- [Chelsea] Howdy from Texas A&M.

- [Grace] Computers lie, (gentle instrumental music) but the wind won't lie.

- [Dr. Dunbar] If your life support systems quit one month out into a six months journey, you're dead.

- [Jeremiah] They were called weird when they were a kid too, just like me.

But we're not weird.

We're cool.

(gentle instrumental music) - Welcome to campus.

Welcome to "Texas A&M Today."

(gentle instrumental music) Howdy and thanks for joining us for another episode.

I'm your host, Chelsea Reber, at the Zachry Engineering Education Complex at Texas A&M University.

This fall we've been meeting people who make Texas A&M special.

We continue that today as we meet a former NASA astronaut researching how to get Americans to Mars, with a little help from our students and a few pieces of high tech equipment.

Later, we'll also tour A&M's own wind tunnel, capable of testing everything, from golf clubs to missiles.

But first up, when storm strike or heat waves sizzle, meteorologists around the country are hard at work.

And whether they're behind the scenes or on TV, there's a good chance you'll be getting your forecast from an Aggie.

(gentle instrumental music) - You get to put yourself literally at the edge of what Mother nature and this earth can do.

Which is, take a single little spec, turn it into a cloud, then turn it into a thunderstorm, and then when you got the right ingredients, it just turns it into this monster of a storm that can make a tornado, or baseball-sized hail, or anything that seems to defy what a normal day is like, right?

(lightning crackling) (thunder rumbling) It's hard to...

Some people have these big weather events that they're like, "This was it.

"It was this tornado, this hurricane that, you know... "That's why I wanna be a meteorologist."

And some people just really like weather.

That's kind of how I am.

It wasn't one big event that came up.

- They certainly come to us with a fascination about weather, that maybe was something that happened when they were five-years-old or seven-years-old.

A lot of times it's a hurricane, for coastal residents.

A lot of times it's a tornado.

- I think it stems from me being afraid of weather as a kid.

And so, anytime wind picked up, temperature changed a little bit, anything was out of the norm, I freaked out.

And so my mom always was kind of a comfort to me to turn on the TV and see a meteorologist telling me, "Everything's fine.

"There's nothing going on."

- We were visiting some relatives in a tornado warning and the NOAA Weather Radio going off and me being kind of freaked out about what that was, and then wanting to learn more.

I guess I was always somewhat inquisitive, trying to figure out more about something as opposed to kind of not being afraid of it.

And I think that's partially, why I ended up kind of in weather.

- Anybody that's driven past campus has seen the O&M Building and the big radar that's on top.

So during active weather, students get to go up there and they get to start up the radar, they get to look at the radar data, they get to interpret it.

They get to do all those things right there.

(gentle instrumental music) And then for the broadcasting side, there's what they get to do on the green screen.

So you know, the forecast that goes to KAMU, they do a radio forecast that goes out across, I think 10 or 16 counties as well.

There's so many hands-on things that these students get to do now, that even I didn't get to do while I was in school.

So what's really cool about A&M is the National Weather Service or the Storm Prediction Center can call up to the meteorology department and say, "Hey, we need a balloon launch today."

And the students get to actually go out, do the whole process themselves, gather that data that is given to professional forecasters who use that to make sure that we can keep the public safe.

- Howdy Chris, this is Texas A&M.

We're looking to do a balloon launch.

Do we have clearance?

All right, thanks a lot.

All right, you've got clearance to launch.

And we are green on all three screens, so let it rip.

- [All] Two, one... - Let it go.

(gentle instrumental music) (wind fluttering) - Man, that is racing.

Just so- - We probably are, we're probably doing 50 knots at like 950.

- Howdy, Brazos Valley.

And let's take a look at your Tuesday.

We're starting off, it's wet and cold all day long.

I always look forward to class, even though I do get nervous.

I thought it was a cool opportunity, something that I've never done.

And I'm in the broadcasting club but I'm a producer, so I'm behind the camera doing all the behind-the-scenes things.

So getting to be in front of the camera was really cool.

Our program is really small.

It's a really tight knit community, so getting to do things like storm chasing with my classmates, who have become my best friends, and I'm getting the opportunity to get on the green screen and practice broadcasting.

All the different opportunities that A&M has given me to practice this craft, I think has made me love it even more because yes, it's a lot of math, yes, it's a lot of physics, but it's more than that.

It's a hands-on major too, and that's something I was looking for.

And so it's just a combination of all those things that have made me kind of fall in love with weather.

- Everything about the program has changed my life.

It has made me so much more confident.

It's something special about having a group of people that you can relate to and a group of people that grew up in a similar way as you.

Like, I just feel so much comfort in this building because I know that everybody in this building has similar goals as me and like they're not, they were called weird when they were a kid too, just like me.

But we're not weird.

We're cool.

- What's your average?

(wind fluttering) - I'm looking at an average of about 10, around that wind, 11.

- Like many fields, there's an expectation that that bachelors degree means you are ready to do some work.

We take very seriously that charge to make sure that graduates are ready to save lives and property.

- If we can be the ones to help people, help people plan their day better, help keep people safe when there is danger coming, help people feel more comfortable about living in a certain region, as climate may be changing or as things might be evolving, then we have accomplished our goal.

- Sure, the weather and the science of it is cool, but essentially, you become a meteorologist because you do wanna make sure that people know what's coming, know what's happening, right?

It's not a perfect science, but we can give you a pretty good idea that, "Hey, on this day there's gonna be big storms.

"You need to pay attention because they could be destructive "or maybe even deadly."

They're coming pretty close, and it's gonna be right here.

This is the Navasota River.

So I think that that is the biggest vein that I look for and that, I think I see in a lot of Aggies as well.

It's just that passion to wanna help people, 'cause that's essentially what we're doing as meteorologists.

And no matter where you are in all 50 states, guaranteed that in some way, shape, or form, you're getting a Aggie meteorology forecast.

- Next, we're checking out one of the many unique research opportunities for students, A&M's own wind tunnel.

We'll see how aerospace engineers study the way air flows over planes and other objects, and how that work is setting up our students for success.

(calm instrumental music) - People were really smart 70 years ago.

They were able to figure out how to do mechanically and hydraulically what we just throw at a computer and hope it works.

(calm instrumental music) I don't think they realize how special and unique this place is.

The facility itself is called the Oran W. Nicks Low Speed Wind Tunnel.

For most of its history, it has just been the Low Speed Wind Tunnel.

There are only two or three other tunnels in the country like this, and we really are the only ones, that I'm aware of, that are so engaged in the educational mission of the school that they're attached to.

It was initially completed in the middle of 1940s, first operated in the middle or late '40s as just a straight tunnel called a open-loop tunnel, that would draw air in from the outside and eject it back outside again.

Then in the late '50s it was closed up into the closed loop.

(calm instrumental music) The aerospace engineering department here is one of the oldest in the country.

And this place has been here almost since the beginning.

Driving by on the street, you would just see a big beige tube.

We've had just about everybody you can imagine testing aircraft configurations, both military and civilian, or commercial type configurations.

There may be up to a dozen students working here, mostly undergraduates, but a few graduate students.

In fact, one, Grace is working on the test of UC Davis and NASA.

So she really is in charge of the test.

I mean, she's designing how the pieces come together, she's operating the tests, setting up the equipment.

And the staff here is supporting her, but she is in charge.

(gentle instrumental music) - I've been here for about a year as a research assistant and I was here for three years as an undergraduate research assistant.

A&M has a great engineering program.

Once I was at A&M, we have amazing aerospace labs and that really drew me to the aerospace program in the first place.

I do Particle Image Velocimetry research, PIV for short.

You fill the tunnel with a seeding particle, I use smoke, and then use a laser to highlight those particles, and then two camera flashes to see how the particle moves between the two images.

A project in particular that I'm working on is UC Davis Wing in conjunction with NASA.

We're testing a seven foot wing with high pressure air going through it, to see if that could be good information for commercial aircraft.

- What we do is try to determine how will an aircraft or a part of an aircraft, a wing or an airfoil section, react to air flowing over it or vice versa, what will the air do when it encounters this object?

- We have a test section and then the motor that pulls air and it goes around the circuit, which makes it a lot more efficient.

And the circuit expands and contracts to get the air to move a little bit faster.

And we can hit speeds of about 200 miles-an-hour with that set-up.

- It's really hard to determine in-flight because it's hard to put sensors near the object.

It's hard to get it in exactly the right configurations.

But if we have total control over how we position something, what its parts are, and we can attach it using some kind of load measuring system, then we can get all the data we would like to offer in a very controlled setting.

(calm instrumental music) We've tested all sorts of things.

As aerospace engineers our favorite are aircraft.

A test like that will usually take, short ones, maybe a week, long ones may take eight weeks in the wind tunnel.

And for those we'll work with an outside company or some other entity, and they'll send us design files, what the vehicle looks like.

And the staff here and the students who work here will take those design files and scale them down to something that can fit in the wind tunnel.

We've had cyclists in the wind tunnel, we've done architectural tests, we've tested lots and lots of offshore oil rigs and drill ships.

We work a lot with student teams and clubs.

We've had golf club manufacturers come in and test the drag of different drivers.

Just about anything that's exposed to wind or that moves through the air is within our ability to test and evaluate.

Almost all aerospace engineers work with computer simulations rather than wind tunnels.

The wind tunnel provides us an opportunity to very quickly test in real air how a particular shape will perform.

We can get a lot of data really quickly, whereas with simulation, you can maybe start getting data faster.

You don't often trust it until you can match it up to an experiment and then it takes you maybe longer to proceed through all the different cases.

So we often will do many, many, many more cases than a simulation.

(calm instrumental music) - Computers lie, but the wind won't lie.

If you're gonna put a human inside of it, you want to make sure that you are 100% confident in your results.

A wind tunnel is how you actually prove that you're correct.

It introduces students to that middle step between actual design and then the aircraft going out to the fleet, whether it's commercial or military.

Most students, myself included, didn't know test engineering was that middle step.

Now if they go to designing, or if they go to flight test engineering, or they go to that last step, they'll know what happens in between and they'll have experience with it.

I hope to be in between the stages of designing and actually having that plane go out, if that's flight test or wind tunnel testing.

Somewhere with a big company like that.

- The thing that's made me happy over the last decade is just seeing the number of students who come through here, and knowing that in the aerospace engineering curriculum, really, every single year students are interacting with us.

This place had really been a little bit separate from the rest of the department.

And one of the things I'm really proud of is how we've been able to pull this facility, the Nicks tunnel, back into the educational mission of the school and really get a lot more student involvement.

- If 200 miles per hour isn't enough for some tests, engineers can reduce the size of the tunnel to bring the wind speed up to about 300 miles an hour.

That's almost twice as fast as a category five hurricane.

Before we go to our final segment, we have a special edition of Aggie Facts for you and it's quite a hoot.

(drum rolling) The year was 1917, A&M defeated Rice in a basketball game in Houston.

Amidst the joy of victory, Aggie cadets stole Rice's mascot, a six foot tall, 200 pound canvas owl.

They ceremonially inducted it into the Corps, gave it the rank of general, and shipped it back to College Station via train.

The owl went to chapel and lectures, and watched the cadets march in review.

Within days, Rice students formed the Owl Protective Association and hired two detectives to find the bird.

One of them posed as a reporter, writing a story about the owl napping and stumbled on the only four Aggies who knew where the owl was.

The third floor of the armory: the most secure building on campus.

Alerted by telegram, Rice students drove up in the middle of the night to break in.

They drew the attention of several watchmen, but ran away and returned multiple times.

Finally, five Rice football players rammed the door open, got their owl, and drove away.

They got as far as Millican and Navasota before their cars broke down.

At least 800 cadets chased after them, taking over Navasota.

Cadets had complete control of all telephone and telegraph lines, blockaded all roads, and stopped all passing trains.

Knowing the bird would likely be captured, the Rice students burned its sawdust stuffing and kept the canvas skin.

It took a few days of hiding and sneaking, but four students were able to avoid capture, hitch a ride, and triumphantly get their mascot back home.

13 other students weren't so lucky.

They were held at A&M until Rice's president got involved.

By the way, the detective Rice students hired named the owl, Sammy.

That's been the name of their mascot ever since.

Next, we're off to the final frontier.

Dr. Bonnie Dunbar flew on five space shuttle missions, now she's researching how to improve the lives of astronauts during long future trips to Mars.

Let's see how A&M is playing a significant part.

(gentle instrumental music) - [Dr. Dunbar] I could look at the stars at night at 9:00, 'cause I lived in a very rural area with no night lights.

(rocket engine growling) Sputnik was launched when I was eight, and that was all that you heard on the radio.

(rocket engine growling) Reading HG Wells, Jules Verne, even watching the science fiction TV shows, that's what captivated me.

It's not easy to describe exploration, whether it's space or deep sea diving.

- [Astronaut] Close the hatch thermal cover.

- People who become enamored with that and excited about it have the same level of passion.

I didn't say, "Logically, I have a plan.

"I pick that."

It kind of picked me.

(gentle instrumental music) The return to the moon is called the Artemis program.

The moon is gonna be our next Antarctica Research Base.

The moon is about three-and-a-half days away and the front face of the moon always faces us.

So if you've got a base there, it's always a direct line.

And if you had an emergency, you could be back here in three-and-a-half days.

Mars is a lot different.

Mars is in orbit way out there.

If your life systems quit one month out into a six months journey, you're dead.

(door slams) If we can learn to operate in the lunar environment, in that extreme environment and design systems, including space suits, then we can extrapolate that, reduce the risk of going to Mars.

- You'll click to start the sequence and these light panels will turn on, and I'll be doing a calibration sequence.

My dad was able to get me outta school to go see the last space shuttle launch of Discovery, back in 2011.

Since then, I knew that space is where I wanted to be in to work and it's where I got really involved in all my STEM classes, and started my own projects through high school and undergrad.

My research is focused on predicting suit fit performance by using computer modeling and finite element analysis.

I'm really motivated to figure out the best way to fabricate and engineer space suits that work best for humans, so that that we don't minimize any of an astronaut's existing performance.

What truly makes it unique working with her is that, how much experience that she brings to the table that many of these other researchers don't have direct data points for.

(gentle instrumental music) - Five missions, 50 days in space.

(gentle instrumental music) What was critical is those were five missions.

So the longest mission was 13 days, the shortest, seven days.

It was long enough to see the short term effects of vestibular changes.

So you know, you kind of sway a little bit until you become re-acclimated to earth's gravity.

We can't get less than 1G here, but on a centrifuge, if you're prone, we can use centrifugal force to create an artificial lunar and Mars gravity.

NASA then built what's called a short-arm centrifuge.

It was, now in storage at the Johnson Space Center.

We talked about bringing this centrifuge back into operation in the state of Texas.

NASA gifted A&M the entire $2.2 million centrifuge facility.

(gentle instrumental music) A&M, and NASA, and KBR have teamed together and we're gonna have a world class facility.

- It is rare and having a centrifuge here, it is such a huge asset for us for, not only for us as a scientist and the ones who will be operating it, but also for Texas A&M.

(gentle instrumental music) We'll be the only one with these capabilities in the United States.

So, it really put us up front in this investigation of what's happening in human space flight when we wanna go to the moon and go to Mars.

There are lots of unanswered questions about what's the right way to do it, what's the right counter measures to keep our astronauts healthy during all this trip.

So here, it's really a unique facility to answer some of these questions.

(gentle instrumental music) - We're so used to living on earth, we've evolved over millions of years to be perfectly adapted to earth and 1G conditions.

(gentle instrumental music) Almost every system of the body is affected by spaceflight in some way.

But over those really long duration missions to Mars, that's where all those effects are gonna start adding up and you are potentially gonna see you have an increased number of medical emergencies.

Most people have probably been to the fairgrounds and a lot of people might have seen one of those rides, where you spin around really fast and you stick to the wall.

So imagine a scientific version of that, but you're lying down.

So you're lying down horizontally on your back, but you're spinning around.

So the sensation is, lying down but almost like you're standing up, 'cause you're getting pushed outwards.

- We have a couple of NASA funded projects that we'll be executing on the centrifuge.

So external investigators, or even NASA, in collaboration with NASA, we'll be able to host external teams to come and do their research using our centrifuge here.

- [Reporter 1] One, zero- - [Astronaut 1] Zero.

- [Astronaut 2] Release.

- [Reporter 1] And lift off.

As the countdown to Mars continues, the perseverance of humanity launching the next generation- - [Dr. Dunbar] After we have a base on the moon via the Artemis program and we're flying crews to the moon, and we're thinking about, the nation's thinking about going to Mars in 2035.

We wanna be one of those top 10 universities, just like MIT was during Apollo, that people look to, to be part of the future.

(calm instrumental music) - [Dillon] Even if it's as low as 10% chance just to put in a number out there, it's worth giving it a shot.

- [Reporter 2] One.

- [Astronaut 3] Zero.

- [Reporter 2] We have ignition.

And we have lift off of NASA's Genesis spacecraft- - [Dillon] It's just a explorer's nature to wanna go do that, even though the risk might be pretty great.

- [Reporter 2] (indistinct) Kick rate is in.

- [Dillon] You just kind of have to bite the bullet and just take a chance.

- [Reporter 2] Everything continues to look good.

- You're doing it all for the greater pursuit of knowledge.

As long as there is a chance then it's worth going.

- [NASA Control] You've got a little burning or steering activity.

Picking up a little bit as we go through the wind shears and encounter the transonic buffet.

Stage level's still looking good and we've just went supersonic.

- NASA's latest goal is to put humans on Mars some time in the 2030s or forties.

China hopes to do it in 2033 and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, has hinted at a crewed mission, as early as 2029.

Next, I caught up with a Texas A&M difference maker for a one-on-one conversation.

Today, that's interim Vice Chancellor and Dean of Engineering, Dr. John E. Hurtado.

He received his masters and PhD in aerospace engineering from A&M, and has been back in Aggieland, teaching and researching since 2001.

You have patents on some of your robotic algorithms and they're part of a permanent collection at the Smithsonian.

How did that come about?

- It was an interesting project where we built 36 of these sugar cube sized robots and each robot was on its own.

It was totally autonomous.

It could compute by itself, it could decide by itself, it could communicate with the other 35 robots.

And the algorithms that we developed were to make them or enable them, rather, to cooperate and solve a problem that one on its own would not be able to solve.

And so it was very innovative work.

And I got to see those robots at the Smithsonian, behind the scenes, they're in a cabinet because my daughter interned at the Smithsonian, what?

25 years later?

- What should people expect when hypersonic testing begins at RELLIS?

- What we are building out there is called the Ballistics Aero-optics and Materials range.

The BAM.

- [Chelsea] BAM, yep.

- This will be the largest facility of its type in the country.

So it will be able to test projectiles, achieving hypersonic speeds, so Mach five or greater.

It will also be able to conduct tests in directed energy, high energy laser directed systems.

And thirdly, it will be able to test impacts of high energy projectiles upon materials to see how they behave.

All very fascinating.

And so in one range you get to test three very different types of science and engineering.

- You work here in the beautiful Zachry Building.

What do you look forward to when you come to work every day?

- It is a great environment to come to work.

It's a great environment for our students to study.

I look at each day, I prepare the night before, I do my homework and I look at each day, and I look forward to getting that day's job done.

I look forward to working with a really strong team.

And I try to take time out of each day to walk the hallway, just to see the students.

I think it's why we are here.

If I didn't wanna be here with students, I'd still be at a national lab.

- And there are some people who are afraid that Texas A&M is growing too much and that it might dilute the degree, the education.

What is your message to those people?

- There is no dilution in what our students are receiving.

There is no hesitation for industry and labs to come here and recruit our students.

I look at it as, it's an opportunity.

We are providing more opportunity to more students than ever before, and I'm excited about that.

- Thank you so much for joining us today.

You can watch an extended version of this interview on our website.

Thanks for watching today's episode of "Texas A&M Today."

Our first season continues in two weeks and we hope you'll join us.

(upbeat music)