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Aaron
Yazzie, Navajo, tweeted, 'Some of the Mechanical engineers
for @NASAInSight are here and ready for touchdown! Nick designed
the grapple, Liz did environmental deploy testing, Milo worked
on the proposal, Enrique was the designer/configurations lead,
& I designed the Pressure Inlet #MarsLanding' on November
26, 2018 from Pasadena, California. (Twitter)
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A Navajo mechanical
engineer contributed to NASA's Mars Landing.
Aaron Yazzie sat with
other NASA engineers holding his breath and hoping the spacecraft
would survive the landing on Mars a few days ago. And it did!
This is the eighth time
(ever) NASA has landed a spacecraft on Mars. It is the next step
in sending astronauts to the moon and Mars in the future, and may
rewrite textbooks.
A million thoughts ran
through Yazzie's mind before and during the seven-minute landing
phase. He kept Twitter
updated during landing day -- and when it left Earth six
months ago.
"A lot could've gone
wrong and a lot of work that I had done for many years could have
blown up and crashed on Mars. That would have been really sad,"
Yazzie said over the phone from Pasadena, California. "But it all
went really well. I was really happy."
The InSight, or Interior
Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport,
spacecraft is the first spacecraft to study the core of the red
planet. Or as like NASA likes to say, they want to study the "vital
signs" of Mars. The company wants to accomplish two goals on this
mission: to find out more information about the formation and evolution
of Mars, and look at the tectonic activity and impact of meteorites
on the red planet.
The 32-year-old built
the pressure inlet, which is part of the auxiliary
payload sensor subsystem and functions as "the eyes and
ears of the lander," he said. Yazzie's piece works with the pressure
sensor that another engineer designed. The entire auxiliary system
tells the lander the temperature, pressure difference (Mars has
thinner air) and if wind is blowing. During the two-year mission,
his hardware will monitor the planet's static atmospheric pressure
and filter out the Mars wind. The more still the air is, the better.
This allows scientists to retrieve accurate readings.
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Labeled
illustration of InSight with its science payload deployed.
Many of the investigation tools are labeled. SEIS is the Seismic
Experiment for Interior Structure. HP³ is the Heat Flow
and Physical Properties Probe. RISE is the Rotation and Interior
Structure Experiment, which uses the lander's two medium-gain
antennas. TWINS is the Temperature and Wind for InSight instrument,
part of the mission's Auxiliary Payload Sensor Subsystem,
which also includes the magnetometer and the pressure sensor
(out of view beneath the pressure inlet). The lander's radiometer
and laser retroreflector are out of sight, on the other side
of the deck. (Photo Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lockheed
Martin Space)
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Missions before studied
only the surface of Mars, such as the soil and canyons, according
to NASA.
Mars is a rocky, or terrestrial, planet like Earth, Earth's moon,
Mercury and Venus. They're the same type of planet. Mars and Earth
share similar interior structures: crust, mantle and core. But if
these are all rocky planets, why are they so different? That's what
scientists hope to find out. The information scientists gain will
ultimately tell us how Earth formed.
"It's really exciting
to learn about Mars because we're learning more about ourselves
and our land and where we came from," Yazzie said. He often jokes
about how Mars looks exactly like the Navajo reservation if you
look at Tuba City or the rock areas around Monument Valley. They're
both red.
The Holbrook-raised engineer
has worked for the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 10 years.
Before this big project,
the Stanford University alum tested, designed, and built hardware
meant for Earth. And then came his first flight delivery and first
flight project. (Again, a first and it went to Mars.)
"This is the first project
I worked on where I was in charge of my own design for a piece of
the mission. It's called flight hardware," he said. "It was my first
flight hardware. That means it's flying on a mission and going into
space. It was my first time I was responsible for a piece of flight
hardware. So I was really nervous."
Aaron Yazzie
@YazzieSays
It's @NASAInSight
landing day! I'm at the landing event at the Pasadena Convention
Center, currently surrounded by many of the engineers that
worked on the mission and their families.
See
Aaron Yazzie's other Tweets
Between 2012 and 2014,
he designed, worked on, tested and attached it to the lander. On
social media, Yazzie said he was giving his 2014 self a high-five
for the hard work.
Initially, the mission
was set to launch in 2016, but an issue happened with another piece
of equipment, he said. So NASA had reschedule the mission for 2018.
"Mars and Earth get close
to each other every two years," he said. They wanted the two planets
to be as close as possible in orbit.
Once the spacecraft familiarizes
itself with Mars, you'll get to see Yazzie's work exposed. That'll
be within a few weeks, according to surface operations timeline.
His device sits on the top deck of the lander and hides under the
big white dome structure, also known as the wind and thermal shield.
When the robotic arm takes off the shield, you can see a "stack
of discs" that makes a tower in the center of the white ring. That's
the masterpiece.
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In
this illustration of the InSight lander's deployed configuration,
south would be toward lower right at the Martian work site,
with tethered instruments on the ground and the heat probe's
mole underground. (Photo Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lockheed
Martin Space)
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During Thanksgiving,
he told his family back in Holbrook, Arizona, about the project
and landing but the scope of it didn't hit them until they saw it
on the news. When mission control got confirmation of the landing,
he texted his family, "Landing successful!!! I have stuff on Mars!!!"
His younger brother, Jared Yazzie, the founder of OXDX Clothing,
shared the text message on his Instagram story.
Part of Yazzie's job
is receiving jobs and delivering them, such as the pressure inlet
he designed. Even though he won't have an active role in in the
entire mission he will "definitely keep tabs and make sure it works
and do what it's supposed to do."
What surprises him the
most about his role in the historic mission is not too long ago
Navajos were far from western education. His grandparents were traditional,
off the grid and not part of western education.
"Within two generations,
we had to make the advancement forward to get me here. It wasn't
just me. My parents took a big step forward to help me get here
and my grandparents took a big step forward to help me get here,"
he said. "I always think about how amazing it is, the resilience
and the rapid pace that we're advancing in considering our history."
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Aaron
Yazzie, Navajo, from Arizona sent his first flight hardware
to Mars on May 5, 2018 and it safely landed on November 26,
2018. (Facebook)
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After a 30-minute conversation
and eight hours of celebrating, the dubbed 'Indigenous
Bill Nye' reflected on his experience that many Native peoples
in higher education and the professional world have previously shared:
feeling like an imposter.
He went from a small
town in Arizona to Stanford, which was a culture shock for him.
The low rates of Native students graduating from high-school and
college graduation make students feel lonely in higher institutions.
That lonely feeling grows with the extremely low number of Native
students in science, technology, engineering, and math. You feel
so different.
"I always felt behind
the pack and trying to catch up and trying to prove that I belonged
in that field and that college. I struggled through it. Made it
through," he said. He graduated, completed internships and found
his current job.
The same cycle happened.
Imposter syndrome sunk in and he felt he need to prove he belonged
there.
But this mission brought
him "a lot of validation."
"It's not until now that
I finally feel like I am a full-fledge NASA engineer. I made it.
I did it," Yazzie said. "I'm not an imposter anymore. I'm doing
it."
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