(music throughout) NASA White Sands is a remote test
facility that the agency uses for some of the more dangerous testing
that is needed to support the NASA missions.
The size of the guns, the biggest gun we have
is about 225 feet
and the building itself is only about 200 feet long.
So part of the gun does actually stick out of the building.
There is a very, very large project underway right now that started
not too long ago with the landing of the Perseverance Rover on Mars.
I am a systems engineer for the capture containment and return system.
This system is the NASA payload which is basically responsible
to bring the samples, the Mars samples back to Earth.
When I'm standing in is actually called a hypervelocity test facility.
It's where we shoot little projectiles at objects, basically
as fast as we can achieve on on earth.
In our case, we are testing to see what will happen
to our designs if they were to be impacted
by a micrometeoroid on the trip to or from Mars.
The goal here is to see how well those materials withstand
those impacts, to make sure that we don't lose containment of our sample.
Hypervelocity guns work in two sections, which are a two stage light gas gun.
We pressurized hydrogen in the first section in the middle of the gun.
There's a barrel.
That's where the projectile is held.
The pressures that are generated from these guns
can actually level the building, and that pressure is suddenly released
where the projectile is, where the barrel in the middle of the gun is.
And then from that point on, there's
a simulated vacuum which simulates space,
and then it is impacted where the target is.
It's all about the timing.
You're dealing with about 500 microseconds, for the timing of the event.
So unlike a traditional firearm, a lot goes into preparing these guns
for a shot set up takes anywhere from an hour to a full day.
Gunpowder is prepared and loaded by hand.
We're able to remotely operate the guns via
the bunker
on the count of three,
three, two, one.
It's equal to 25 times faster than a 44 mag.
The velocities are also like flying from New York to San Francisco
in 5 minutes.
One of the interesting things that we learn
is that a massive piece of metal does not offer the same level of protection
of really thin pieces of metal, but stack all together.
What we are doing is we have very light layers of material and those layers
they function to progress, fully break the particles
until the very last layer that receives all the energy from the hit.
And it stops right there.
If it wasn't for this study,
we would be sending up rockets and satellites and
pieces of the space station, not knowing whether they were going
to protect the astronauts or the equipment we send up.
It's a really neat thing to see when you test something
and have it correlate very well back to your your simulations.
I am super excited to be working this mission to bring back samples from Mars.
It is something that has
never been done before and we are learning so much from this,
especially because this Mars is a planet that we had fascinations for a very,
very long time.
So it is
humbling and a lot a lot of work, right.
Being here testing things.
It's it's amazing.