Interview with Anita Sengupta keynote speaker at GOTO Chicago 2015

Hi, it’s Mike with UGtastic. I’m still here at GOTO Conf 2015 , but I’m standing here right now with Dr. Sengupta, who gave a talk about how she helped with the Mars missions , the Curiosity mission with the parachute, and some very fascinating things. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. So, your talk, what was the gist of your talk? So, the talk was to talk about how difficult it is to land on Mars, specifically how difficult it was to land the Curiosity rover on Mars, and then talk about how we actually designed the entry, descent, and landing system, some of the details and the capabilities of the rover, Curiosity in terms of the science that it’s capable of doing, and some of the science results which have been collected over the past two years. So, you were actually part of the team that helped. It sounds like, as you described in the talk, there was thousands of people involved, but you were part of the team that helped. Yes. So, your aspect was, what part of the aspect of the landing were you involved in? So, I was a member of the entry, descent, and landing engineering team. So, that probably was around 20 to 50 people during the life cycle of the mission. And so, my role in particular was the engineer for the parachute, so responsible for qualifying the supersonic parachute, and then also developing a test sequence which allowed us to assess what the environment was going to be like at the very end of the sky cream maneuver at the landing event. Yes, so those very dramatic shots. Yes, so those very dramatic shots of the lander coming in and the fully opened parachute, that was part of your doing. Yes. So, that’s absolutely amazing. And when you were describing the amount of effort that goes into figuring out just how much a parachute, I mean, we look at a parachute, we think skydivers, oh, they just pop a parachute and that’s it. I mean, what was involved in a parachute on Mars? So, there’s a lot of design work which has to be done. Which is primarily related to quantifying the type of environment that it’s going to see on Mars because it gets deployed at a much higher speed than it gets deployed here on Earth, and it also gets deployed in a much thinner atmosphere than it gets deployed on Earth. So, that results in it being a very difficult aerodynamic problem in terms of understanding what kind of loads the parachute is going to see. So, we did a whole variety of analyses using computer codes , computational fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, as well as a lot of testing. So, we build full-scale parachutes, we build sub-scale parachutes, and we test them as close as we can to the environment that they’ll see on Mars. Right. And one of the many fascinating things you touched on is that you talked about doing the testing up front in the early planning stages so that way when the system finally was released on Mars, it had to work one time, and that was it. Otherwise, boom. Yep. Yeah. So, you showed all kinds of… demonstrations of different types of analysis and testing, wind tunnels, showing the fluid. You said there was a kind of like what looked like water going around the parachute, but it was actually the air itself. I mean, all of these devices were being used to take hard maths and turn them into experiments that could be kind of reasoned about, and even as a layman, I can look at that and be like, oh, I can see how that air was coming. It was coming out, and it was causing the parachute to mal form and things like that. But it also made me think about those old pictures of the early NASA scientists with their giant chalkboards of calculations and formulas. You know, where’s the, you know, like that visualization of … It’s so hard that it’s hard even to formulate the question. It’s that, you know, there’s all kinds of mathematics that have to go, you know, out of your head and turn into computer simulations. I mean, where does that chalkboard go? Is there still that chalkboard of formulas somewhere, but maybe just in the computer? I mean, like, how does that even work? So you can think of the chalkboard as a one-dimensional calculation or a single-node calculation, and so all of the physics that go into the chalkboard calculations still go into our calculations, but now they get coupled to a highly resolved three- dimensional model, of the parachute. So the same physics existed as existed back then, but now with the advent of computers, and specifically supercomputer clusters, we can actually take the flow field surrounding a parachute , divide it up into millions and millions of tiny little cells, and actually do those computations at each cell to give us a much better resolution of what’s going on in the flow field. So it actually facilitates these types of missions, and it actually reduces the cost to implement these missions, because now we can run simulations instead of multiple test sequences, and usually get away with just one test sequence. And those of us who are doing app development, we think that we’re doing test-driven developments when we write a little test harness. You guys are building massive infrastructures to verify that this one thing is going to, this one event is going to happen, and it just, you probably heard several heads popping in the audience just thinking about it, because we hear about it in the media, and it’s on Twitter, and it’s kind of an abstract thing. But there’s people like yourself who are really making this stuff happen, and that’s something that maybe we lose touch with. And you did mention about the STEM, and you showed a very kind of telling picture of your team, and you’re the only female, and it was all guys. So you were also talking about being able to attract more diverse women and people of different nationalities. Is that something that is… endemic in JPL and NASA, that it’s all middle-aged white guys? Or is that just unique to your team? I’d say it’s probably unique to aerospace. It’s unique to a lot of, unfortunately, hard science fields . So aerospace, mechanical, electrical, computer science, physics, a lot of times, for whatever reason, not enough women go into that as a career choice in undergraduate. And we need to fix that. I don’t have the solution for fixing it. I think probably one of the first things we should do is have more female role models, which is why I do a lot of… because I think it’s important for girls to see other women doing these things as a good career path, as an acceptable career path. So I think that’s probably… because if you take a look at, you know, even in my own university, you know, there’s usually one or two female professors per department tops. So there’s just not enough women in the field, which then is sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, and as far as also, like, STEM, you know, those of us who are over 30, I’d say, we didn’t really have even a… we didn’t really have a concept of STEM. I’d say even maybe people in their 20s didn’t have STEM. Is it been around long enough for this concept to have any impact on hiring, or are you seeing any change from where you stand as a scientist working in an established team? Is there any change maybe in the interns or anything because of some of those efforts? Have you seen? I certainly haven’t run any of the numbers myself, but we do have a lot of interns come in every summer, and usually you do get a pretty good ratio of about 50-50, males to females. And then I also teach at university, at University of Southern California, and there I see around, you know, 30-40% females in the class. So I think it’s getting better, and I think, ironically, the fact that space exploration and space travel is becoming cool, and being even nerdy or geeky is becoming cool, I think it makes it more acceptable. It’s more culturally acceptable, so I think that’s actually going to help a lot more women enter the field, you know, at the undergraduate level, if you start from there. Yeah, excellent. Yeah, and, I mean, being able to see programs, I mentioned… Earlier, another person I interviewed, Bob Pollin, who did the DevOps for Kids here in Chicago, I got to take my daughter to that, and, you know, she’s six, and getting her to do scratch programming and getting to start thinking about that, and then looking at some of the seeds that are being planted now, like seeing how they’re going to develop in the coming decades, it’s extremely exciting, and sometimes it’s a little intimidating, but that’s enough about, you know, being a parent. But it’s great to see, and I don’t say this, great to see a woman up there talking, but just anybody up there talking and knowing that they were involved in something that went beyond our day-to-day world, and it’s like I sort of asked you a question earlier, did you actually get to touch any of the equipment that went to Mars? And you had a very interesting answer. I’ll just ask it again. Did you actually get to touch any of the equipment that went to Mars? So we actually do our best to not touch them. Sometimes they get sent to Mars because we have something called planetary protection where we don’t want to bring any Earth-based bacteria or microbial spores to Mars because we don’t want to contaminate Mars. We don’t want to contaminate Mars for two reasons. One, because, you know, to protect any potential life forms that could be there, not that we know that there are any, and also not to contaminate our own biological experiments that we’re performing. Yeah, you mentioned something about how there was a concern over some methane that had been seen in a previous experiment and people weren’t sure if, if it was just, and if it was just one part per billion, I think it’s what you said, a very tiny, tiny number, but it doesn’t take much. It doesn’t, no. Yeah, so you have to be very careful to make sure that you understand, like, what the control is so that you can be sure that what you’re referencing, what you’re reading is in real measurement. Right. And, again, just knowing that I’m getting to talk to somebody who is just one degree away from sending things to Mars is kind of a, you know, I’m a little, phew, but it was very, very good to be able to speak with you. I appreciate you taking the time here at the end of the first day of the conference. And, well, that’s it. Thank you very much. I’m gushing. Thank you. Well, thanks for watching my talk. Thank you.