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The NASA InSight lander landed on the surface of Mars in November. His mission: to reveal secrets about the creation of planets in our solar system. Essential to this mission: a robotic arm the length of a broom that he slowly extended after the landing to place a number of sensitive scientific instruments on the Martian surface – and even pierce the planet itself.
To learn more about manipulating a robotic arm on the surface of a distant planet, Futurism has maintained with Al Tadros, Vice President of Space and Space Infrastructures. at SSL, where he manages the company's relationship with NASA and helps invent the most sophisticated robot arm ever leave the Earth.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Futurism: There are only five robotic arms on Mars, all five built in SSL. How did you become NASA's leading supplier of robotic arms?
Al Tadros: Five robotic arms were operated on Mars and we had the chance to build them, the latest being the InSight Lander arm. About 20 years ago, we were created by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, within a core team passionate about science and wanting to create robotic capabilities that could help JPL.
F: Mars is tens of millions of kilometers from the nearest repair shop. How do you approach the design of something that absolutely has to work, even without the help of anyone to fix it?
AT: Part of the heart of the space industry is the need to build hardware that works for years without maintenance. So yes, robotics is subject to extreme environmental conditions, but we build many satellites that must also be qualified and operated under extreme conditions. So we have processes, suppliers, tests, and programs that test the reliability of everything we build.
Robotics on Mars has unique environments that it faces. While many of our satellites have been built in a clean room and have been launched and operated in a vacuum of space, the Martian landers go through a thin atmosphere and land on a dusty surface. When they reach a destination, they must work in a day and night environment, which means that extreme temperatures with a light atmosphere and dust are transported. And this poses unique challenges for robotic or mechanical systems such as the Mars undercarriages.
F: How do you simulate the Martian surface? Do you test somewhere on Earth as on Mars?
AT: good question. First, for the equipment or spacecraft we build, we have to put it in a container, carry it to a launch site and place it on the rocket. And during the first few minutes, when the rocket goes up, it vibrates very hard and it is subjected to many acoustic vibrations – as if you were at a rock concert – being shaken on a stage. So we literally put it on a vibrating foot and shake it in the same way so we can check that the design respects and survives the launch.
We vibrate very hard and there is a lot of acoustic vibrations – like during a rock concert – which is shaken on a stage.
When you have no air and you have no thermal properties of the air, your thermal behavior differs from that of your spaceship. We simulate this in a vacuum chamber called a thermal vacuum chamber for this reason.
F: Let's talk about the multitasking capabilities of InSight. It has a handful of major scientific instruments on board and the robotic arm plays a crucial role in their deployment. How do you approach an engineering task like this?
AT: These missions are science-based. The leader of these missions will therefore be a scientist with a set of main objectives that he strives to achieve. For Mars InSight Lander, this means placing critical payloads on the surface of Mars.
For March 2020, the next mission we are currently working on, we are actually building the Mars Sample Processing Arm, which is collecting samples of the surface. And you want to keep a blank sample that could be sent back to Earth, which means that there are unique requirements for that.
F: What is the next phase of the InSight mission that you personally are most excited to see?
AT: This goes back to the very pulse of the mission – science. InSight studies the inner planets of our solar system. So, what we study on Mars has applications here on Earth and on the evolution of our own planet. And it helps us to understand the solar system in a broader sense.
The unique peculiarity of the Mars study is that humans have populated a large part of the Earth's landmass and generate many activities induced by human activities, vibrations and noise. On Mars, you do not have that. So we can study a virgin rocky planet.
F: Do you envision SSL playing a role in human exploration of Mars? There is a lot of talk about bringing humans to the surface of Mars.
AT: It could take decades, but people are already working on it – in different ways. Even NASA is currently focused on the moon but in a sustainable way. But many of the abilities they deploy around the moon and on the surface of the moon are to demonstrate, evolve and improve our ability to go to Mars and beyond.
F: Speaking of sending human astronauts to Mars, do you fear that crewed missions could be overtaken by robotic technology?
AT: There are two aspects to this. The first is: can we put humans on Mars or on the surface of the Moon? And the other is: what do we want us, humans, to do? Mankind has an exploration gene, whether it's reaching the summit of Everest, searching for the reason for its existence, or exploring our solar system. Humans are an essentially exploratory species, so I think that there will always be this human element. And robotics will be used to push the limits.
Mankind has an exploration gene, whether it's reaching the summit of Everest, searching for the reason for its existence, or exploring our solar system.
As you probably noticed last week, we had the first commercial crew capsule that was launched and returned to Earth, which was a landmark event. This goes back to the beginning of the aviation industry, while the aircraft were very experimental, but they became a very common place after decades.
F: Do you apply artificial intelligence technology in your robotic arms, particularly with respect to InSight?
AT: We do not build the software that exploits it. This is the job of JPL. Robots and robotics on Mars are basically getting an order to move up to a point and wait for the next order. Or a sequence of commands is given and it follows this sequence as long as all the telemetry is green. If he encounters a problem, he stops and waits for the operator to return to Earth. So it's a type of rudimentary control, but very careful and safe, because we do not need to operate quickly.
Once you have involved humans or other temporally critical elements, it is interesting to know how to automate it or improve temporal efficiency – because the astronaut's time is precious.
We had never implemented artificial intelligence on the arms of Mars, but software, processing and algorithms are progressing so quickly, I think not only Gateway, but all future robotic systems will have levels of autonomy and a artificial intelligence.
F: Anything else you wanted to talk about?
AT: One of the most interesting aspects of space robotics at the present time is the potential for assembly of spacecraft, space telescopes and other platforms space.
A spacecraft the size of the space station could never be built and launched on a single launcher. If you're thinking of building communications satellites, space telescopes, space habitats, that's what I think we're getting into now, which brings us back to the 1940's 1940's von Braun space station and science fiction. We are going to come to an era in space where we are not limited by the size of a launcher.
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