picture in the top left of me and my team posing in
front of the set of bits that are actually on Mars right now. We just finished building
them in our super clean room, and we're all smiling ear to ear. Of course you can't see
it because we're covered head to toe in what we call a bunny suit, and we have to wear these
bunny suits, these crazy clean bunny suits, because when we're studying Mars for signs
of life, we have to be super cautious and careful about keeping them clean, and making sure that
there's no contamination on them. And humans are super dirty! We carry around with us a
bunch of hair that falls out, and our skin falls off, and we carry, we have dirt on
us, and we have cat hair on us, and all this stuff. So when we're working on these parts
we have to make sure that we're covered head to toe to make sure that we keep it super
clean. But then for our parts, because they are touching these samples these very important
samples, we had to wear another layer of sterile garments, sterile goggles, and sterile gloves,
in order to even enter the room that holds these parts. So, what you're seeing is just
an incredibly clean room, and incredibly clean humans, in front of incredibly clean drill
bits that are on Mars right now. And so lined up in the picture on the right is all
of them lined up. The tall one on the left is, that is what we call the regolith bit. That's
the one that's going to grab that loose, loose rocky material or sand. The six ones next
to it are our coring bits, and both the coring bits and the regolith bit are actually
hollow on the inside. And what actually goes inside them is a sample tube. So the picture
on the bottom left is a sample tube. That, that piece fits right inside the back of our
drill bits, and then when we actually use them to get the samples, the sample will actually
go right inside of that sample tube, so that we can pull that sample tube out at the end,
and it's nicely preserved right inside that sample tube. And then going back to that
top right picture, the far right two drill bits, those little short ones, are our abrading
bits. And then down in the bottom right, that picture is just showing the different
types of rock cores that we hope to get. We know that we're gonna encounter a bunch
of different types of rocks, and all of them are interesting to us, and so that was interesting
because, we when we're designing these drill bits and designing this whole drilling system,
we knew that we were gonna encounter a bunch of different types of rocks that might
be really hard, or they might be really soft, or they might break apart easy, and so we
had to really design a system that could adapt to all kinds of things. And we're looking
at things like mudstone, and gypsum, and tuff, and sandstone, and basalts, all that kind
of stuff. So what we're hoping is that by the end of this whole mission, all of these, these
rock cores that you see in the bottom right, we would have examples of those back here
on Earth that we could study. And so in the meantime after we drilled those samples, we
have to store them somewhere. And so there's an entire system that's living inside the
body of the rover that we call the "Adaptive Caching Assembly," and it's this big system
that, it's like a factory of a bunch of tubes that we have stored, and we can pick
up a tube, and we can put it into a drill bit to get our sample. Once the sample comes back,
we pull that tube out with the sample inside of it, and we can move it over to get a volume
assessment to figure out how much sample we collected, take some pictures of that sample,
Put a seal into it so that we can seal it up and protect it while we're storing it on
Mars, and then we put it back into its storage location. The idea right now is that we
want to save all the samples on Mars for the time being, and there's a time in the future
where we'll drop some of those samples into a cache on Mars, just basically leaving
it into a safe place on the surface of Mars, where a future mission will come and pick
them up, and bring them back to Earth. So in the meantime while our team was off building
the whole sample acquisition side, the drilling system and the Adaptive Caching Assembly, the
rest of our team were building the rest of the rover. So the team building the mobility,
the wheels, and the body of the rover, and the science instruments and the head, and the cameras,
and the batteries, so much that went into building this rover. And so this picture is at the
very tail end, when all of these parts that were built by all these different teams was
finally coming together, and was being turned into this big rover. So I think this picture
is taken during one of its driving tests, because you can see the little ramps at the bottom.
After the the rover was all built up it's time to sort of package it up and get it ready
for launch. And so they, this is the, an image of the entire cruise stage, the rover
fits first inside of what we call a descent stage. The descent stage is the thing that
will allow us to land safely on Mars. And then both of those stages are, are sandwiched in
beside, or they're encapsulated inside of a heat shield. And then that whole system
is attached to what we call a cruise stage, and the cruise stage is what travels with it
from its journey from Earth to Mars, so basically the entire time that it's flying through space.
And it has with it some solar panels, and ways to communicate with back home, and
some stuff that we need for landing. And so in the bottom left picture you can see
the rover is all stowed up, and it's put, it's sort of nicely installed inside of the
top of the heat shield, and one thing I want to point out is if you squint, what we're
looking at is basically the belly of the rover. There's a gold panel on that on the belly
of that rover, and there's something mounted there. That thing is a helicopter. We sent a
helicopter to Mars, which is nuts! We call it, the the name of this helicopter is called
Ingenuity, and and this is another demonstration mission. So we wanted to just prove that we
could fly anything on Mars, very similar to when I mentioned the Sojourner rover, that
very small microwave with wheels that was sent there to try to prove that we could just
drive anything on Mars, well Ingenuity is going to Mars to just prove that we can fly anything
on Mars. And Mars is a very hard place to fly anything, it has a very thin atmosphere.
So what helicopters and aircraft use here on Earth in order to fly is to be able to
push off of the air density and create some lift, but if Mars doesn't have that air
density, then how do we generate the lift that we need to to fly something? So luckily
there is some air there, it's a lot less than Earth but they're, the Ingenuity helicopter's
trying to prove that we can, we can use that to fly. It's really just going to fly
up, and do a few flight paths, and take some pictures. There's not much else more planned
for it, but if this, when we prove that this is successful, there might possibly be more
missions in the future that include flying robots. So, the Perseverance rover launched
successfully in July 30th of 2020 during the pandemic. We couldn't, even though the
pandemics had happened, we couldn't slow down which was just kind of a crazy time for us.
The reason why we didn't really have any room to play with this because of our launch
window. Earth goes around the sun in a certain trajectory, Mars goes around the sun and its
own traject-in its own orbit, and there's... Earth as you know takes one Earth year to
go around the sun, Mars takes almost exactly two Earth years to go around the sun, and every
two years Mars and Earth get pretty close to each other in their orbits, and that's when
we want to launch things between Mars and Earth. Otherwise it'll take too much fuel,
take too much time, and so we really only had that small window of opportunity to launch
things between the two planets, and we didn't want to miss our opportunity. So we kept to
our schedule, we launched on time, and we traveled from Earth, to Mars, and landed
successfully on February 18th of earlier this year. If you've ever seen the video
of the landing of Perseverance, it is crazy. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you
to go look it up. I don't want to show it here because it's going to show up too choppy, but
here's an overview of it. Basically we're entering Mars, we're approaching Mars with
our full crew stage. We have to separate from that top crew stage because we don't
need that anymore, and then all that's, all that's left is just the heat shield protecting
it as it enters Mars' atmosphere. Once it starts to enter Mars' atmosphere it starts to feel
a lot of friction from those little particles in the air brushing past, because it
it was traveling so fast before— thousands of miles per hour—and then all of a sudden
hitting some kind of resistance, it's going to feel a lot of heat as it enters the atmosphere,
and so we needed that shield to protect it. So once we get slowed down a little bit, and
we're inside Mars' atmosphere, we can safely get rid of that front heat shield. So we get
rid of that-oh sorry, first before we do that, we deploy a giant parachute. This
parachute is tricky, like we, like I mentioned before it's very hard to fly anything on Mars
because it has low, it has a low air density, same thing with parachutes. We can deploy a
giant parachute but it can only really slow us down so much. So we deployed as big a
parachute as we can to slow us down a whole lot. Once we're slowed down we can get rid
of that heat shield, because we have slowed down, and at that point the rover which is
tucked up inside the, the top portion of the heat shield, can finally see the surface
of Mars. Once it can see the Martian surface, it starts to look around and starts
to map what it sees, and starts to figure out where it wants to land. That, that system
is new for this mission, they call it "Terrain Relative Navigation," sort of a,
it had the brains to determine for itself its own safest landing location which is kind
of insane. So once the parachute has slowed it down to a certain point, it can't
slow us down all the way so we kind of have to get rid of it, and find another mode to
slow us down the entire way. So we will then separate from that whole parachute
and backshell, and we free fall for a split second in Mars' air, and then we turn on
our power descent stage which is basically like a jet pack. So the rover comes down on
this jet pack, and this is what slows it down the most as it's coming down through,
through the atmosphere, and at that point it can, it can sort of make a diversion
to move it to the place that it determined was safest for it to land. Once it's where,
Once it's above where it wants to land, slowly moves to, towards the surface, and it's, it
sort of hovers about 70 feet above the surface. We don't want to use that stage to go all
the way down to touch the ground because of those rocket engines are just going to kick
up way too much dirt, way too much rocks, and it might damage our rover, so instead we hover
at 70 feet, and we lower our rover down on cables. We call this the Sky Crane. And so
it lowers the rover down until its wheels just touch the ground, the cables get cut, and
that sky crane can fly away, and then we have a rover safely sitting on the surface
of Mars. So this entire sequence is all automated, and it happens in seven minutes. And one of
the scariest things about it is that because it happens so quickly, even if it were to tell
us at the very beginning "Hey I'm about to start this descent sequence," and phone it
back to us here on Earth, we wouldn't get that signal until 10 minutes later. So it's, it's
a scary part of our mission because we're in the dark, we have no idea what's going on,
all of this will happen and end before we get any communication from the rover. So that's
why they, people like to call it the "seven minutes of terror." One of the coolest things
about this mission is that we were able to, for the first time, include a bunch of cameras
during this entire landing sequence. So we got real-time video of all of these things
happening. So in the top left you can see the front heat shield getting deployed
and falling to the surface of Mars. The top right is a picture of the parachute
getting deployed. The bottom left is the rover's first view of the Martian landscape and when
it's starting to map out what it sees and determine where it wants to land. The the middle
bottom, the top one is the descent stage, or sorry, the sky crane operation. So the,
you can see the jet packs, and then the cranes that lowered the rover down, and then
the very bottom middle picture is showing the rover hanging from that sky crane until
its wheels touch the ground. And the very bottom right image is us approaching the ground
where you can see all of a sudden the surface come into focus. This is all really incredible
and you can see this image on the internet, you just have to look up um "Perseverance entry
descent and landing." So then once we landed, we took our first picture. That's at the top.
In the top picture, it's a little grainy because this is when the landing covers were
still on the cameras. That protects it from all the dust that might get kicked up, and
then we deploy those covers which are clear, and then we can get a better picture. So these
were the first images sent down from Perseverance. And then once we landed we wanted to just
check out the area that we landed in Jezreel crater. And so we did that by deploying our
mast, the head of the rover, which has a set of cameras on it. And then we just used that
to take a whole bunch of pictures around us, not only to inspect the landscape and the
area that we landed but also to check our own rover to see if there was, we could see
any damage. And then we did more checkouts. The top picture is our first drive. The
bottom left is the first time we wiggled our wheels. The bottom right is the first time
we moved our turret and moved our arm to make sure all of that was functioning.
Two pictures that I was really excited to get down is the one on the, on the left
showing the launch bit which I, is a part that I built, inside of the coring
drill, and then the right picture is showing the bit carousel. So all the bits live inside
what we call the bit carousel. That bit carousel basically spins around and we can pull a bit
out of there, use it, put it back in the bit carrier, spin it around, grab another one. And so
all of the bits are inside of that assembly and that was the first time I got to see it
safely on Mars. So that was really exciting. This was a really cool image for us to
get to. This is the first selfie that Perseverance sent down. So the Perseverance, actually Curiosity,
its predecessor, is really good at selfies, and Perseverance is also going to be really
good at selfies. The way that they take them is that the rover on the end of its arm
has a camera, which is called Watson, and it's able to just, we just take a bunch of pictures
all around, not only of itself but the area that it landed. And then we stitch them
all together to create images like this. And so it took this selfie just after it deployed
the Mars helicopter on the ground and drove away, getting ready for the first Mars helicopter
flight. And so that Mars helicopter, this is how it deployed on the ground.
Really cool. And then getting ready for its first flight, and the bottom image you can
barely see it, but there's a little tiny speck in the middle, this is the Perseverance's
view of the Ingenuity helicopter's first flight on Mars. So this was really exciting,
the first time that we've ever flown anything on another planet. And then we did another
flight, and this one's really exciting because this is an image taken by the helicopter mid-air.
You can see it's little, the, the maybe little feet on the very edges out left and right
of the image, and then, if you look in the very top left part of this image there's something
sitting there: That is the Perseverance rover It's just amazing to see what the first picture
I showed you was one robot taking a picture of another robot flying on Mars, and then this
is one robot flying and midair takes a picture of another robot driving on Mars. So this is
just really exciting, really cool to see. And then here's another, sort-of real-time
video that the helicopter took as it flew. So that's so exciting, to date I believe the
the Ingenuity helicopter has achieved its mission. It's taken five flights I believe,
and it's still scheduled to do some more flights, so that's really exciting. I like to include
these images here, they're just nonsense images that the rover takes every day to inspect
certain things it's going to do around it and stuff, and they post all of these kinds
of pictures on our website in the raw images section, so if you ever want to know what the
rover's doing today, go to the raw images and it, all the recent pictures will show up there.
And then one last thing I want to talk about with this mission is something that I'm
really excited about, the naming of science targets on Mars. So the science team decided
that they were going to come up with a method for, for sort of unofficially naming
things that they come across that are interesting on Mars, and so the way they decided to
come up with the method for naming things is that they took the entire map of where
we were expected to land in Jezreel crater, and they split it up into a bunch of little
squares that were about one mile by one mile, and then they named each of these squares
after different National Parks in the world. And there's probably one square here that's
named after Grand Canyon, and what they decided is that whatever square that they
were in at the moment, they would use that as a theme for naming different science targets
that they came across. And so if you zoom into this square, the, the place the square
that we just happened to land Perseverance in is named after Canyon de Chelley National Monument.
Canyon de Chelley as you know is another canyon located in Arizona, right in the heart of the
Navajo nation. It's a very important place for us Navajo, it's not only got a lot of
historical value to us, but it's got a lot of cultural value to us. The science team
once they landed, there recognized that and they reached out to the Navajo nation. They
knew that I was on the team, that I was Navajo, so they reached out to me, and together with
myself, the science team, and the Navajo nation were able to work together to come up with
different names using the Navajo language that we could assign to different science
targets that we came across. And so here as an example, here is a, one of the NavCams
on the, on Perseverance studied this particular rock, and they named this rock Yéigo which
is, in the Navajo language, means, like, diligent. So that was a really exciting part of
this mission that I got to be a part of, and I'm really proud of that. And so to bring
it all around, I like to show this. This is something I've always shown people. I worked
on the Curiosity rover as well as the Perseverance rover on its sample acquisition system, and
with that system, we, not only did we drill into rock, but we scooped up sand and I
just like to tell people that, that my origins are like, the way that I learned how to scoop
up sand really is from my grandmother. And so this is a picture of her, scooping up some
sand in her corn field, making an underground oven so that we can make some kneel-down bread,
which is like a corn bread that we cook inside its husk in an underground oven. It's just
a really cool thing for me to sort of compare where I've come from and where I am now.
And it's why I do everything I do. So those are all the slides I have. Thank you
for listening.
Wow. Aaron thank you so much, that was a amazing talk and just a beautiful full circle ending.
Choked me up a little bit, this just, what a beautiful story that you have here. And,
I have so many questions but like, I'll keep it down to just a few if you don't mind.
First, really neat that you're, you're, you have this, you know, you're designing the drill bits
for this machine to go on another planet, I mean, can you bring that down to Earth for
us, like how does one go about designing these drill bits, what are you thinking about, what
precedents have been set, I mean, what, what all goes into that because that just seems like
such a, an incredible task to, to do.
Yeah, I, I just like all of us building on knowledge
of people that come before us, and things that we do, the same with all of us engineers.
There have been a lot of missions to Mars already, and lots of things like Curiosity
had a drill on it already. And so our team, I like to consider myself part of the whole
coring team, because the drill bits were very much a part of that. You can't really design
it alone you have to see how it fits in with the entire system, and so as a team we looked
at past rover missions, past drilling missions, to see what worked, what didn't work, and sort
of built off of that. And then also here on Earth we do a lot of coring drilling,
not only for things like mining and all that kind of stuff, but also geologists use coring
drills to grab rock cores, either out of ice or out of rocks, and so there's a lot of similar
things even all the way down to just masonry bits, or like things that any, any, like all
of you if you were drilling into a cement block, or a rock, or as something at your home
would use something similar. So there's a lot of similarities between drilling things on
rock and Earth, like I said, rocks on Mars are not different from rocks on Earth. The
things that are different that we have to think about when we're designing stuff
is the environment, how cold it's going to be on Mars, that type of environment it's going
to be, and so we have to worry about making sure that we, like, if, if it's going to get
so cold on Mars that we can't use lubrication like we would here on Earth because it would
just all freeze up. So we have to come up with unique ways to work around that, unique materials,
All of that kind of stuff. And then the added challenge was that we had to
keep them super clean, and so, our, we're working with this big machine that's a bunch of turning
gears and, and, involves a lot of people and humans to build and all that stuff, and
then our parts the drill bits, we had to coat them in very special coating to make
sure that we, that helped keep them clean, and we had to keep ourselves clean and test them
clean and all that stuff. So that was all part of the challenge.
Well and, and so what, what
did it feel like when you saw that first picture of your precious drill bits on the surface
of another planet, describe what that was like for you.
It is surreal, it is incredible to
see the things that you once touched and held in your hands. All the way from, I held the
base material that it was machined out of, and I held it every single step of the way,
and then it's like, even the day I remember when we, when I finally finished the parts
and it was time for me to put it into the rover, it was like saying goodbye to my children.
Like I was so sad to see them go, and then to see them finally on Mars it's like finally
seeing them graduate from college or something you know, so it was really incredible.
And where were you when Perseverance landed on Mars?
So when Perseverance landed we were still
in quarantine shutdown mode, I was sitting right here in, oh yeah, at home in Pasadena,
California, watching, and that's how every, a lot of our team, we were all watching remotely.
But we all got to be together on a big like, webex type, or a web conference thing and watch it together
That's incredible. And, what are some, what are some sites on Mars this
is kind of a...
nebulous question but, what are some sites on Mars that you might imagine being protected
in the future as some sort of National Park. Like if we were to start thinking way ahead
in the future you know, not a National Park of course, but maybe some sort of international
or or solar system park. What are some cool sites on Mars that are maybe, just amazing
places that we might protect in the future?
Yeah I mean, I think, I mean Mars has, from what
I understand—I wish I was a Mars scientist and could tell you more about every intricate
detail, about things that are features that are there, but there are, I believe there
are canyons larger than Grand Canyon, there are mountains larger than Mount Everest, I
think those are things that would just be incredible to see, like, to preserve and
see. And to be honest Mars is the place that I want the entire planet to be a National
Park, you know like something that's protected, I don't know like, I don't know how, how different people's
feelings are. I, I don't really want to assume that we're going to just live there, I, I don't
like the idea of colonizing it for the sake of just as a backup from, for Earth. I believe
that we should take care of Earth first. It needs to be our only choice that we are going
to live here forever, because this is where our home, Mars is just there for scientific
study not for us to mine or, you know, live, or anything like that. So I'm hoping that for
its entire life that Mars is protected through and through.
Oh that's in, that's fantastic.
And then last question for you is, you know, what, what, what advice would you give to
some of the youth in Grand Canyon region who might want to follow in your footsteps?
Yeah sure. I mean, I grew up just like them, I, I mean I was a, I was a good student, and
I was an ambitious student. I had big dreams for myself, but other than that, I didn't have
a lot of examples of people, either from my community, or from my family that had gone
to a place like NASA, and even if you would have asked me as a kid like if I wanted to
be a NASA engineer I probably would have said no, or like, I didn't think that that was something
that was even an option for me. It didn't, it took a lot of small baby steps. I went to
a lot of summer programs that were geared towards Native American high school students
that helped me, one, realize that I was a smart student, and then helped me realize I'm interested
in engineering and I might be able to do that as a living. And then it helped me realize
oh, I might be able to apply to a place, I ended up going to Stanford University, which is the
first time anybody from my family, or from Holbrook I think had gone to Stanford. And,
and so I wouldn't have been able to get that confidence if I didn't go to a summer program.
And then I got internships that helped me realize oh, I might be able to work at a
place like NASA, so it was all these little things that helped me realize not only the
opportunities but also my own, my own capability. And so I, I'm, when I, whenever I talk to
to youth from our region, I want to encourage them to just not... not eliminate those big
dreams from, from, from your aspirations. Don't remove yourself from them, because they
belong to you just as much as anybody else. Just because you're from a place that feels
like it's a bubble, that feels like nobody that you know has gone on to do those types
of things, doesn't mean that you can't be the one to do it.
Well fantastic, I mean that's
a great way to end it, we're just immensely excited that, and honored to have had you,
and, I'm sure this whole region is just very proud, that you're representing
us, and, and, and, and then representing the Navajo Nation in such, such an amazing inspiring way.
And, again your story is just a beautiful full circle, and as somebody who, who lives
here now at Grand Canyon region I mean, just the those pictures that you put up side
by side of the surface of Mars and, and places on, on the Navajo Nation, it's just, it's,
it's so incredible. It's just, it's an amazing story. So thank you so much for, for taking
the time and, for everybody watching, please tune into the virtual telescope viewing session
that is premiering right after this talk, and again, the 2022 Grand Canyon Star Party
is June 18th through the 25th, and hopefully we'll be able to celebrate that on site, and
perhaps in in a future star party you will all be able to come and speak with Aaron
Yazzie as we're definitely going to keep him in mind and try to get him here here on site
in the future. So Aaron thanks so much, and good luck with everything in Perseverance and beyond.
Thank you so much, it was a pleasure talking to you.