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New film Good Night Oppy puts spotlight on the ‘lovable’ Opportunity Mars rover | CBC Radio

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The Present18:57The ‘lovable’ Alternative Mars rover

When Bekah Sosland Siegfriedt was in Grade 8, she witnessed one thing that sparked her love for house exploration: the launch of the Mars Exploration Rover mission.

“Once I noticed Spirit and Alternative, these robotic explorers on Mars … looking out particularly for water, I assumed, properly, possibly that is one thing I can do,” she advised The Present’s Matt Galloway.

Siegfriedt had already been fascinated by the brilliant stars and galaxies within the sky above her hometown of Fredericksburg, Texas, and the 1997 film Contact

However she stated it was “actually cool” seeing these robots with human-like options, from eyes to an arm, exploring the Crimson Planet.

“I believe that is what [struck] me first, was seeing how we reworked these robots into folks so we are able to do what folks cannot do presently,” she stated.

WATCH: Alternative’s launch in 2003

Now the flight director at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Siegfriedt has gone from watching rovers to designing, testing and even launching NASA’s newest Mars rover, Perseverance.

Siegfriedt is featured in Ryan White’s new documentary, Good Night time Oppy, presently screening on the Toronto Worldwide Movie Pageant.

The movie focuses on Alternative, the Mars rover initially designed to final 90 days on the planet however ended up staying for 15 years — and the scientists and engineers captivated by it.

“It was a collection of all of those folks that I used to be ready to say, ‘No, we’re not going to work with you, you little documentary filmmaker,’ — [they] saved saying sure,” White advised Galloway.

“I believe it is a testomony to this story and the way, I believe, heartwarming and uplifting it’s.”

The Alternative rover in the course of the exploration of Meridiani Planum on Mars, the place jarosite was first found on the planet. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU)

A sense like childbirth

White stated he was “hooked” the second Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Leisure manufacturing firm pitched the movie thought, however was involved about discovering individuals who may talk the story with emotion.

“The robotic cannot discuss,” he stated. “Now we’ve to go to NASA and discover scientists and engineers who I assumed, in my preconceived notions, could be very unemotional, indifferent folks.”

“However time and time once more, we had been shocked once we interviewed these folks, how a lot they wore their coronary heart on their sleeve.”

Siegfriedt stated there’s quite a lot of work that goes into constructing rovers — and about “a thousand, million issues must go proper” for a profitable touchdown.

“So we’re all relying on one another. The entire items have to suit collectively completely. We now have to speak loads,” she stated.

“You see the emotion within the film from all of the folks once we land — and it truly is essentially the most unbelievable accomplishment that I’ve ever felt, once we’ve landed one thing.” 

Members of the Perseverance rover staff at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory react in mission management after receiving affirmation the spacecraft efficiently touched down on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. (Invoice Ingalls/NASA by way of Getty Photographs)

Siegfriedt, a mom of two, compares the method of constructing and touchdown a rover to delivering a child.

“You simply are like targeted on getting this baby out of your physique safely — and when that occurs and the kid is introduced as much as you, you could have this second of like, ‘It is over,'” she stated. “‘We did this, I did this, my physique did this’ — and it is similar to touchdown a spacecraft on Mars.”

Alternative catches its personal silhouette on this late-afternoon picture taken by the rover’s rear hazard avoidance digicam. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

That emotional attachment is mirrored by different engineers and scientists within the movie, in response to White.

“When Spirit dies, [rover driver Ashley Stroupe] type of tears up in her interview,” he stated.

“She says, ‘I do know that is going to sound loopy as a result of it looks like I am speaking about an individual, and she or he wasn’t an individual.'”

To the folks concerned within the mission, he says, the rovers weren’t simply robots. “It’s a creature that you simply fall in love with, a non-human creature that you simply say goodbye to on the finish of the movie.”

And to a level, he argues, it is by design.

“[NASA] have purposely created lovable creatures that everybody — the taxpayers which can be paying for this — can fall in love with and go alongside for the journey,” he stated.

Perseverance

Earth’s final contact with Alternative was in mid-June 2018. A mud storm on Mars’s floor disadvantaged its solar-powered batteries, forcing it to enter into hibernation and lose contact with Earth.

Siegfriedt stated it was some of the “intense” Mars mud storms recorded by NASA.

Some hoped Alternative could be revive after its hibernation, regardless of its age and “mechanical points and software program points,” Siegfriedt defined.

However it by no means did. On Feb. 13, 2019, NASA officers declared the Alternative mission full.

Right now, Siegfriedt and her colleagues are working on the subsequent technology of rovers — like Perseverance, which launched on July 30, 2020, and efficiently landed on Mars seven months later.

When Perseverance despatched its first selfie upon touchdown, Siegfriedt may really feel the feelings working by her once more.

“That second … seeing the rover and seeing her eyes and seeing her arm and seeing all of the components of her, is a way of awe and marvel as a result of it takes you again and reminds you we’re there to seek for life on different planets,” she stated.

“For me personally, that being my dream as a younger lady and being reminded of that always at work, it is unbelievable.”


Produced by Julie Crysler.



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