♪
NARRATOR: February 18, 2021.
Perseverance, NASA's newest rover,
one of the most sophisticated planetary probes ever built,
is approaching Mars
on an epic quest to hunt for life beyond Earth.
SWATI MOHAN: We are under a minute
from cruise stage separation.
NARRATOR: 130 million miles away,
a team of researchers anxiously waits...
MOHAN: Heading alignment.
NARRATOR: as Perseverance attempts to land
where no rover has dared land before...
Inside a crater
that might be filled with ancient Martian life,
but is definitely filled with cliffs
and sand traps
where a rover can crash
or get stuck for good.
AL CHEN: We're heading toward the ground
at race car speeds.
So there's no way we're going to joystick this down.
NARRATOR: For the first time in the history of Mars exploration,
a rover is equipped with
the intelligence to try to steer itself out of danger.
ELIO MORILLO: There's a very specific timeline of events
that have to happen at the correct time for
the entire process to succeed.
NARRATOR: Perseverance signals its progress...
MOHAN: Sky crane maneuver has started.
NARRATOR: as the team monitors every step.
If the rover manages to land in one piece,
for about two years, it will drill into Martian rock
that could hold evidence of ancient life,
then collect samples and store them.
JULIE TOWNSEND: For the first time, we are going to collect
rock samples and bring them back to Earth.
NARRATOR: In the future, another rover will retrieve the samples
Perseverancecollects.
And through a series of daring missions...
that sound more science fiction than science fact...
the samples will be brought to Earth,
where researchers can examine them
in far greater detail.
KENNDA LYNCH: We have this amazing technology
that can really can get those samples,
bring them back to Earth,
and do all the really cool analysis
that we want to do here on Earth.
♪
This is a very, very large undertaking
involving thousands and thousands of people
from all over the world.
NARRATOR: Thousands of researchers
with one shared goal.
"Looking for Life on Mars," right now, on "NOVA."
♪
NARRATOR: Did life ever exist on Mars?
And if it did, what would that mean for us?
JENNIFER EIGENBRODE: How special is life on Earth?
Why do we not see it on Mars today?
Did it ever evolve on Mars?
♪
What does it take to get life
to evolve on a planet?
♪
DERRICK PITTS: That question about life
is the one that really perplexes and, I think, really drives us.
♪
Something about our desire to not be alone
keeps pushing us forward in the search for life.
I like to call it "CSI: Mars," right?
You know, it's, it's literally this investigation
where you're finding all these little clues
to put together your story.
♪
NARRATOR: The tale of our celestial neighbor, Mars.
The red planet.
It captures the imagination.
Thousands of images paint a picture
of a barren, alien world.
♪
At the same time, there's something about Mars
that's strangely familiar.
AARON YAZZIE I was born on the Navajo Nation.
It's a high desert area
that actually has rolling desert hills,
canyons, and rock formations, and mountains,
and all of that looks like the Martian landscape.
DIANA TRUJILLO: When I look at the pictures of Mars,
I see the Mojave Desert, right?
Without the cactus.
But I can't tell the difference if this image
is from the Mojave Desert or if this is from Mars.
To me, it makes me want to know more.
It makes me want to know, you know, what happened to Mars,
or was there life there?
(whirring)
NARRATOR: Can the Perseverance rover finally answer
this question?
We've been searching for the remnants of life
on the red planet for decades,
from the Mariner orbiters
to the successful landings of Viking 1and2...
...through the twin rovers Spiritand Opportunity
that crisscrossed the planet.
MORILLO: We've been building our knowledge
of the Martian environment
through so many decades and so many achievements
from so many engineers before us.
NARRATOR: But it was the discoveries
of the most cunning robotic detective
to ever explore Mars, a rover named Curiosity,
that set the stage for the Perseverancemission.
September 14, 2012,
40 days after Curiosity landed on Mars,
it stumbled upon the unexpected.
SANJEEV GUPTA: I remember the moment those images came down.
We were all at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
at the time, and we were all huddled
around a giant computer screen,
and, and I was just gazing at this in astonishment,
because it's not what we had expected.
EIGENBRODE: We came across a whole bunch
of cobbles,
and when we saw that, everybody's jaw just dropped.
"Oh, my gosh, look at this, this is perfect."
It is the classic example
of a river deposit.
Each one of those rocks, they had to get bounced around
in some type of environment that was going to turn them
from something that was chunky and sharp and angular
to something that was rounded.
Rivers do that.
Rivers on Earth do that very well.
And so when we saw this, it was our first evidence of a river.
NARRATOR: Evidence that water once flowed
on the surface of the red planet.
On Earth, all life needs water to thrive...
...from the giant blue whale
to tiny microbes.
GUPTA: The scientists on the team have discovered
all these telltale signatures in the rocks
that there were rivers and ancient lakes that existed
for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years.
HEATHER GRAHAM: You can think of Mars
as... back in time, of course...
as being Earth's slightly smaller, slightly colder sister.
GUPTA: Between 3.9 and 3.5 billion years ago,
we think that Mars was a warmer and wetter place.
And what's interesting about
that is that's the same sort of time interval
that life got going on Earth.
KEN FARLEY: We have two planets with similar environments
at similar times.
One of them, on Earth, is inhabited.
Why wouldn't we expect that the one on Mars would be inhabited?
NARRATOR: Curiosityfound evidence of a once-wet world.
But here on Earth, for life to thrive,
it needs more than water.
It needs nutrients.
EIGENBRODE: We tend to simplify
that search for what type of nutrients
as what we call CHNOPS.
When people say CHNOPS, what they're saying is carbon...
Hydrogen... Nitrogen...
Oxygen... Phosphorus...
Sulfur.
And we spell all those,
the first letter of all those out,
it's called CHNOPS. (laughs)
NARRATOR: These six elements make up
roughly 99% of the mass of the human body.
In fact, they make up about 99% of the mass
of all living things.
If life, as we know it, ever existed on Mars,
finding CHNOPS was key.
Could Curiosity, a laboratory on wheels, find CHNOPS?
The rover scooped up samples of Martian soil
to decode its chemical composition.
EIGENBRODE: What we found was a diverse chemistry
that included carbon, hydrogen,
some nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur,
and eventually we found some phosphorus.
There's plenty of chemical energy available for life,
if it had ever lived there.
That's really been the big discovery
of the Curiosityrover mission.
♪
NARRATOR: Curiosity found the ingredients necessary for life
to emerge, but not life itself.
FARLEY: Curiosity has not, in fact, detected evidence
for life, because it does not have the instruments
designed for that purpose.
NARRATOR: Perseveranceis designed to take the next step
in Mars exploration,
as it ventures into unexplored territory
to search for samples of Martian rock
in Jezero Crater.
If you want to set yourself up for success
for finding ancient life, that is the place to go.
♪
NARRATOR: This orbital image reveals
what makes Jezero Crater so intriguing.
KEN WILLIFORD: The key thing that led us to Jezero
was this beautiful delta, beautifully visible from orbit.
We think that delta must be somewhere around
three billion years old or older.
This delta sits at the end of a beautifully expressed
sinuous river channel that came in from the northwest,
flowing into the crater rim, and filling up
Jezero Crater with a lake.
NARRATOR: On Earth, deltas form where a river
and a larger body of water meet.
Sediment, brought in from the river, drifts to the bottom.
TANJA BOSAK: The sediments that
the river carries are...
They really just fall out and they settle down.
♪
EIGENBRODE: It creates a mud layer at the bottom.
Year after year after year after year, it creates these.
NARRATOR: Take some of that earthly delta mud,
put it under a microscope,
and you'll find it's teeming with life.
Tiny microbes,
among the most ancient forms of life on Earth,
arising billions of years before the dinosaurs...
and far more resilient.
BOSAK: If we think about Mars billions of years ago,
we cannot hope for any large-scale fossils.
We can't really hope for fossil bones.
We can't hope for petrified wood.
We can't hope for fossilized leaves,
because none of that life existed even on Earth
before maybe half-a-billion years ago.
The only life that we can hope for
on this old, ancient Mars is microbial.
Now, this is where it gets tricky,
because microbes are tiny.
That's what their name says, they're microscopic.
And we can't really take microscopes to Mars,
but what we can look for are rocks
that can be shaped by microbial processes.
NARRATOR: And that's what the team
hopes Perseverancewill find:
fossilized microbes, buried in the ancient rocks
of Jezero Crater.
FARLEY: There are a lot of very interesting debates
among the members of the science team
trying to figure out, which rocks should we sample?
What should we be looking for?
(camera clicks)
And we have
one example, only one example, and that's Earth.
♪
NARRATOR: So the Perseverance science team set out
to study the clues Earth has to offer
in rocks about the same age
as the ones they will search for in Jezero Crater.
FARLEY: We went to this location
in Western Australia where the oldest evidence of life occurs,
just so we could see what it actually looks like.
MAN: There are ripples around the side of...
NARRATOR: The strange, rippled layers of these rocks,
known as stromatolites,
are actually the remnants of a form
of ancient microbial life.
In a stromatolite, you'll see there's lots of convolutions.
They're bumpy and, and lumpy.
NARRATOR: Bumps and lumps of fossilized microbes.
A fossilized community of organisms all packaged together.
NARRATOR: There are just a few colonies
of living stromatolites left on Earth.
They look like rocks,
but just beneath the surface are layers of bacteria.
WILLIFORD: These often form in shallow-water environments
where the microbes sort of
have something to live on, and they pile up in these layers,
one on top of the other, a layer of gooey microbes,
bacterial cells that have this sort of mucous-y,
gooey substance.
That gooey substance
traps sediment, mud or sand, that flows on top of it.
And then they grow on top of that again.
And that process repeats.
NARRATOR: By studying these
ancient stromatolites,
the team hopes to gain a deeper understanding
of what to hunt for on Mars.
When we went out and looked at these rocks,
I was very surprised how obvious it was
that the structures that we were looking at were, first of all,
very unusual and very likely
to be biogenic, produced by life.
This is a kind of a feature
that we could see in Jezero Crater with the cameras
that we are carrying with us on the Perseverancerover.
This rover has a ton of cameras...
we are carrying 23 cameras.
♪
Color cameras, zoom cameras,
black-and-white cameras... You name it, right?
Cameras that can see up to, like,
the size of a grain of salt, and so
they're all over the place on the rover, right?
On the front, on the back, on the top, on the arm.
We have two in the robotic arm that are awesome.
One of them is Pixl and the other one,
which I love the name, is Sherloc and Watson.
You can guess from the name
of Sherloc and Watson that the whole point
of those instrument is to investigate, right?
What is the chemical composition of that target?
BOSAK: We don't have geologists
who can bang their hammers on the rocks
or, or take their lenses, or maybe there's even,
you could drop some vinegar to see what minerals are present...
we can't do that.
But we do have a lot of instruments that tell us
what is in those rocks.
NARRATOR: Perseverancewill also be on the lookout
for another ancient rock in Jezero Crater,
one that is as elusive as it is appealing.
WILLIFORD: This is a piece of what we would call black chert.
Chert is such a fine-grained rock.
If you look really close,
you can see some sort of blotchy, black stuff
in the interior of this gray rock.
And that black stuff, that blotchy, black stuff
is actual fossilized bacterial cells.
This is a type of rock that we would
absolutely love to encounter on Mars.
The tough part is that chert is very, very, very hard to drill.
So it'll be a tough decision.
If we see a rock like this, we would,
we would probably be willing
to give up an entire drill bit.
The payoff is potentially so huge,
because we could, you know,
maybe bring back fossil Martian cells.
♪
NARRATOR: Even if Perseverance finds rocks that look promising,
it's not equipped to verify ancient microbes.
For that, the Martian rock would need
to be studied back on Earth.
Collecting samples on Mars and bringing them back to Earth
is one of the most complex things we've tried to do
with one of our robots... This is a sample tube,
and on board Perseverance are over 40 of these.
And the goal is to fill each one of them
with a sample of Mars rock.
NARRATOR: A sample tube is loaded inside a drill
at the end of the rover's arm.
YAZZIE: We had to come up with an entirely unique design
to drill into a lot of different rocks
and be able to extract core samples that aren't broken
into too many pieces, that hasn't turned into powder.
So it's actually a very sophisticated mechanism.
After we're done drilling the depth that we want to,
we do one final motion to extract the core
from the inside of the rock.
♪
NARRATOR: Now the sample tube, filled with Martian rock,
is brought back on board the rover.
JESSICA SAMUELS: We take the robotic arm
with Martian sample inside of it
and we dock it inside the belly of the rover.
(whirring)
Where we have another small robotic arm
that extracts the tube...
(whirring)
...and takes it through a series of stations.
SAMUELS: We want to inspect it.
We want to figure out how much volume we may have collected,
take some pictures of it.
And then we seal that tube
and then go put it back into our storage rack.
TRUJILLO: So all of that gets done internal to the belly
of the rover with a little arm
that, he's moving it around, which is insane.
NARRATOR: It took seven years
to design, test, and build
this one-of-a-kind sampling system.
TOWNSEND: We've put a lot into this rover,
and we are very invested in it working
when it gets to Mars.
And so we kind of wait
with bated breath, and we do the best we can,
and we do tons and tons of testing.
And we, we hope that it is enough.
♪
NARRATOR: Inside this massive clean room at JPL,
the sampling system,
along with seven science instruments,
are carefully loaded inside the S.U.V.-size rover.
Throughout this process,
the spacecraft must be kept impeccably clean,
down to the microbe.
LYNCH: We don't want to send
an expensive vehicle like Perseverance
to Mars and then just detect ourselves,
because we didn't work to make sure that
we kept the spacecraft and the instruments,
and everything that it touches, as clean as possible.
COOPER: You want to have
a nice pristine sample without any Earth contamination,
so that's why we work really hard
to keep that spacecraft clean.
NARRATOR: Moogega Cooper is responsible
for hunting down earthly microbes that could hitch a ride
to Mars on the spacecraft.
Especially the hardy ones.
COOPER: The microbes that we're talking about are
so resilient, they could possibly survive all of the
radiation in space, U.V., the temperature swings,
journeying to Mars,
and possibly back.
So we have to sample the hardware over time,
and we use either swabs
or wipes to collect samples,
lift them off of the surface, and we bring it to our lab
and we put them in these petri dishes.
We have to give them food
so that the colonies grow large enough so that
we can see them, and know that they're present
on our petri dish.
NARRATOR: If some hardy microbes flourish,
the surface is cleaned with isopropyl alcohol.
COOPER: Over the course of the mission,
we've taken 16,681 wipes, swabs, and air samples
of the spacecraft and the surrounding environment.
Pretty... Pretty good job.
NARRATOR: But there's one part of the rover
that needs to be as clean as humanly possible.
The sample tubes that will store Martian rock.
IAN CLARK: We had to have an environment
in which to put them together
and to handle them and to work with them
and assemble them.
We built an entirely new clean room,
the cleanest environments we've ever had at JPL.
We take a normal clean room
and we start breaking everything down
to understand additional sources of contamination
and how do we make that room even cleaner.
The gloves that they use,
how many layers of gloves that they have,
how often they need to change gloves,
how often they have to change the gowns,
when we can reuse things.
Even the computers that are used in there.
We can't bring cell phones into that room.
We can't bring everyday objects
that you normally associate with how you do your job
into an environment that is that sterile and that clean.
The sample tube itself looks very similar to a test tube,
but that really belies the complexity of the design
and the features that are built into the sample tube
to help prevent contamination.
The gold coating is a mixture of titanium and nitrogen
especially engineered in order to prevent organic compounds
from sticking to the surface, and that's on the outside
of the sample tube and also inside the sample tube.
♪
These sample tubes are the cleanest things
that we've ever sent
to another planet by far.
In fact, these sample tubes are probably
the cleanest thing on Earth.
♪
NARRATOR: March 2020.
The COVID-19 pandemic triggers
shutdowns across the country...
including at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Life as we know it comes to a grinding halt.
COOPER: It's hard enough to build spacecraft, but on top of
that, as we were approaching launch,
the COVID-19 pandemic was surging in parallel.
NARRATOR: Time is of the essence.
It's just four months before launch.
A limited number of essential workers
are permitted on site.
COOPER: It's very difficult
to control whether or not face masks are worn
outside of the workplace environment.
It's easy when you're in a clean room, that's what you do.
You wear your face masks, you wear your bunny suits.
We actually felt safer in the clean room than we did
in the regular environment.
NARRATOR: Despite the team's best efforts,
it's unclear whether they'll be
ready to launch on time.
SAMUELS: We launch to Mars
typically every two years.
And if we miss that opportunity,
you know, that, that's a long time to wait.
YAZZIE: One thing to understand about sending something to Mars
is that we have a very short launch window.
Mars takes about two Earth years to orbit the Sun,
and every two years, Mars and the Earth are close enough
to each other, and that's when we launch missions
between the two planets.
And if we miss this launch window
for any reason, we would have to wait two years
until we could try again.
NARRATOR: And that wait could cost half-a-billion dollars.
TRUJILLO: The team recognized
we are already on the rails, right?
We're about to take off.
Let's just get the job done.
If we focus on this target,
maybe we'll unite the whole team, as well.
And in a way, also give hope to everybody,
not only on the U.S., but also around the world, that
we still can manage to focus on a mission
and focus on a bigger objective, and then pull it off.
♪
FARLEY: For me, the bright spot
of COVID was actually seeing the team that we had pull together
and actually get it done.
It's kind of miraculous that we got to the launch pad.
NARRATOR: Before Perseverance is launched,
members of the team install this plaque
to honor healthcare workers.
MORILLO: It's a constant reminder that
there are people, you know, making sacrifices to make sure
everybody is safe and healthy.
♪
NASA ANNOUNCER: From America's shore
to Jezero Crater on Mars.
We'll begin with the launch of this
Atlas V rocket...
NARRATOR: The day has finally arrived.
Perseverance is on the launch pad.
On a nearby beach, team member
Elio Morillo,
along with friends
and his mom, have come to watch the launch.
MORILLO: This is my first mission,
and I'm about to see it take off to Mars.
I can't describe how
excited and scared and nervous
I am at the same time.
I'm really proud to be part of this team.
And despite the pandemic,
we have persevered through this together.
NARRATOR: Meanwhile...
Grabbed my security blanket.
Let's see if she'll let me...
NARRATOR: Other team members, like Ian Clark,
along with his dog Pixl,
nervously watch the launch from home.
MAN (on computer): Launch director.
LD is go, and you have permission to launch.
The bouncing in my leg is accelerating
as we're getting closer. (chuckles)
(chatter on computer)
28 seconds, 28 seconds to launch.
NASA ANNOUNCER: Eight,
seven, six, five, four, engine ignition, two...
WOMAN: Zero.
NASA ANNOUNCER: Release... and lift off.
♪
(exhales)
(cheers)
WOMAN: Damn!
(cheers)
WOMAN: There it is.
There it is, there it is!
♪
(laughs)
(laughing)
(cheering)
(Morillo exclaims)
MORILLO: I'm a little bit speechless
with what just happened.
It's surreal, I, I don't know what else to say
other than, I still can't believe that I just saw that.
It's pretty magical, you know, it's, uh...
What we get to do.
(laughter, applause)
MORILLO: I'm terrified and really excited, but it's scary.
NARRATOR: Perseveranceis on its seven-month journey to Mars.
But for Elio Morillo,
the hardest work has just begun.
(scooter starts)
MORILLO: We're working around the clock.
Tonight, for example, I have to go in at 7:00
and I won't leave probably till 4:00 in the morning.
And that's kind of the nature of the work to make sure
we prepare for our landing
on the red planet.
We are working with the Earth version
of Perseverance,
which we've calledOptimism.
The rover and the computer that it has on board
is exactly the same as the one that's onPerseverance.
My job is, is literally the one they portray
in, in "The Martian."
Is this the replica? - This is her.
Okay, let's see it.
MORILLO: Where there's a lab that has the Earth versions
of all the vehicles... Pathfinder.
I work in the real lab that has the Earth version
of all the vehicles that have gone to Mars.
NARRATOR: It's called the Mars Yard.
♪
Here, Optimism, Perseverance's twin,
faces some of the same challenges Perseverance
will face on Mars.
The only real way to do that is through simulation.
So the Mars Yard is where we actually perform driving.
We have soil that kind of looks like Martian sand, if you will.
There are rocks that we replicate.
And we have slopes, as well, so that we can climb the vehicle
on the slopes.
In doing that,
we typically will find bugs.
NARRATOR: Glitches in the software, the rover's brain.
MORILLO: And as we come up with fixes,
we will uplink those fixes to the real vehicle.
And that is the purpose of my team.
So that, hopefully, we find these issues
before they happen on the real vehicle.
♪
In case things go wrong, we better figure out how to fix it
through software,
because at this point in time, we can't send mechanics to Mars.
I'm an avid user of social media.
And some of the images I've posted are
of myself working on the vehicle.
I think personally,
being a Hispanic man, it's very important for people like me
to understand that there are people that look and sound
like me that are working on such technologies.
That is why I share what I do.
And I like to show people
what we're doing, because it's pretty unique.
NARRATOR: A few months after Perseverance lands
on the red planet,
it will drop a special little package on the surface
that could revolutionize the future of space exploration.
A tiny copter named Ingenuity
could be the first aircraft to fly on another planet.
BOB BALARAM: When we first proposed it,
there were a number of naysayers, even at JPL,
who said, "Oh, this thing can never fly."
I thought it was going to be challenging
every step of the way.
In fact, at the beginning,
it was the question of even feasibility.
Can it be done?
NARRATOR: What makes flying on Mars so challenging
is its extremely thin atmosphere...
100 times thinner than Earth's.
The thinner the atmosphere, the harder it is
for a helicopter to generate lift.
AUNG: Fundamentally, a helicopter
flies, you know, by first generating lift,
and the lift is generated by the blades
pushing the air,
and that provides the lift.
NARRATOR: On helicopters, the blades are curved on top,
and are also angled to redirect the airflow downward.
Because of this design, as they rotate,
the air pressure on top of the blades decreases
and the air pressure underneath the blades increases.
That difference in pressure pushes the helicopter up.
Earth's dense, thick atmosphere helps make lift possible.
♪
In order to fly on Mars,
the team had to find a way to compensate
for its thin atmosphere.
To rethink the physics of flight.
AUNG: You have to build a vehicle that has a large blade, you know,
significantly large proportional to the size of the vehicle.
And the blades have to spin very fast
and the vehicle has to be very light.
NARRATOR: In 2018, the team took their copter on a test run.
This special chamber has had most of the air sucked out of it
so it can accurately mimic the thin atmosphere of Mars.
AUNG: This is a moment of truth.
You send the command,
the helicopter is sitting on the ground,
and it starts spinning.
And the danger was, is it going to start, you know,
skittering across the, the chamber floor?
(blades whirring)
The vehicle was perfect.
It was balanced so perfectly.
(blades whirring)
Our minds go back to what the Wright brothers
must have gone through.
The first moment they took flight,
they must have felt
the emotion, the feeling,
the reward they were looking for.
(blades whirring)
BALARAM: It's been a long journey.
We've done all the testing
here on Earth, and now it's time to go to Mars
and prove that this thing can really fly
in the actual environment of Mars.
♪
NARRATOR: If all works as planned,
Ingenuity will take a series of flights over about 30 days,
venturing farther with each flight.
AUNG: When astronauts get to Mars,
you know, in the future,
being able to scout and survey
and just having the aerial dimension
will be crucial.
♪
BALARAM: To make the whole planet accessible
through a new form of mobility
is going to be transforming in terms of what it does
for exploration.
(whirring)
NARRATOR: Another passenger on Perseverance
could help turn our sci-fi dreams of human exploration
into a reality.
In fact, in the feature film
"The Martian,"
Mark Watney couldn't have survived without it.
JEFFREY HOFFMAN: In the movie "The Martian,"
there was a mention of a device called an oxygenator.
Everything here that's keeping me alive...
The oxygenator, the water reclaimer...
HOFFMAN: Which we like to think of
as the, maybe the great-great-grandchild of Moxie.
♪
NARRATOR: This little gold box named Moxie
will test whether it's possible to take deadly Martian air
and create breathable air.
♪
The air on Mars is not only thin,
it's rich with carbon dioxide... CO2.
HOFFMAN: So what we're trying to do with Moxie is to take
a carbon dioxide molecule...
CO2, one carbon, two oxygen atoms...
and split off one of those oxygen atoms.
NARRATOR: An oxygen atom doesn't like to be alone.
After it breaks away from the carbon dioxide,
it joins with another oxygen atom, creating O2,
which is in the air that we breathe.
Here on Earth, the atmosphere has plenty of O2,
thanks to photosynthesis.
We take all that oxygen for granted.
When we're on Mars,
we have to make the best of what we've got
and get our oxygen
out of that carbon dioxide.
NARRATOR: Breathable oxygen
will be crucial for humans to survive on Mars.
HOFFMAN: There's no question,
if I were going to Mars, I would want oxygen to breathe.
But that's not anywhere near
the, the major requirement for oxygen.
Assuming that I want to leave the surface of Mars
and get back to orbit and, and catch my ride home to Earth,
I'm going to need a lot of propellant in a rocket
to get me off the surface of Mars.
Tens of tons, in fact.
Whether you have a campfire,
whether you have an internal combustion engine
in a car or a truck...
anytime you'd want to burn something,
you need two things:
you need a fuel and you need oxygen.
NARRATOR: To take off from the surface of Mars with a crew
of four, in a rocket about the size of this pickup truck,
how much fuel and oxygen do you need?
Oh, we need about seven tons of fuel.
That's a lot of fuel.
And we need about 25 tons
of liquid oxygen to burn all that fuel.
To picture how much that weighs,
we can start with a five-gallon jug of water,
the kind that we put on top of the water coolers.
If we wanted to put that much liquid oxygen
in those water jugs,
we would have over 1,300 of those jugs.
So imagine putting 1,320
water bottles in the back of this truck.
♪
That would be tens-of-feet-high stack of water bottles.
Too much even for the water bottle delivery van,
never mind this little pickup.
That oxygen turns out to be the single heaviest thing
we would need to take
on a mission to Mars with astronauts.
It dominates the cost and the complexity of the mission.
So what if we can start living off the land?
By saying, "We're not going to bring any oxygen with us.
"We're going to make it on Mars and use the oxygen that we make
"to fuel the rocket that will take our astronauts home,
that will take Mark Watney home."
♪
NARRATOR: If Moxie can efficiently create burnable
oxygen, then the sci-fi dream of human exploration of Mars
may become a reality.
FARLEY: It's clear that the United States
is putting in a big effort
to send astronauts to Mars.
And, and the technologies that we are demonstrating
are going to make that easier.
♪
NARRATOR: Perseverance will test technology that will take
exploration into the future as it collects samples
of Martian rock.
Once it's done, how will these samples
make their way back home?
ALBERT HALDEMAN: Mars Sample Return really is an
international program between NASA and ESA.
♪
KELLY GEELEN: We all come from different backgrounds
and we have, of course, different roles
to play in the bigger picture.
But everybody is working towards the same goal.
If you think about it, it's amazing
how a collaboration across the globe can come together
to do such an amazing thing.
NARRATOR: Current plans call for another lander to travel to Mars
within a decade,
and a multi-part mission
to bring the sample tubes back to Earth will begin.
ALASTAIR WAYMAN: It would be a big risk, a big gamble,
to bet the whole of Mars Sample Return on the fact that
Perseverance would still be alive and fully functional
after almost a decade on the surface of Mars.
NARRATOR: So researchers across the globe must prepare
for different scenarios.
The Perseverance rover has the possibility to either hang on
to sample tubes or drop them onto the surface.
NARRATOR: Just north of London,
engineers at Airbus
are preparing for one of these scenarios.
Meet Fetch.
Think of this little rover as a celestial messenger service.
VIJENDRAN: Perseverance will drop the sample tubes
on the surface of Mars,
drive a little bit away, and take a lot of good photos
to document exactly where the sample has landed.
And we will be able to direct
the Sample Fetch Rover to the general area
within a meter or so of the actual samples on the surface.
NARRATOR: Once Fetch gets close, it will need to find
the sample tubes on its own.
WAYMAN: We need to have autonomous systems on board
that can take a picture of the scene in front of it,
identify what's a rock,
identify what's a crack,
identify what is the tubes.
NARRATOR: Fetch starts by taking a picture of the general area
where the tubes should be.
So this is the raw image that we've taken right as we've
approached the sample tubes.
You can see on the raw image that there's clearly a number
of tubes dotted around the terrain,
as well as a couple of rocks.
NARRATOR: Through a series of steps, it decodes the scene,
homing in on the tubes based on their shape and color.
WAYMAN: In the times that the tubes are on the surface,
there will certainly be some form of dust deposition on them.
Sand might build up adrift on one side of the tubes.
But it's not going to be a thick coating
that completely obscures it.
NARRATOR: Fetch comes up with a plan to grab the tubes,
but it can't do it without Delian,
a savvy robotic arm being developed in Italy.
This lightweight arm is equipped with a brain of its own.
This operation must be performed autonomously
with the vision system.
NARRATOR: In other words, the brain of the rover
and the brain of the arm work together to locate
and pick up the samples.
WAYMAN: Being able to do that is something that's,
that's completely new, completely novel.
It's not been done on any Mars missions before.
So it's something that's a key development challenge
that, that we're working on.
♪
NARRATOR: Once it collects the tubes, Fetch will bring them
to a pint-sized rocket.
HALDEMAN: The most challenging element
of that whole architecture is going to be launching
a rocket off of Mars.
That is super-ambitious.
That will be a first.
NARRATOR: The rocket, designed by NASA, will release the
samples, which will be grabbed by another orbiter,
designed by ESA.
GEELEN: The Earth Return Orbiter
is hurtling around the Martian planet by 7,600 miles per hour.
The job for an orbiter is to slightly adjust its velocity
to make sure that we can capture this basketball inside a hoop.
We'll have some sort of trap door that opens,
and then we'll basically swallow this basketball up
and put it into our spacecraft.
HALDEMAN: Through various stages of mechanisms and airlocks,
if you will, put it inside a Earth entry vehicle
that itself will be clean,
and we will have these various layers that will protect
the Earth when we bring that sample back from Mars.
NARRATOR: To protect Earth from whatever the samples contain.
PITTS: Incredible safeguards are being developed
to make sure that any object brought from Mars
remains in an environment that is completely cut off
from Earth environment in every possible instance and manner.
The nice thing about sample return is, we've done it
in the past with the moon...
the Apollo samples.
Samples were treated as hazardous
until they could prove that it did not affect
humans negatively.
And the same thing will be done for any sample return mission.
The items are treated as potentially hazardous
until we know that it's safe.
You want to be overly cautious,
you want to sure that you prove without a shadow of a doubt
that it is not hazardous to humans.
♪
NARRATOR: But long before we would confront
any potential danger from Martian samples,
Perseverance must land where no rover has dared land before.
Back in May 2019, in the heart of Death Valley,
a team of engineers test a new autonomous landing system
they hope will give their rover the ability
to steer out of trouble...
to be its own pilot.
We get one chance.
We have no opportunity to fix it.
And it has to work the very first time.
NARRATOR: Inside this trailer is a makeshift mission headquarters
where they will monitor if the new landing system
actually works.
Our previous missions really only had one computer,
one brain, that was doing the entire entry, descent,
and landing sequence.
Now we have two.
♪
NARRATOR: Two brains that must work hand in hand to guide
the rover to land safely near the delta of Jezero Crater.
CHEN: That delta has created this cliff that's, like,
60 to 80 meters tall,
kind of along the lines of how tall we're seeing
the terrain behind us.
NARRATOR: The rover must land close to it, not crash into it.
To test the rover's new brains,
the team secures one on the nose of a helicopter
and the other behind the cockpit.
The helicopter, and brains,
take off...
...heading to a section of Death Valley
that looks remarkably like
the surface of Mars.
ANDREW JOHNSON: Typically,
when we do these tests, you start out very nervous,
and often things break,
and you have to fix them.
MOHAN: We're really trying to find the unknown unknowns.
What if we didn't think of something that
really will affect the mission?
Hammer, do you read me?
NARRATOR: The helicopter goes above 10,000 feet...
CHEN: Which is pretty high for a helicopter to fly.
NARRATOR: High enough for the crew to need oxygen,
and around the same height where Perseverance will start
to use its pilot's brain to land on Mars.
CHEN: Just like you and I can take a map and look at it,
and then look around and see different landmarks,
and see what's, you know, what's where on the map,
the rover figures out where it is based on knowing
where all the landmarks are in the map
and then identifying them.
NARRATOR: A lot like the job
Pete Conrad and Alan Bean faced
when they landed on the moon on the Apollo 12 mission.
ASTRONAUT (on radio): Okay, we're at 19,000 feet.
I got some kind of a horizon out there.
I got some craters, too, but I don't know where I am yet.
CHEN: They were looking out the window
at different craters and different features on the moon.
ASTRONAUT (on radio): I think I see my crater.
CHEN: That they knew of from maps of the moon.
ASTRONAUT (on radio): There it is!
There it is, oh, my God, right down the middle of the road!
CHEN: They figured out where they were.
You know, we're doing the same thing that
those astronauts did on Apollo 12, just on Mars.
♪
MOHAN: The vision computer is telling the rover computer,
"Here's where I am, here's where I am, here's where I am."
The rover computer takes where we are,
figures out where we can go,
and picks the safest spot
in the place where we can actually reach.
And it does all of that in the snap of a finger.
NARRATOR: In the trailer, the team tracks
the brains' progress.
So on this side, we have a map that we've made
of our landing site that we're matching to,
and this is the image that's taken on board.
NARRATOR: The squares on the monitors represent landmarks.
The colors tell them if the brain on the helicopter
is correctly identifying those landmarks
and matching them to its map.
JOHNSON: So green ones are ones that are good,
that we matched correctly,
that the system believes are correct.
NARRATOR: After six runs over the desert,
there's plenty of green on the map.
The rover's brain appears to be up to the task.
But will it work on Mars?
February 18, 2021.
Almost two years after their test run in Death Valley...
MOHAN: Standing by for cruise stage separation.
NARRATOR: the team attempts to land their rover in Jezero
Crater under circumstances no one could have prepared for.
Because the pandemic still rages across the country,
many team members watch from the safety of home.
YAZZIE: I'm feeling really nervous and excited.
The past five years of my life
has been spent working on this project.
I wish someone could hold my hand.
BOSAK: Like everything in life,
you get up
and there's no guarantee that your day will go well.
NARRATOR: 3:48 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
Perseverance begins its descent.
MOHAN: We have confirmation of entry interface.
COOPER: As soon as the spacecraft
hits the top of the atmosphere,
it's minutes between that moment
and landing on the surface of Mars.
NARRATOR: Although there are cameras on board,
the team can't see any imagery during landing.
MOHAN: Navigation has confirmed that the parachute has deployed
and we are seeing significant deceleration.
The parachute has deployed.
TRUJILLO: When the parachutes opened,
that's big, because you slow down a lot with that one.
CHEN: Even though we're under a huge parachute,
we're still descending at about 200 miles an hour.
That's actually a little faster than, than I'd be going
if I jumped out of a plane and dove headfirst
without a parachute.
MOHAN: Perseverance has now slowed to subsonic speeds
and the heat shield has been separated.
CLARK: Once the heat shield falls away,
our lander vision system is taking pictures of the surface,
trying to figure out where it wants to land.
We have ten seconds to do that.
Things happen real fast after that.
The vehicle drops itself into, like, free fall,
turns on the retro-rockets.
MOHAN: Sky crane maneuver has started.
The rover slowly was tethered down to the surface.
It was an incredible, you know, few moments of anticipation.
TRUJILLO: You want to hear it, you're waiting for it,
and then they call it.
MOHAN: Touchdown confirmed.
Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars.
Wow. Whew!
(cheering, Mohan continues)
BOSAK: Disbelief, excited.
It is incredible. It is incredible.
Oh, my gosh.
(cheering)
Cheers.
(cheering)
As I was celebrating, the image comes in.
There's a picture!
TRUJILLO: I just could not believe it,
that Mars was saying hello to Perseverance so quickly.
YAZZIE: You want to see the dirt,
you want to see the dust on the wheels.
It's real, it actually happened.
I just want to hug somebody!
NARRATOR: Later, actual video of the landing finally comes in.
CLARK: This is just insanely awesome footage.
James Cameron, eat your heart out.
(laughs)
Just to see how utterly amazing all of this engineering is,
and all of the stuff that went into making this happen.
The ones and zeros,
and the forces and accelerations and rates,
that doesn't really do justice.
That sort of numerical purity doesn't do justice
to all of the emotion and humanity
that went into making something like this happen.
TRUJILLO: We're not landing as a city or as a country,
we're landing as the blue planet, right?
And the blue planet is going to the red planet,
and we're going to be exploring it together.
♪
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♪