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[Music]

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>>There's a lot of people, a lot of professors
that will tell you that aerospace has become

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a very staid, or even conservative, and that
there's nothing new to learn, and I would

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say to those people that you're not trying
hard enough.

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Mars is just such an alien world in so many
ways, and so designing a little airplane to

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be able to fly there, that's a pretty good
trick, it's been a lot of fun.

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[Servos moving]

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The hardest part about designing little PRANDTL-M,
we initially thought it would just be the

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aerodynamics, but that we sort of had handled,
we ran into another problem, where we ran

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into a very unusual instability, it comes
up every once in awhile, and it's a function

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of the mass distribution; we struggled for
months trying to figure that particular problem

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out, and it turns out that the real answer
in that case is to use a stability augmentation

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system, and we have a really brilliant guy,
Ryan Dibley, who was able to design us a little

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piece of software in order to do that for
us.

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>>Alright, standby, here we go...

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...three, two, one, release!

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[Background propeller, power generator]

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[Music]

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[Background radio calls]

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>>Dropping in three...two...one...release!