ASHITEY TREBI-OLLENNU Senior Robotics Engineer: This was my first mission, and it was very exciting,
you know, doing something that no one’s done before. I grew up in Ghana, and when I was a kid I was very fascinated by radio. And I was curious, “Are there people inside the radio?” So one day I opened the radio and I was disappointed to find there were no people in the radio. So, that’s my fascination with engineering.
KOBIE BOYKINS: For the rover design, it was a deliberate decision to make the characteristics humanlike.
ASHITEY TREBI-OLLENNU: When you are a geologist and working in the field, you typically take a rock and break it up to look inside of it. So the rover needs a robotic arm. And it had multiple instruments at the end to take measurements and microscopic images. Like a Swiss Army knife.
STEVE SQUYRES: Now, the resolution of the rovers’ cameras is the exact equivalent of human 20/20 vision. So, all the sudden they start to look an awful lot like eyeballs.
KOBIE BOYKINS: And then, the height of the rover was 5 foot 2. That’s the average height of a human being. So it would feel like as the rover was driving taking these images, that a human being was walking along the surface. DOUG ELLISON: It’s just a box of wires, right, but you end up with this cute-ish looking robot that has a face. JENNIFER TROSPER: So we had these amazing science instruments but once you put all that stuff on the rover, the mass gets bigger.
GFX LOWER THIRD: 18 MONTHS UNTIL LAUNCH
JENNIFER TROSPER: Then this is gonna be a big problem for landing on Mars.
ASHITEY TREBI-OLLENNU, SENIOR ROBOTICS ENGINEER
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