Dreams about the Universe: A Chat with ESA Engineer Ewelina Ryszawa

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Ewelina Ryszawa, a Polish mechanical engineer at the European Space Agency, tells Culture.pl about a Polish satellite she co-designed, her involvement with NASA’s InSight mission which sent a robotic lander to Mars and… her favourite science fiction stories.

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Starry sky, photo: Andrzej Sidor / Forum

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Marek Kępa (MK): Apparently you were already interested in astronomy and the evolution of stars as a child?

Ewelina Ryszawa (ER): I was fortunate to grow up in the countryside, half way between Warsaw and Białystok, where the sky was clear and light pollution was minimal. At night you could see all of the stars. From a very early age, I found these stars, and the universe, very interesting. I also read quite a bit of children’s literature on these topics. Additionally, I was always intrigued by the technical sciences. I always knew that I wanted a technical higher education.

There was a time when I considered civil engineering and architecture, because I also liked technical drawing. But later, as a high-school student, when I started to think about what I’d like to do in life, I returned to my childhood dreams about the sky and the universe – what can be found there, how to get there, are there any alien civilisations? And I wanted to do what I always had at the back of my mind.

MK: So when you became a student of the Faculty of Power and Aeronautical Engineering at the Warsaw University of Technology you already knew you wanted pursue a career in the space industry?

ER: Yes, that’s why I chose this faculty. At the time it was the only faculty in Poland that offered an astronautics specialisation. Curiously I didn’t actually end up choosing this specialisation. I eventually chose something similar – aircraft propulsion. I did that because it provided a better technical education.

But, from my first year at the university, I was involved with the Students' Space Association. The SSA had existed for around twenty years and already done some exciting projects. Back then there weren’t many institutions or companies in Poland that dealt with space engineering. Actually the SSA was one of the top outfits in the field at that time – its members were involved in the development of European student satellites. This association was a wonderful place, you could really develop your skills there and learn amazing things. By the way, the SSA is where the first Polish satellite – PW-Sat1 – was designed.

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The deorbit sail of the PW-Sat2 satellite, Warsaw University of Technology, photo: pw-sat.pl

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MK: This brings us to our next question. At the Warsaw University of Technology, you designed, alongside other students, the PW-Sat2 satellite which was launched in 2018. What was this satellite’s mission and how did you feel when it succeeded?

ER: This was the first space project I worked on. I was its co-founder and worked on it throughout its duration. At first there was eight of us, student members of SSA, and we wanted to build another satellite following PW-Sat1.

It’s a bit different in Poland than at Western European universities, when you want to build a satellite at a university, students have to do everything by themselves from scratch. From the concept of the mission, to establishing requirements, obtaining sponsors, detailed technical design, the final assembly and testing. How do you even find a spot on a rocket, how do you launch such a satellite? You have to find that out. So this was an amazing project that offered a lot of learning opportunities.

We decided that the main experiment was going to be a deorbit sail that opened in orbit, which is made to quicken the burning of the satellite in the top layers of the atmosphere. Of course, this only applies to low Earth orbits where you can still find traces of the atmosphere and where you have fractional drag. During the launch this sail was rolled up in a container measuring 85 millimetres in diameter and 60 millimetres in height, and from this very small container a 4 square metre structure was deployed in orbit.

Our deorbit sail wasn’t the first ever designed, but it’s not so easy to make a deorbit sail that’ll successfully open and allow for us to monitor its functioning. A lot of missions before us tried to open similar sails and failed. We were successful at the first attempt.

Personally, I was shocked. Many student satellites are defunct right from the start, for various reasons, for example their components malfunction. When it turned out that PW-Sat2 is working and that everything is in order we were overjoyed. The sail worked very well and it successfully lowered the satellite’s orbit causing it to burn in the atmosphere. I didn’t expect things would go so well.

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Ewelina Ryszawa & the Astronika team, photo: Bartlomiej Zackiewicz PL / Astronika

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MK: In 2016, you became an employee of Astronika, a Polish company manufacturing solutions for the space industry. There you took part in an immensely interesting project – NASA’s InSight mission which sent a robotic lander to Mars in 2018. You coordinated work on the hammering mechanism for the HP3 instrument, aka ‘the mole’. Can you please explain to our readers what that is?

ER: When I took over this project the instrument’s integration phase was already under way, so this device had been designed before I joined Astronika. My role was that of an Assembly Integration Tests Lead Engineer.

We worked on the heart of the mole – the hammering mechanism. The mole is a penetrator, a device that burrows into the surface of celestial bodies like moons, planets, through hammering. It’s not a drill, as drilling generates a lot of heat and that can disrupt certain measurements. If you want to generate as little heat as possible or have an extended range (a drill is limited by its own length) you use a penetrator. Theoretically, the depth attainable by a mole is only limited by the ground characteristics and the length of the power cable.

The objective of NASA’s InSight mission was to examine Mars’ interior. The most important tool on the lander was a French-built seismometer, the second most important instrument was the penetrator.

The mole was supposed to examine how heat spreads through the Martian regolith. The exterior of the penetrator was equipped with heaters. The device also pulled a cable behind it, jam-packed full of temperature sensors. The goal was to burrow 5 metres deep making numerous stops along the way. During these stops, the heaters were to heat up the regolith around the penetrator and the sensors on the cable were to measure how the heat spreads. This experiment was made to check how heat spreads through Mars’ interior and verify our models of Mars’ internal structure.

The penetrator was designed by the German Space Agency, but its heart – the hammering mechanism – was made in Poland by Astronika.

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Spacecraft InSight on Mars, 2018, photo: NASA / Wikimedia.org

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MK: Constructing a vital part of an instrument for an interplanetary space mission – that sounds like quite a challenge. How did you verify that the mole would carry out its mission? I hear that you experimented on a model of the Martian surface at a laboratory…

ER: Constructing instruments for space missions is a very complex undertaking and it’s never done by one person or institution. It’s always a network of collaborators. We, as the providers of the hammering mechanism, were responsible for testing it in laboratory conditions. After we delivered the integrated mechanism to the German Space Agency it was put into the penetrator. They conducted tests on the entire device.

An engineering model of the hammering mechanism was put into an engineering model of the penetrator. The device was then put into a tall tube filled with a substitute of the Martian soil, something very similar to what we expected to find on the surface of Mars. This tube was over 5 metres tall and hammering tests were conducted in it. They all ended in success. A few versions of our device were created and, in the end, the 7th version was sent to space.

MK: Unfortunately on Mars it turned out that the mole isn’t digging deep enough into the regolith and due to that can’t make all the planned measurements. This occurred even though the hammering mechanism was working flawlessly. What was the reason behind this?

ER: On Mars there’s nobody who can check this organoleptically. We can only use data which is in certain ways limited. But the most probable explanation is that the Martian regolith is completely different than we expected, its physical characteristics are completely different than we assumed. Due to this there wasn’t enough friction on the penetrator’s exterior. For the penetrator to burrow you have to have friction coming from the earth surrounding the mole. It can’t dig in a void. The problem was that the Martian soil didn’t spill into the hole created by the penetrator’s digging, an empty space was left around the device.

MK: I’ve read that this soil was more like pumice than powdery ground…

ER: Yes, you can compare it to sugar and flour. If you put your finger into sugar and make a small pit it’ll automatically start to cover itself up. But if you use your finger to make a hole in flour, it won’t cover itself up as quickly – the hole will remain.

Even in the photos you could see that the Martian ground wasn’t spilling. During the hammering a hole was made that had a diameter much bigger than the mole itself. This hole didn’t cover itself up. The burrowing attempts lasted for two years. I’m hugely impressed by how many attempts JPL [Jet Propulsion Lab, a NASA field centre] made and how they were carried out.

For example, to help with the burrowing the manipulator on board of the InSight lander was used. Of course, it wasn’t meant for this. This manipulator has a small scoop on its end and this was used to try to push the regolith into the hole around the penetrator. Also, attempts were made to pin the mole. Unfortunately, in the end the penetrator only managed to dig a hole as deep as its own length, which is 40 centimetres, so we didn’t reach the planned depth of 5 metres.

MK: But it was still a success! In an interview for RMF.FM Artur B. Chmielewski, a Polish project manager at JPL, says that in space exploration ‘it’s OK to make mistakes but you have to later figure out why you made them’. In other words, you have to learn from failed attempts. Are you under the impression that those involved in the InSight project learned something from the story of the mole and the hammering mechanism?

ER: Definitely, we all learned a lot. We know more about what to expect on Mars, we can better prepare to avoid such situations in the future, we know what additional solutions we can implement in instruments so that they can burrow better during future missions.

I personally learned that despite serious problems there’s always a way out you need to consider. I was really impressed by the ideas of the JPL engineers to use what’s available on the spot to help in the mole’s digging. Outstanding progress was made in the burrowing, using what was available on board.

I’d like to add that Astronika was responsible for the making of the hammering mechanism but didn’t participate in the later experiments. JPL was responsible for the burrowing and the analysis of its results. From the perspective of those involved in the creation of the hammering mechanism the mission was a success because the mechanism always worked properly, throughout thousands of work cycles it worked flawlessly. That shows that the technical expertise was excellent.

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Ewelina Ryszawa & the Astronika team, photo: Bartlomiej Zackiewicz PL / Astronika

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MK: You recently became a member of the European Space Agency – congratulations! What will you want to work on there?

ER: My dream is to work on interplanetary projects. That’s my childhood dream. What’s among the stars? Are there any inhabitable planets? Are there any other civilisations out there? My dream is to work on missions that go as far as possible and provide us with information about our surroundings and what’s beyond the solar system. Do our theories match reality? Is there alien life in our solar system?

Currently I’m working on a number of projects, among them is an instrument for JUICE [Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer]. I’m also involved in an observation mission that’ll accompany one of the Sentinel satellites. It’ll observe the Earth’s temperature, clouds, surface and wind speeds in small areas.

MK: According to the magazine ‘Urania’ there are more and more women working in the Polish space industry – soon they’ll constitute a third of all the workers in this sector.

ER: I agree, there are more and more women in the industry and that’s a good thing. I think we’re heading in the right direction.

Unfortunately, women are often discouraged at a very early stage, people say this is a man’s job. It annoys me that girls always have to be dressed nicely and can’t get dirty. You want to use an electric drill – you get disapproving looks. Why would a girl want to do that? When I heard comments like that it really made me mad but it also motivated me. If somebody told me I can’t do something I worked extra hard to prove them wrong. But I know that not everybody shares this approach. When women hear such comments all their lives it’s demotivating and makes it harder for them to find work in the industry. I think this is wrong and I really hope it changes.

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Stanisław Lem at his Kraków home, 1971, photo: Jakub Grełowski / PAP

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I really like Lem’s books and science fiction literature in general, as well as science fiction movies and TV series. The Expanse TV series has a great story and concept. That’s sort of how I picture the future, what the conquering of the solar system will look like – that we’ll have colonies on other planets, moons and asteroids. Although the acting here, in my opinion, isn’t its strong suit.

When it comes to books there are two stories I like to return to. Dune is very vivid and shows what human kind might accomplish one day and what the possible problems linked to that could be. The other story is Kir Bulychev’s The City Above. I read this book as a teenager and I remember it made a huge impression on me. It’s a great mix of science fiction, social reflections, and psychological literature. I like this book a lot.

I also really appreciate Lem’s His Master’s Voice. Lem had amazing ideas and sometimes it’s hard to believe that he predicted certain things, like e-book readers, so long ago. His books are outstanding. I also used to enjoy fantasy literature quite a bit. Of course, Sapkowski is a classic. But I was also a big fan of Jarosław Grzędowicz’s series Pan Lodowego Ogrodu (Master of the Ice Garden). I thought all the volumes in this series were great.

Interview conducted by Marek Kępa, Apr 21

Language English

Warsaw University of Technology

Astronika

Jet Propulsion Lab

European Space Agency