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WENDOVER — The Utah Test and Training Range, located about 100 miles west of Hill Air Force Base, is known for its many secretive, highly classified activities. So, when the 2nd Audiovisual Squadron at Hill was tapped to run the Air Force's first-ever high-definition live broadcast out in the West Desert, they knew it would be a big deal.
It ended up reaching 50 million people and won a 2024 Webby People's Voice Award for events and live streams. The team will be celebrated in an award show on May 13.
The mission: Document the return of OSIRIS-Rex, a probe that traveled almost 4 billion miles through space to explore the asteroid Bennu, vacuumed up a 70-gram sample of its surface and was headed back to Earth with what NASA called "a time capsule of the ancient solar system."
Commander of the squadron, Lt. Col. Mark Graff, said his team of around 50 airmen and civilians based full-time in Utah "was a perfect match in terms of capability," and they began meeting with NASA in 2022, when it was determined the pod would touchdown at the Utah Test and Training Range, in a landing zone larger than the size of Rhode Island.
Between March and September of 2023, NASA teams and Graff's squadron conducted seven or eight site visits, mapping all of the different audio and visual feeds that would contribute to a live broadcast, sometimes separated by miles. Tech. Sgt. Travis Curtis said they used a combination of fiber optic cabling and line-of-sight technology to bridge the distance between disparate feeds.
In September, the month of the planned landing, teams kicked it into gear. By that time, they had set up 20 video feeds from five separate sites, a camera mounted to the recovery helicopter and a high-altitude plane tracking the landing on an infrared camera. Graff said the final execution phase of the broadcast, in the week leading up to the landing, required "days of very early mornings and very long nights to ensure that that team of dozens of people came together to provide the American public the very best opportunity to view and understand the significance of this mission."
Michael Raynor, who provided engineering support, said the team was planning around NASA's precise calculations. "They knew exactly, to the second, when that would hit the ground," he said.
The uncertainty, depending on weather conditions and other factors, was where the pod would land in the miles of desert, he said.
On the day of the landing, the team started at 3:30 a.m., arriving on set, checking cameras, lights, audio feeds and equipment from a 40-foot long production truck — "the only one of its kind in the entire Air Force," according to Graff. A crew of 12 worked from within the "nerve center," with another 11 providing support at different locations.
They began broadcasting at 8 a.m. Mountain Time, switching from live field reports to some of the 70 pre-produced video packages of interviews of NASA officials, including Brian May, the lead guitarist for the rock band Queen and an astrophysicist involved with the OSIRIS-Rex project. "My heart's there with you as this precious sample is recovered," May said, "Happy sample return day!"
In another segment, Scarlett Johansson, Jason Schwartzman and others from the cast of Wes Anderson's "Asteroid City" asked NASA scientists questions.
At around 40 minutes into the stream, the OSIRIS-REx entered the atmosphere, but NASA scientists watched with horror as the drogue parachute, an initial chute providing stability, failed to deploy on time. For a nail-biting few minutes, it was not clear whether both chutes would open or if the sample would be obliterated in a crash landing.
"We were worried that it was going to plummet to the ground," Raynor said. The high-altitude plane then lost the visual of the capsule. Everyone on the broadcast held their breath, and the camera panned over to find the pod attached to a "creamsicle" colored parachute. The team erupted in applause.
That's the drama of a broadcast in real-time.
"In live TV, you have to have backup plans built into your broadcast," Graff said. Within 70 minutes, the team was scrambling to find the capsule, wrap it up and bring it to a temporary clean room on the range, before it was shipped to NASA's Johnson Space Center.
"From where I sit as commander of this squadron," Graff said, "this was a perfect example of a group of approximately 50 airmen and civilians coming together with other types of teams to do something extremely difficult exceptionally well for the American people. And that gives our unit the confidence to know that regardless of the circumstances or the challenges that we may face in the future, with other types of broadcasts, we can do it."
