By Kunal Mehta
Staff Writer
San Jose State students, alumni and community members were enthralled by the tales of Mars exploration told by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) engineer Kobie Boykins at the Hammer Theater Wednesday night.
As part of the National Geographic Live! speaker series, Boykins presented “Exploring Mars,” sharing his work on the Opportunity, Spirit, and Curiosity rovers that explored the red planet.
Boykins unveiled pictures collected by the Hubble Space Telescope that illustrated the depth of numerous galaxies, some of which have existed ever since the big bang. “It gives me chills,” he said.
He began talking about the Mars rovers by discussing the parachutes used to slow down the rover as it enters the Martian atmosphere. He then showed a video of a test in the desert where the parachute frayed. The engineers took the parachute to the largest wind tunnel in the United States – NASA’s Ames Research Center.
After testing nearly 70 different conditions under intense instrumentation such as high-speed cameras, they realized the problem was caused by the Earth’s thick atmosphere.
Boykins explained that Mars’ atmosphere is one-hundredth the density of Earth’s, so the problem would not be an issue when they actually landed on Mars.
Recent SJSU aerospace engineering graduate, Reine Ntone said she could really relate to what Boykins went through. Ntone is now a systems engineer at NASA who worked on the Technology Education Satellite 8.
“I work at NASA and deployed a satellite last week. I had watery eyes
during the launch, and I worked on it for six months,” Ntone said. “And they worked on [Curiosity] for eight years.”
Ntone and her team also worked on the parachute, which also didn’t work in their testing. But when the team actually launched the satellite, it worked just fine.
Boykins said Curiosity was intended to act as a biologist – looking if life was possible on Mars. The earlier Opportunity and Spirit rovers were geologists – looking for evidence if there was liquid water. Curiosity was designed to drive further and had a different set of wheels, he added.
Another JPL engineer had the idea to put the JPL logo in the wheel tread so Curiosity would be able to leave the three letters behind wherever it went. After someone at headquarters vetoed the idea, Boykins explained they had to make the letters more covert and ended up using morse code.
Before Curiosity, Boykins worked on the twin Opportunity and Spirit rovers. Both rovers were designed to last for 90 days, but that didn’t happen in practice.
Spirit, which he referred to as the bad sister, communicated for five years while Opportunity, the good sister, communicated for nearly fifteen years.
It was then that he joked what JPL really stands for – Just Plain Lucky.
Boykins compared landing a rover on Mars to throwing a dart from San Jose and having it land on a piece of paper in New York.
Boykins said that until the last decade, only 33 percent of Mars rovers were successful, and now it’s 40 percent. “That means 60 percent have failed,” he added.
“We had a calendar with stickies guessing when it would die,” Boykins said. “No one guessed more than a year and a half.”
Boykins was the cognizant engineer of the solar array on Curiosity, and won a NASA Exceptional Service Medal.
He teased one of the plans for the upcoming unnamed Mars 2020 rover project which includes a Mars helicopter. The proposed helicopter would fly for about three minutes and gather aerial imagery.
“It was pretty dope, I follow this in my free time but I still learned stuff,” aerospace engineering senior Alec Gloria said.
Boykins finished by saying that his favorite picture from all of Mars was a picture of the sunset.
“I am hopeful that in my lifetime, a human being can tell us how beautiful it is,” he said.
