We are PhD comics. And we want to know why. Today we are visiting the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California and asking the question, why are we sending another rover to the surface of Mars? This is the most I felt like a real scientist in my career. I'll be honest, I was running soon. We have found ourselves on the Mars rover lab test bed. I don't know the official name. The Mars Science Laboratory. Mars Science Laboratory test bed. Yeah, we call this one the VSTV for a vehicle system test bed. And behind us is an actual replica with all working parts of curiosity which will be knock on lead, landing August 5th successfully on Mars and taking us to the next level of science. So this is pretty much what is going to be landing on Mars. Yeah, it's basically the only rover test bed we have. It's the only one with wheels and a full suite of avionics. It's been building up in various stages, but right now it's pretty high fidelity. We set up a little Mars environment here like that. And like this little rock shrine, you know. And then we pretend like it's day 100 on Mars and we have all the scientists up in the other rooms. They're not allowed down here. We turn off the cameras and they're not allowed to see what the configuration is. We put little ducks just for fun. So I can go a little closer because I've got what's called the ESD wrist strap. It makes me at the same voltage as the rover so that no static discharge can jump across and fry any instruments. Okay, I will stay at least a meter away. So yes, this one looks huge. Yeah, this is the size of a mini-couper and we're using a landing system that's never been tried before. Depending on who you ask, you get different degrees of confidence. Takes 15 minutes when you send the command through the dish at the DSN. What was this thing? Yeah, we work a lot hours. And then a Mars day is slightly longer than a Earth Day so we're always shifting times we start. Why MSL? Why the big rover with the crazy landing system? The additional trip to Mars after two rows of the rovers have been there. There's a couple of reasons. I think one of them is the previous rovers had about five kilograms of payload. That's the amount of like science instruments they could carry. We're carrying about 80 kilograms of science instruments. It's just a huge, you know, 16 times more payload than we're carrying. We also have delivered new capability on the rover itself. The drill for example is something we haven't been able to do before. This is the end of the arm. You can see it's kind of like folded up like this. The biggest thing on the end of this arm is a big drill. And so when it grabs from the drill, you know, sample of the rock that it just sampled. And then it'll come over here and drop the sample off into these funnels. They go inside the chassis, the rover, and drop off into those instruments. And then they can do the analysis and they generate a data product and send it back to Earth. What we're looking for really the science of habitability, not whether life exists of course, but whether you know, could, could the potential for life be there. And a lot of that of course does still revolve around water, but a lot of that also revolves around organic compounds. It's big cyclops. I is actually a telescopic laser that they can focus and blast a hole in a rock. The fact that we have a rock shooting laser is the coolest thing about this project. That is pretty amazing. It's almost Star Wars-esque. I got into this because of I took an astronomy class at a community college in high school actually. I just thought like seeing anything move on this guy was like the coolest thing ever. And it still is the coolest thing ever. But yeah, it's easy to lose track of how lucky we are to work here. And this thing always surprises people. And there's a lot of good analysis that goes into it. It's just a coordinated effort to really understand how this thing works. You've got a lot of good people working on it. How do you know it's on your work? Don't. We do lots of testing. you