All these worlds are yours | Veronica McGregor, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory | OnBrand '17

[Music] I want to say good morning I know it's not morning here but it is in Los Angeles where I am from it's about not even 8 a.m. so I'm getting gear I've had plenty of coffee I'm here to talk to you might be wondering what's NASA doing here at this conference I've actually done a couple of these talks because people are really interested to see how we have transformed in delivering our news and information in the last decade and what I have seen here today are numerous organizations whether the New York Times or agencies all talking about the incredible transformation that has occurred in the last decade that is like slammed all of us and made us all have to change the way we had been doing things for decades and that happened for us at NASA as well I came from CNN I came to be head of you know basically a public affairs office I had covered NASA I knew I loved it I loved the content but when I started there all we were doing were press releases and video news releases everything went to the news media we relied on them to deliver our story and at a certain point the news media was no longer there to do it for us at a certain point we saw a lot of the reporters were being laid off we saw entire news outlets newspapers magazines had folded and it became a bit of a crisis point for us to make sure that we could still get everything all the information out to the public but we were a bunch of former journalists in my office and so we rose to that challenge so let me explain a little bit more about what we did I want to explain a little bit about that location that's the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California it is one of 10 NASA centers and you may be familiar with Houston that's where we have Mission Control for the International Space Station you may be familiar with Kennedy Space Center where we launch all of our spacecraft most of our spacecraft and I'm from the center that is located in California we do all of the robotic exploration for NASA not all of it there are a few other centers that do that as well but you would probably recognize a little bit more the Curiosity rover picture that I had up earlier this is the type of work we do at JPL we build robots that we send out into space whether they're orbiters at Jupiter or Saturn or they're Rovers landing on the surface of Mars hopefully we'll future we'll be getting more orbiters out to small moons around Jupiter we have a lot of missions in the pipeline it's actually been an incredible time for space exploration we've gone from ten missions flying missions when I started at JPL in 2001 to over two dozen today so we're incredibly busy we have a lot going on a lot of it is earth science as well so we do this robotic exploration for NASA and traditionally this has been send out these robots go explore worlds maybe they'll be worlds will resent humans one day so before any astronauts went to the moon we did all of the lunar landings with robotic spacecraft to test that out right now we're on Mars we're doing a lot of testing there we do have instruments on curiosity that tests the radiation environment that's being done just so that we can prepare for humans one day to go to Mars and then we send spacecraft across the solar system and launch telescopes that peer out into space looking for planets around other stars so you may be familiar with scenes like this this is Jet Propulsion Laboratory this is the landing night for the Curiosity rover on Mars back in 2012 our Mission Control Room tends to get very very emotional and very excited people sometimes compare it to that International Space Station mission control room where everybody's in suits and ties and our just talking really quietly we're pretty emotional at JPL for some reason I don't know why one time the Houston folks asked me if we planted people in there to try to make this look this good it said no it just happens we're a happy bunch so they're excited about landing that rover on Mars I could be excited about the way the public reacted to watching all of that stream live to the Internet so we made it available for everybody to see that mission and we had to stream it to every channel available because we were actually landing on the west coast it was almost midnight news programming was done for the day there were no live reporters out there at that time and we knew that going in that we needed to make sure that we were streaming this live to every platform we could do so YouTube Facebook the NASA website as well and this is you know this is the type of stuff that we're doing today that we've changed so let me tell you the history though back in 2008 by the way this is the first robot selfie from another planet that is the Phoenix lander on Mars and it did have a nice little camera on its arm and it did take a picture and that I tweeted back in 2008 I started this account in 2008 first sort of the same reason that was when we were really seeing the decline in the news media coverage for our missions we saw so many fewer reporters coming to JPL to tell this story and that particular lander was going to land on Mars on a Sunday on a weekend that was a national holiday in the United States and we had very few media covering it and three weeks before we landed I realized you know we've got to find other ways that we're going to be able to tell everyone that we've landed that we're safe and share the excitement of this mission and Twitter was still relatively new so I open an account and called up Mars Phoenix and that was the very first NASA account on Twitter if you're wondering how NASA felt about opening that first account I didn't tell them you know it I just knew that there was this new platform that we wanted to use that we wanted to take advantage of didn't want to have anyone say but we have to test it first we have to do some studies we need to have the you know if tourneys look at this just really wanted to get that going so I didn't put any NASA branding on it at all I was ready to pull that down if I had to if NASA got mad at me and I started tweeting from this account three weeks before landing and then landing night it exploded this account became the fifth most followed account on Twitter that year the mission lasted only about five months so eventually it had to come to an end but it showed NASA the value of jumping into these new platforms we actually started winning awards for this and it was around that time that NASA suddenly said this was there too you know Twitter account that NASA was winning awards for the Twitter account so I like to say as I mentioned earlier JPL has to send those robotic missions out to explore new areas before humans go and I now say that we also jump into social media before the rest of NASA to explore that for them and before they jump in and that's pretty much what happened we opened up other accounts very quickly in 2008 Cassini Saturn that's a mission that recently ended how many people here saw any coverage of the Saturn mission that we had to dispose of properly by crashing it into Saturn that is an amazing mission and it had been in space for 20 years which is why it was coming to an end we have an account for the Voyager mission there's two of them actually one is in interstellar space at this point these like you know just celebrated their 40th anniversary since launch they've a huge following in social media which we found really interesting because we didn't think they're you know that people most people on social media were old enough to remember what these spacecraft were doing but apparently they are extremely popular curiosity had an account two years before it landed on Mars we showed the entire row rover being built in our cleanroom we streamed it live with a live chat and we got people very excited about the mission before we even launched the mission and you know a sunset on Mars is a pretty cool thing to be able to watch the astronaut program and NASA is the agency joined Twitter about six months after we put up these other accounts and of course the astronauts they have their own handle at NASA astronauts but a lot of them are also on Twitter or other platforms now they've become very very engaged they actually had a little concerns going into it they were worried about the amount of time it would take they were worried about being able to vote you have to devote time to your account you can't just post I mean that's always been our philosophy you don't just post we're not pushing out information we want to have a conversation with people so it took them some time but I think you know they joined in and obviously many of them do extremely well and they really enjoy it so this is the NASA agency footprint today on different social media platforms we've got millions and millions of followers it's been amazing but of course it's this is extremely recognizable brand and it's a brand that people mostly feel really good about because it really shows the best of humanity it shows what we're capable of it shows how we can dream big wave a saying at JPL dare mighty things you know just always think outside the box and so we have a great following and it's not only that you know the 20 plus millions on all of those platforms that's the agency account all those other accounts and a few others that I showed you earlier they all have over a million followers themselves so I think we're about really double we're probably about 40 million I the accounts we do out of JPL are about 20 million followers across several different accounts so we have this giant footprint in social media and it's been very successful way for us to get out information about what we are doing because we're taxpayer-funded and we owe it to the public to tell them what we're doing with their money we've taken advantage of every single platform possible old and new we see one opening up we'll jump into it we do try things differently on Twitter there are hundreds and hundreds of NASA accounts on snapchat we have one and we all agreed that every mission does not get their own we share one account so you'll see snapchat stories from 10 different centers if we just passed you know that around people schedule it in advance and I think that's a great way of doing it I think we have a lot to learn in terms of where we're putting all of our resources and you know whether it's worth it to have too many accounts on one platform or whether we should consolidate and that the thing for us in social media is that everything we do is organic we cannot spend and we have zero budget for marketing and advertising none we can't sponsor a single post we have public affairs offices and everything we do is produced in-house or through a collaboration with an outside company that might be wanting to work with us because they're working on some really great product and we want to give them our content we are both a Content producer and a content provider so we keep you know all of our material is available for use it's mostly public domain and we have very few requirements for using our materials whether it's a documentary film or or we've had a lot of advertisers that's seen in mission controls everyone jumping up and down we had multiple advertising companies contact us to use some of that material and you know putting our material getting it into popular culture or into other areas that are gonna spread our message is is they okay with us so we have our responsibilities include sharing the good days and we do that obviously you've seen plenty of things and this was an interesting case the arrival of Pluto normally we would give out the first image to the news media we would unveil it at a press conference they decided to do it a little differently this time and this was done by the headquarters social media team they posted the first great picture of Pluto to Instagram first and we all kind of wondered what our traditional media would do we figured they were gonna come at us and be very angry that we did not provide it to them first because that's how things had been done for decades and I was not at the location but I understand from my colleagues who were there that news media came running at them asking about that picture on Instagram but they all just wanted to know how do I get on Instagram so they've kind of accepted at this point that you know they might not get the things first that it'll go to these social media platforms and you know they've been sort of trying to catch up and get on these different platforms and learn how to use them so that they are also taking in the material we also have a requirement to share all the bad days this was a launch of supplies to the International Space Station that did not make it that is not a NASA rocket that's one of the Rockets provided by one of our subcontractors that helped us launch these things to the International Space Station but of course it goes down in everybody's minds as a NASA failure and we do live stream every single launch and we do have to hold a press conference within two hours of anything bad occurring any mistakes and any anomalies and one of the reasons we do this is because the NASA charter when NASA was founded in 1958 Congress mandated that this was going to be a very open agency and we were going to disseminate all of the information about what we do all of our results to the public to the widest practical audience was what it said and but I didn't say how we had to do that so this is why we look for new ways all the time it's really our and it's in our culture at NASA and frankly you know this is just it makes me feel wonderful to work for an agency that is so open so transparent I know there's conspiracy theories out there but everything you need to know everything you want to know about our missions is publicly available it's all online for instance we are also at JPL where the center that helps determine whether an asteroid is going to come close to Earth or not there was one that passed earlier today you might have heard about it in some news media they made it sound like it was really scary it was a small asteroid it came very close to Earth think about 20,000 miles that's really close but we knew well in advance that it was going to be perfectly safe and in fact what we did is we used it as a test to test our early warning network around the world of our tracking system for these things but you see a lot of media where they make it sound like oh you know we barely you know survived through this we discovered with this account asteroid watch that we have different audiences that monitored monitor different channels for us different accounts everybody who is on the NASA account the NASA JPL account Mars Curiosity for the most part they are space fans well we discovered this asteroid watches don't ever take that for granted because most of the people it seems following us a kiln or not space fans there are people who are terrified of asteroids this account went from zero to a million within a month of us starting it and I was so excited this is an account I do personally I was so excited is gonna put out all this asteroid news and science and get people cuz I think they're fascinating and the very first tweet I put out just just met with mass panic it really I mean everyone just wrote back what does this mean what do you mean there's an asteroid passing near-earth asteroids past near Earth every day and believe me you can see the whole long list of them online it's all available so knowing your audience is really important and so now I have a different way trying to communicate to these followers try to make sure they understand we know about it it's safe we're good but you know you guys probably remember a few years ago we did get caught by surprise by an asteroid and there was very good reason for that coming from the direction of the Sun which is a blind spot so you know there's a lot to be done that only happens with small asteroids by the way the big ones we can see them a lot easier and small ones that's tough I mentioned the end of the Cassini mission here this is you know one of the big major milestones that we share and we try to share directly with the public through multiple channels through videos through animation we released this animation six months prior to the end of the mission we wanted to tell the story this was a tough one this was trying to hold awake it was trying to celebrate a mission that we were killing people were very very emotional in our meetings we had a lot of people planning how we were going to tell the story of this mission ending and we were getting emotional and people were you know starting to choke up and apparently other people were too because apparently we were ruining everyone's day with talking about this mission that was coming to an end so it was a challenge to talk about celebrating all the amazing things that Cassini did that was interesting that we didn't we saw this after the fact because a lot of times companies will come to us and we'll work with them Google Doodles for instance will work with them on something Hallmark cards put a new spin on the end of the mission for us and we love that that totally unexpected you know that made us feel like hey people really do know that this mission is coming to an end this is us getting into different platforms new audiences it was great so I may tell you a little about about some of the more recent things that we are working on and one of the things we're really enjoying right now is 360 video don't know how many of you in the room are using 360 video in your campaigns what I have found about 360 video is people love it but it's really hard to share so it's getting great views in fact our YouTube channel doubled its number of views in 2016 because we started doing 360 videos then this bridge this was our very first one and luckily our Rovers take they do these 360-degree panoramas for us we just had to find the right platform to put them in and as soon as Facebook made their 360 player available we jumped into it and they were so thrilled that Mark Zuckerberg actually we we got a phone call on a Saturday Mark Zuckerberg wants your 360 video so that he can post it on his own page and of course we did that and you know we had 5.7 million more views on it that day but we looked for these opportunities to jump into new platforms anytime that you come available and when then we also really pay attention to the feedback that we get so for instance after that first 360 people loved it but they said but I don't know what I'm looking at what it what am I supposed to be paying attention to in this so more recent ones we've done some annotations on them so that people can more fully understand exactly what you're seeing when you're looking at a picture from Mars oh and I think there's a comment there typical kind of comment we get I don't know if you can read it there but that's sort of you know we sometimes get so used to our own material and sometimes we forget that this is what people are thinking when they see this that's the joy for us for using social media is that instant feedback it helps us do better products it has from the very first day we changed press releases we created new products because we realized where we had missed giving people information stuff we took for granted people knew they didn't know we were always looking for those sorts of cues coming back in social media we do a lot of mission animations like you saw earlier we realized hey we can do these mission animations and 360 degrees too so on the one side was seeing the spacecraft approaching Jupiter and then turning around you would see Jupiter on the other side as the spacecraft approach this is a Juno spacecraft so that was taking just a resource that we had and just putting it into the correct file format so we could post it both to YouTube and and Facebook we also put cameras inside Mission Control I mean to me there's nothing more exciting than being inside Mission Control during a major mission event this was the arrival at Jupiter last year and we did this as a test we we put the camera in there and we didn't stream live we just recorded the video and then we released a short video of what it was like I want people to feel like they're just in the room there with everybody and I think that you know if we can do this live-streaming more often that this is a really great way to you know inspire the public to really come along on these journeys with us from last year to this year we did commentary and we did Mission Control for that Cassini end of mission a couple of weeks ago and the technology is changing so quickly that when we did the next one we did stream live we streamed live at a Mission Control for about two hours and this is just a screen grab of it we were able to do a picture-in-picture insert a virtual screen inside our 360 degree view which was our commentated show you know our experts talking about the mission they're speaking with a commentator they're showing them the graphics so you were able to send Mission Control turn all the way around look at everybody there see what they were doing and then look at the virtual screen and follow the commentary I just love this stuff I hope everyone else does too we actually got a great number of views on this we got more views on the 360 than we did on regular format but again we found that people we're having a lot of trouble sharing it and then they angry and they give us a thumbs down and this is all because you know you have to share it and then tell people it doesn't work on Safari it works on Firefox for Chrome and if you're opening it up on your mobile device you got to open it in the app you can't just it'll open in Safari if you're on an iPhone so it's it's just killer it's it's hard but you know when this all gets changed because it will eventually you know we're gonna be there we're gonna be ready we're gonna have 360 content for people to watch so what we're doing with this 360 content content that we're doing is giving it out to a lot of different companies that are interested in it we've given out to Google we've done a lot of 360 videos for them for a project called Google expeditions and these are like student field trips they're you know perfect for classrooms that are just using Google cardboard they can study the surface of Mars with a teacher they can they can look at our experts look at our mission control room we also had requests from a company in Massachusetts actually MIT labs working with another company called or endeavor and they asked for lunar material because they were testing virtual reality and making experiences for elderly people who were in rest homes and trying to find them something that they really loved and they wanted the moon that's what they really really were felt attached to so we gave them the content we gave them a material and they sent us back this clip of you know the group watching it and you know we just loved it this is this is what we want to do we want to bring people along so while we were trying to do 360 video for Facebook and YouTube there's another group at JPL called the ops lab and they were working on trying to create augmented reality that would be used by our scientists who are working on the curiosity mission for scientists and and this was you know their vision that they could have avatars and they could be on the surface of Mars because curiosity sends back all this great data the photos and all we had to do was put it into a device and the reason being it's this is how scientists actually look at photographs are used to look at photographs 360-degree but they had to look at it as a flat photograph and then they had to try to talk about you know the rock over there or you know we would ask them how far is that rock from that rock you know and the answer is that are next to each other you're just looking at the two ends of a 360 so our ops lab tested the scientists and found that they were really having a hard time when they were talking to each other trying to describe the next area they wanted to go explore so they wanted to build augmented reality and what we did is we teamed its Microsoft and they were coming out with hololens and we worked with them to create an augmented reality Mars experience where you're put on your hololens and you are literally transported to the surface of mars and you're standing next to the Curiosity rover and I can't even describe how incredible it is any of us at JPL who have tried it for the first time or an emotional bunch we tear up we're like this is beyond amazing that we can do this scientists now hold weekly meetings on Mars they can be thousands of miles apart from each other but if they put on their hololens they go to their workspace they're on mars together they are walking together because they can see each other's avatar and they're saying this rock this is the one i want to study it's no longer looking at those flat panoramas so this is just amazing and it was so amazing the first thought that came to all of our minds was this is great but we have to make it available to the public how do we do that so we did a test at Kennedy Space Center and we created a first of all we got who else but Buzz Aldrin to be our host and we created sort of a canned experience that could be played on hololens that we could have the public put on and see what it was like and I'm going to show you a video here of watch their faces [Applause] [Music] this is a realization of provision for the on-site project from the beginning we've built this experience around a real Mission Operations tool that scientists are using to help control the rover it's really exciting to see the smiles on the faces of people coming out of the exhibit I'm seeing people coming out of here with that same look on their face I had as a kid looking at little pictures of Mars in 1997 [Music] so we did that at Kennedy Space Center for about three or four months we had this open and the feedback was incredible people loved it but it's kind of hard to run as an experience at an amusement type area you know science museum you can only get a few people in it's kind of a time intensive thing to set up so the goal is still been how can we make this available to everybody and we are working on that and I think it will be available very soon for anybody to be able to walk on Mars and imagine what that's gonna be like I mean we our goal is to inspire the next generation of explorers our goal is to open up these worlds to everyone to explore and the technology is just going so quickly and we're just so excited to be doing this I only have about 40 seconds left but I wanted to talk really fast and I'll do it fast about what we do when there is no technology I mean obviously there's technology all the time but we don't do everything with virtual reality or 360 video or through social media what we do is we take it offline and we hold events I don't know if anyone here has ever heard of them they used to be called NASA Tweetup sand now they're called NASA socials where we invite our social media followers to come and meet us in person and we have held almost 150 events at this point over the last nine years we did the first one at JPL as a way to thank our followers for that very first mission Twitter account and the response was amazing we could not predict how incredible it was going to be we thought people would come because they wanted to meet us which was true they wanted to meet our scientists and engineers and we gave them amazing access but they met each other which was even better because when you get a group of fans together in one place and they meet each other it's magic we get people from all walks of life we try to select a very diverse group from people from across the country we get a lot of international applicants we want to get people who are young and old we want to get people who have audiences that we normally don't tap into I'm going to go real fast now and we give them this in will access whether it's taking them right to the lunch they get to go to the launch pad the day before they get to tour they get to talk to whether it's astronauts at the location or you know the science staff or the engineering team this is amazing access the pop you know we do public tours all the time but they don't get to go in clean rooms garbed up like that this is the kind of access that I say to people it is you know VVIP and it's because this is so important to us these people are so important because they spread our message the type of engagement we get is amazing they ask the best questions often many more questions than then we get through traditional media let me go through here and they've changed lives I mean they've really opened up doors for us that we didn't know were imaginable but even for some of our attendees it has changed their lives we had a gentlemen it was a DJ who came to one of these he had not finished college and within very short amount of time he went back to college he got his degree in computer science he started an internship at Johnson Space Center he works today as a flight controller for the International Space Station he's one we have several others who we have hired in after they've gone through these experiences so I'm gonna leave you pretty much with this but what we're trying to do whether it's through VR or you know 360 or in-person events what we're trying to do is transform our fans and our followers and our consumers of our products into these very empowered ambassadors for us who go out and help spread our message and hopefully engage people just as we do but by amplifying our message they are a force multiplier and with that thank you very much [Applause] 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