(Multicom Jingle)
(reverent orchestral music)
- [Narrator] The first manned mission through deep space
is about to reach its final destination:
Mars.
The crew must now prepare for the most dangerous stage
of this perilous expedition:
landing on the surface of the Red Planet.
- Entry, descent, and landing
is obviously the most complicated
'cause it's the most death-defying portion.
- We are go for Mars entry.
- Standby!
In three...
Two...
One!
- Once you start the entry, descent, and landing
through the atmosphere, there's no turning back.
- And when you go, you go,
and you go all the way to the surface.
Very scary.
It happens really quick
because going from the outer top atmosphere of Mars
to the surface is only about six minutes.
- [Man] For entry, descent, and landing, we are roughly--
- [Narrator] The Americans have dubbed landing on Mars
the Six Minutes of Terror.
Six long minutes when all the controllers
and astronauts can do is wait and pray
that everything does what it's supposed to.
- [Astronaut] Standby for drone deployment!
In three--
- If you're on your way in and you lose your heat shield,
you have a problem with your heat shield,
that's the end of your mission.
It's gotta work.
It's gotta work the first time.
- [Astronaut] Two, one!
- [Computer] Aeroshell malfunction.
- Fire the rockets!
- [Astronaut] Firing rockets!
We've lost guidance!
(alarms beeping)
- We have one shot to get it right.
Their lives are in our hands.
(reverent orchestral music)
- [Narrator] Landing on Mars
is a complex three-stage process:
entry,
descent, and landing.
Stage one starts when the lander
enters the Martian atmosphere
125 kilometers above the surface
and lasts about two minutes.
The spacecraft is hurdling towards the surface
at 16,000 kilometers an hour,
20 times the speed of a jumbo jet.
Friction heats the air around the outer skin
to 4,000 degrees Celsius;
so hot, the lander appears to be
cutting through the atmosphere like a blowtorch.
- You're basically burning a hole through the sky on Mars,
ionizing the atmosphere as you move through it,
and punching a hole of burnt ionized gas.
And that hot gas is looking constantly
for methods of getting into cracks
and burning the rest of the spacecraft up.
- [Narrator] The only thing that's keeping the crew
from being roasted alive is the aeroshell,
a protective shield
that's covered with a heat-resistant skin.
- [Man] Columbia, Houston; comm check.
Columbia, Houston; UHF comm check.
- [Narrator] The fatal accident of Space Shuttle Columbia
in 2003 was a deadly reminder
of what can happen if the heat shield fails.
- [Man] We are only declaring false locks at this time.
- [Man] I copy, Fido.
- [Narrator] Since that day, engineers around the world
have been working on new kinds of armor to protect the crew.
Neil Cheatwood is an atmospheric entry systems expert
at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia.
- What I'm standing in front of is the command module
of the Apollo 12 flight.
This is a capsule with a heat shield on it,
because when you come into the Earth's atmosphere
at very high speeds, you generate a lot of heat.
- [Narrator] This heat shield saved the lives
of the Apollo crew reentering Earth's atmosphere,
but the Martian atmosphere poses a much bigger challenge.
- It's kind of the worst of both worlds.
Mars has not enough atmosphere
to land like we land a spaceship on Earth,
but too much atmosphere to land like we do on the moon.
- [Man] Apollo 11, Apollo 11, this is Houston.
How do you read?
- When we landed on the moon,
we had a landing system that was designed
to land on a body that has no atmosphere,
and so we could come up with a shape
that's just totally functional for the landing system.
And so, if you look at the lunar lander,
you can see the legs hanging off of it,
you can see fuel tanks and stuff
because it didn't have to be aerodynamic.
- The lunar module had an outer surface
about the thickness of a can of Coca-Cola; very, very thin,
and that's not enough protection.
On Mars, Mars itself doesn't start at the surface,
it goes way up.
There's all this atmosphere.
It's still only 1% of Earth's.
That's enough for it to create a huge amount of heat
as the vehicle screeches through this atmosphere.
- [Narrator] But this heat shield has a second critical job.
While protecting the crew during the firestorm of entry,
it will also double as a break.
And that's a big job because this lander will be a monster
compared to anything that's ever landed on Mars before.
In 1976, NASA successfully landed
two unmanned probes on Mars.
Each of them weighed one ton,
the equivalent of a Volkswagen Beetle.
A lander carrying humans will weigh up to 60 tons.
That's four times heavier than what landed on the moon.
- And the reason for that
is because they have to stay there longer.
Once they get to Mars, you're not gonna leave in three days.
You're gonna stay there for weeks and weeks and weeks.
Plus, you need to bring all the equipment down
to help you get back home.
- [Narrator] If the heat shield can't slow it down,
the 60-ton lander will crash through the atmosphere
like a freight train.
- If you had a rock and a feather on Earth
and you dropped them, the feather would land after the rock.
Now, on the moon, if you had a rock and a feather
and you let go, there's no atmosphere to slow them down,
so they accelerate at the same rate
and the fall, clunk, together.
We're doing the same thing at Mars as we'd be doing on Earth
in the sense that we want to make our systems
more like a feather.
Large surface area and a small amount of mass
is more like a feather.
- [Narrator] To make them more like a feather,
the one-ton probes use an aeroshell
three-and-a-half meters in diameter.
But a 60-ton human lander would need one 26 meters across,
large enough to swallow up five bungalows.
Now, imagine the rocket you'd need
to get something that big off the ground.
- There's a limit to how big
we can make these rockets, okay?
And, in fact, you don't want to make a rocket
unnecessarily large in diameter
just to accommodate this aeroshell.
So, what we are developing now is an inflatable aeroshell
where you would have a rigid portion like this
that's inside the launch shroud.
And from it then, after you get outta the launch shroud,
you can deploy this inflatable shape.
- [Narrator] In Moscow, Valery Finchenko,
a thermal protection specialist with Luboshken Aerospace
is working on the same idea.
The Russian heat shield
is made of a special mix of organic polymers,
similar to the materials used to make Navy Zodiacs,
but with one huge difference.
To keep the Mars crew alive,
this inflatable is designed to withstand temperatures
four times hotter than molten lava.
- [Translator] Here we use a different substance
to cover the material.
The substance does not burn away.
It evaporates from the surface.
While evaporating, it absorbs the heat from the environment
and maintains the same temperature.
- [Narrator] It's like sweat on human skin,
cooling the body as it evaporates.
Tests show that this protective layer
will only last about three minutes.
But that's long enough to survive the fiery heat of entry.
- [Translator] The inflatable technology
is still in its early stages of development.
However, I believe that this is a breakthrough technology
and the future belongs to it.
- [Narrator] But not everyone agrees.
- There's a surprising amount of resistance
to inflatables in the conservative aerospace community
because they don't have that much experience with it
and they can't point to the designs they've used
for the last 30 years.
But I was literally walking down the hall at JPL once
and talking to some guy, and he said, "Oh, right.
"You wanna go to Mars in a balloon?"
And I said, "Hey, hang on a second.
"If that balloon is made outta the same stuff
"that keeps cops alive when they get shot
"by a high-caliber bullet, then yes,
"I do wanna go to Mars in a balloon."
- Glen Brown, president of Vertigo Aerospace,
believes his inflatables are tough enough to land on Mars.
- The kinds of strength and stiffness
that we estimate are necessary for even the 60-ton landers
are achievable with this type of structure
that we're building today.
Its strength is related to pressure
when you think of inflatables.
And so, if you took an air mattress
and just kept pumping more air in it,
it would swell up and grow until it finally burst.
We take the same thing, in a way,
and we wrap fibers around it.
So, this beam that I'm standing next to here, for instance,
is inflated to 60 psi.
It's about twice what the tires on your car
would be inflated to.
Another good thing about this type of structure
is that it's pretty difficult to actually break.
A structure like this can be designed
and we in fact do design them
to be able to take an overload
and, when that overload is released, to pop back.
So, you really can't break them in the normal sense.
- [Narrator] Strong enough and heat resistant.
Thanks to inflatable technology,
the crew will be able to survive
the first two minutes of those Six Minutes of Terror.
With the aeroshell gone,
they are still blazing through the Martian atmosphere
six times faster than a Formula 1 race car.
They'll need to put the brakes on fast.
And now, the biggest threat is one the crew can't see.
- [Narrator] NASA calls landing on Mars
the Six Minutes of Terror.
So far, the lander has survived
the fiery temperatures of entry,
but now it's just four minutes from impact.
- Two!
One!
- [Narrator] Traveling at over 18,000 kilometers an hour,
the crew needs to slow the capsule down in a hurry.
But here, the Martian atmosphere, or lack of it,
creates a whole new set of problems.
With unmanned probes during the descent stage,
engineers have traditionally used parachutes
to control the speed
as the lander approaches the Martian surface.
- When you take humans and the food and water
and auxiliary equipment
to keep a habitable space for humans,
when you take that to Mars, the vehicle gets so heavy
that we have to make parachutes
that are as big as the Rose Bowl Coliseum here in Pasadena.
They're absolutely huge in diameter,
bigger than anything made by the human race ever.
- [Narrator] Mars has only 1% of Earth's atmosphere.
Even the peak of Mount Everest has 30 times more atmosphere.
And that's not all.
- The Mars winds are cyclonic at times.
They include dust, abrasive dust.
They include chemistry we don't fully understand yet.
- [Narrator] So, an impossibly thin atmosphere
plus the risk of winds
double the speed of a category five hurricane;
hardly ideal conditions to attempt a landing
with a precious human cargo.
- We've come in in this aeroshell
and we've taken out 99% of the kinetic energy.
The next 1% of kinetic energy
is taken out by, typically, a parachute system.
That increases our drag.
We open up a parachute, we increase the drag force
or the aerodynamic forces that slow us down.
The danger typically in those systems
is that the parachute won't open right, correctly,
or it will break when it opens.
Either of those is certain death.
- [Narrator] On Mars, the parachute has to open
at speeds over 1,400 kilometers an hour.
But some of the same stresses can be replicated
at a much slower speed in Earth's denser atmosphere.
Even without the Martian hazards,
the test results aren't good.
- We may choose to try and skirt that problem
by giving up the parachute part of descent
and going straight to using our rocket engines
and our propulsion system.
- [Narrator] Leonid Gorshkov
at Russia's Energia Space Corporation
has already made his decision:
Parachutes are just too risky.
- [Translator] I fervently believe
that the spacecraft should not have to undergo any changes
during that critical window.
Nothing should be unfurled, inflated.
It should land in the same state as it was launched.
- [Narrator] With no parachute to slow them down,
the Russian crew will have to fire
their descent engines much sooner.
But that decision comes with a penalty.
- Now you're talking about carrying a lot more fuel
for the descent engine.
Well, if you're carrying a lot more fuel,
then you've had to expend a lot more energy on Earth
to get that whole thing to Mars.
And of course, there's probably less science payload
onboard the vehicle.
Maybe, in fact, all that extra fuel
has had to leave one or two astronauts in Mars orbit.
- [Narrator] Russia has good reason to be cautious.
80% of its unmanned missions to Mars have failed.
- Mars has been a planet of peril
for landing robotic space vehicles,
and all of us have experienced failures,
from the European colleagues to the Russian colleagues
to the Americans.
- Back in 1999, NASA lost two probes in route to Mars.
One was the Polar Lander,
the other was the Climate Observer.
Due to some very poor mathematics
between two teams of NASA engineers,
they thought the spacecraft was hitting the Mars interface
at about 130 kilometers.
It actually hit the Mars interface at about 60 kilometers,
70 kilometers, burnt up in the atmosphere,
and crashed into the planet.
They just didn't know the difference
between metric and imperial units of measurement.
Not good.
- [Narrator] And this time, there will be lives on the line,
so mistakes will be fatal.
- Those last few minutes
as we come out of hypersonic types of flight
into subsonic safe landings
is where there are so many free variables.
It's that final slam on the brakes
and now you're safely nestled
on this beautiful Mars landscape.
- [Narrator] As if things weren't complicated enough,
their habitat and supplies will have been sent in advance.
So, if the lander doesn't hit a precise target,
the crew will be stranded.
- Unable to pick a landing location due to dust!
- If you're coming in,
you gotta hit that landing ellipse, they call it.
And if you've got stuff already on the surface of Mars,
you gotta land right by it.
If you don't land near that stuff, you're not coming home.
- [Narrator] Landing on Mars
is a complex three-stage process.
So far, the astronauts have survived
the searing heat of entry and maneuvered the lander
through the killer winds during descent.
Now, they have just 90 seconds to find a safe place to land.
- Fire the rockets!
- [Astronaut] Firing rockets!
- [Narrator] But where exactly is that?
In August 2005, NASA launched
the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Part of its mission is to take high-resolution images
of the planet.
These photos will help locate landing sites
for future Mars missions.
- MRO will give us the vision to see Mars
for what it will look like for us to find the safe places,
to see the chemistry of the places that we should go visit.
We don't wanna walk into a toxic waste dump on Mars,
but we do wanna go to places that are interesting enough
for human occupation, human exploration, human learning.
So, MRO is going to be our new eye in the sky on Mars.
- [Narrator] Ruslan Kuzmin is a planetary cartographer
who worked with NASA to select landing sites
for the Spirit and Opportunity rover missions.
- [Translator] We cannot just land wherever we like.
We have to be specific
when choosing a landing site for humans.
They will be working on the surface for a while,
and in the future the area might be used to build a base.
- [Narrator] As well as landing near their supplies,
landing in a location where there used to be water
is the top priority for a manned mission.
If there's any life on Mars,
chances are that's where it will be.
NASA is now receiving images
from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
showing stronger evidence of recent water flow
near Mars' equator.
With this new information, they may soon be able to pinpoint
the perfect landing spot for humans.
So, once we know where to go,
the next challenge is getting the lander down
onto the surface gently.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Chief engineer Rob Manning
has successfully landed a robotic mission on the Red Planet,
not once but three times.
For the Spirit and Opportunity rovers,
NASA came up with a simple solution
borrowed from the family car: the airbag.
- You might think the airbag system
is very different than the rocket landing,
but they're really very, very similar.
Now, we're thinking about,
"Well, how do you expand these ideas
"to these large systems?"
- [Narrator] An airbag would hit the ground at 40 Gs.
That's about 20 times what you'd feel
on the wildest amusement park ride.
- How do we wanna land people?
We don't wanna land them in airbags at 40 Gs;
they'll pass out.
People pass out in rides at Disney World at two Gs.
- [Narrator] With airbags not an option,
the only choice left is to ease the lander down
using rocket propulsion.
But where there's rocket fire,
there's potential for trouble.
- The way we envision landing men on Mars
is to use the rocket engines
to land us softly on the surface.
It's a lot like the Harrier Jump Jets.
They're actually quite tough to land vertically.
It takes pilots a long time to learn how to do that.
So, you imagine doing that in a gravity field
that you have never been able to practice in.
If you damage the vehicle,
you're not gonna be able to use it to come home.
Unlike the Harrier, if you have a rough landing,
the mechanics come out, they fix it up,
and you're ready to take off again,
we don't have that luxury when we go to Mars.
- [Narrator] And chances are good
that the landing is going to be rough.
The Martian terrain is unforgiving,
full of craters, rocky mountains, and boulders,
reminiscent of the terrain
that NASA encountered on the moon.
- [Man] Apollo 11, Apollo 11, this is Houston.
How do you read?
- [Astronaut] 50 down and two-and-a-half.
19 forward.
Altitude, velocity lights.
Three-and-a-half down to 20 feet.
13 forward.
- As we were getting very close to the moon's surface,
it became very apparent to the astronauts onboard
that where the automated landing sequence was taking them
was not a safe landing site.
It was full of boulders
which were potentially bigger than the lunar module itself.
- [Astronaut] Roger, we're observing the dimpled crater now.
- Our autopilot was taking us into a very large crater
about the size of a big football stadium
with steep slopes on the crater
covered with very large rocks about the size of automobiles.
That was not the kinda place
I wanted to try to make the first landing.
- [Astronaut] 200 feet, four-and-a-half down.
Five-and-a-half down.
- [Narrator] Neil Armstrong had no choice
but to override the onboard computer
and switch to manual control.
- Eagle, Houston; you are go for landing, over.
- But of course, he didn't have
a very large margin of fuel here.
We were getting very close to the surface.
The aim of the exercise at this point
was to get on the ground.
- [Astronaut] Forward.
Forward.
40 feet down, two-and-a-half.
Picking up some dust.
- [Narrator] For the next 30 seconds,
the mission and the lives of the astronauts
hung in the balance.
- [Astronaut] Contact light.
Okay, engine stop.
(inaudible) at a descent.
- [Man] We copy you down, Eagle.
- [Astronaut] Houston.
Tranquility base here, the Eagle has landed.
- [Man] Roger, Tranquility, we copy you on the ground.
You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue.
We're breathing again; thanks a lot.
(cheering)
- [Astronaut] (inaudible)
- It's an interesting place to be.
I recommend it.
God bless you.
Goodnight from Apollo 11.
- [Narrator] It was a close call,
one that NASA doesn't want to repeat on Mars.
So, Bob Richards of Optech Industries in Toronto, Canada,
is testing a new-generation guidance system
that will help the Mars lander
spot dangerous obstacles within seconds.
- One of our problems is there's no GPS on Mars
or any other planet.
We don't have the information infrastructures
on other planets that we have on Earth.
So, when we get to Mars, we don't have any reference frame.
It would be like jumping out of an airplane
with a blindfold.
- [Narrator] So, engineers are counting on
something called LIDAR.
It's like radar, except instead of using radio waves,
it measures distance using beams of light.
- The computer screen shows safe landing sites as green,
that's very safe territory,
and very dangerous areas as red.
So, stay away from the red; that's unsafe.
- [Narrator] Landing on Mars
is like throwing a dart at a moving target.
Figuring out where it will hit
is what engineers like Canadian Jean de LaFontaine
call the uncertainty ellipse.
- The uncertainty ellipse is the area
where we know we will land within it,
but we don't know exactly where within that area.
Typically on Mars right now with current technologies,
it's about 500 kilometer by 100 kilometer wide.
- [Narrator] That's like landing in an area
the size of Costa Rica, but not knowing exactly where.
- If we want to land close to another vehicle,
then we have to be a bit more precise
so that we can correct and get to,
let's say, a kilometer, hopefully a hundred meter
to the target that we want to achieve.
- [Narrator] Most space agencies
will send the Mars hab
and supplies ahead of the crew.
This splits up the weight
and gives engineers a chance to rehearse the landing.
The problem now is putting the second dart in the same spot.
- The second you say that you're gonna put stuff on Mars
ahead of time,
you have no choice but to land near that stuff.
If you're 200 miles off course
and you have no vehicle with you that can travel 200 miles
over the surface of Mars, you're gonna die.
- [Narrator] James Cameron is part of a team at NASA
that's developing a stereo-motion camera
for the Mars Science Laboratory in 2009.
But Cameron is playing with ideas as well as pictures.
He's come up with a unique lander that may solve the problem
of that troublesome uncertainty ellipse.
- It occurred to me, why not land in your rover?
It's already a spacecraft, essentially.
- [Narrator] So, Cameron combined the lander with a rover,
giving the crew a way to get the Mars hab
once they reach the surface, a revolutionary idea
that neither the Russians nor NASA had considered.
- People like Jim Cameron who thought about
exotic, hostile environments bring a new perspective
to the idea of sending machines
and people to places like Mars.
- [Astronaut] We've lost guidance!
- [Narrator] The astronauts are about to hit
the final minute of those Six Minutes of Terror,
60 seconds that will change forever
the way we see our universe.
- [Narrator] The first manned mission to Mars
is just 60 seconds from landing on the Red Planet.
- There are huge challenges that are in front of you.
Will it be a cakewalk?
Will it be easy; no.
But remember, they're very well-trained
to survive the adversity that's in front of them.
- [Narrator] This is the moment they have trained for.
Everything has to work the first time.
- LIDAR unable to find a landing location!
- [Narrator] There'll be no second chances,
no mistakes forgiven.
(alarm beeping)
- The astronauts are under no illusion;
they are in a risky business.
However, let's face it,
things can go terribly, terribly wrong.
We've seen that in the space business before.
We'll probably see it again,
hopefully not on the first trip to Mars.
- Backup system!
- Roger, the backup systems!
Backup system found a landing spot, Captain!
We're good to go!
- Bring it down!
- Copy that!
Engaging!
- [Narrator] Billions of people across the globe
will be glued to their TV sets and radios,
waiting for news from the crew.
Did they survive the Six Minutes of Terror?
Did they crash and burn?
(dramatic orchestral music)
- Now, the signals of what you're doing are being beamed out
and in 11-and-a-half minutes from now
they'll actually get to Earth.
So, the people on Earth don't even know
how well things are going until 11 minutes later.
So, you're very alone.
(pensive music)
- [Narrator] Outside the hatch,
a very hostile planet awaits,
one that humans were not made to live on
and, without the right protection, will definitely die on.
Mars is more barren than the driest desert on Earth.
Its atmosphere is carbon dioxide, poison to human lungs.
The daytime temperature at the equator
may reach a balmy 20 degrees Celsius,
but at night it can plummet to -100.
Then there's the chill factor.
Cyclonic winds whip up huge electrical storms
that scour the terrain for months on end.
(hydraulics whirring)
(uneasy orchestral music)
- [Adam] When we go to Mars, we will have drawn that line,
connected those dots,
and we will have changed the way people are.
That great experience of discovery,
that great realization that we've now added
to the human knowledge about the surface of Mars,
that's an incredibly powerful moment.
(cheering)
- The first time humans set foot on the planet Mars
will be monumental.
It'll be exciting.
It will be the moment in history
where humanity has reached out to another planet,
and you only get one chance to make that first move.
We went to the moon; we've been there.
But now we are about to set foot on Mars.
That will be very special.
- [Narrator] The astronauts won't have much time
to savor it.
They must get to the habitat
that was sent to Mars ahead of the mission.
This 40-ton ship will be the crew's home away from home
for the next 18 months.
With the space of a small two-bedroom apartment,
the crew of six will work, eat,
and sleep in these cramped quarters.
But the crew hasn't come to Mars for the accommodations.
They're here to find signs of life.
(hydraulics whirring)
And that means exploring a place
that's doing its best to kill them.
On top of the poisonous atmosphere and the deadly storms,
there's the lethal radiation.
During solar storms, the sun can send out waves of it
that reach Mars in less than 20 minutes;
radiation so intense it'll punch through a spacesuit
or the wall of a hab like bullets going through paper.
- It does amazing damage
to the top surface layers of your skin.
And if you get subjected to it often enough,
of course, the penetration to more sensitive organs
in your body increases.
- [Narrator] The Mars hab will be insulated
by radiation-absorbing materials,
including a thick polyethylene layer in the walls
and tons of water that will have been lugged
all the way from Earth.
The crew will be safe while they're inside the hab,
but exploring and working on Mars
will be a journey of deadly extremes.
One piece of equipment will make the difference
between life and death.
(dramatic orchestral music)
- [Narrator] Every time the astronauts
step out of the Mars hab, they'll be facing death.
Only the desperately thin layer of their spacesuits
is protecting them from this hostile environment.
(hydraulics whirring)
Nobody has worked on a walking spacesuit since Apollo.
But now, space engineers are taking up the Mars challenge.
Once a year, near Meteor Crater, Arizona, Joe Kosmo,
one of NASA's most experience spacesuit designers,
conducts extensive field tests.
- Essentially, what we're trying to do
is demonstrating the technologies
and the systems that are gonna be necessary
for planetary exploration.
- [Narrator] Today, the team will be testing
one of the most advanced Mars prototype spacesuits.
It's the Mark III, a highly complex machine
with 20,000 parts, twice as many as most cars.
It costs around $10 million.
Think of it as a one-man wearable spaceship
propelled by muscle power.
- You want to give the crew person
that's gonna be on that surface
the greatest mobility that they has.
- [Narrator] The key to the suit's mobility
is a series of joints rotating on ball bearings.
- So, if you're trying to go from one place, here to here,
and you've got lots of different joints,
you've got a side bearing, an upper-arm bearing,
and a wrist bearing, you don't have to follow one path
and remember that path all the time.
You can go wherever you decide you want to
from point A to point B.
- [Narrator] Geologist Dean Eppler
has spent more than a hundred hours
testing the Mark III suit.
It's designed to be user-friendly
with an ingenious rear entry system.
The backpack opens like a refrigerator door
and the astronaut simply eases himself
into a fully-assembled suit.
The suit must be perfectly sealed and then pressurized,
creating a layer of artificial atmosphere around the wearer.
The suit also needs a tough skin.
In Mars' vacuum-like environment, if a large rip occurs,
the air inside could be sucked out so violently
the astronaut's lungs would burst like exploding balloons.
At Meteor Crater, the suit pressurization check is complete
and Dean can start the trials.
- [Amy] Okay, proceed to test point one, please.
- [Dean] Roger.
- [Narrator] Mobility is excellent, but there's a price.
The suit has a weight problem.
With all those metallic bearings, it's a hefty 95 kilograms.
That's like walking around
with a full-grown man on your back.
On Mars, thanks to the lower gravity,
the suit will feel like it weighs only 35 kilograms.
But that's still too much to expect an astronaut
to carry around all day.
- [Dean] This is probably a good place to do a--
- [Narrator] Joe Kosmo and his team
will have to cut the suit's weight by half or more,
and that's a tall order.
- [Dean] Think how far that we can get.
- [Narrator] The weight problem is why spacesuit designers
at Delaware-based ILC Dover
are experimenting with tougher, lighter fibers
that can still withstand the extreme conditions on Mars.
- The lab that we have here is definitely a torture chamber
to find the limits of those materials
and spacesuit assemblies.
So, there is a product called SuperFabric.
SuperFabric utilizes epoxy-based materials
that are like little armor plating
to allow the material to be locally flexible,
but, in this case, globally stiff and protective.
- Okay, and I have a pretty heavy grit sandpaper in here,
so let's just see what happens.
- [Narrator] SuperFabric is 14 times more cut-resistant
than medium-weight leather, making it one of the toughest
flexible materials in the world.
Resilient enough for Mars.
But design engineer Keith Splawn
wonders if the thin SuperFabric gloves are warm enough.
- 'Cause fingertips get cold easily.
- [Narrator] The lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth
is -87 degrees Celsius.
On Mars, that kind of cold is considered normal,
so just handling a rock or a metal tool
could cause severe frostbite.
Keith himself will be testing his new design firsthand
by grabbing an aluminum bar
frozen down to -150 degrees Celsius.
To pass the test,
the new gloves will have to protect Keith's hand
from the intense cold for at least 30 seconds.
- Yeah, the suit fit is perfect today.
- [Narrator] Toughing this aluminum bar barehanded
would cause as much skin damage
as plunging your hand into boiling water.
- Temperatures are still in range.
Do you have any discomfort, Keith?
Everything feeling okay in your hand?
- No discomfort right now.
- All right, temperatures are looking good.
Bar temperature's currently -180 degrees Fahrenheit.
Are you okay? - Feeling good.
- All your fingertips are looking okay.
You have one going a little low,
roughly 56 degrees Fahrenheit. - [Keith] There you go, 50.
- 50 degrees, remove hand. - Okay.
- [Man] Very good, Keith; good test.
- [Narrator] The test proves
that the thin SuperFabric gloves
are as warm as the old bulkier designs.
- [Man] How you doin'?
They feeling pretty cold?
- [Narrator] Back at Meteor Crater,
the Mark III spacesuit completes another test run.
- Mobility's excellent.
Basically, I can move in the suit
like I move in a suit of clothes.
- You don't wanna go and do exploration
and find it doesn't work once you get there.
Better here than on Mars. (laughing)
- [Narrator] This suit will have to be perfect
because Mars has another nasty surprise in store:
dust cyclones up to five times larger
than a full-blown tornado on Earth.
What are the chances of survival
if an astronaut is swallowed up in one of these?
- [Narrator] On Mars, the most active natural force
is the wind.
For astronauts, it could also be the most dangerous.
(wind whirring)
On Earth, a dust devil can swell
to the size of a skyscraper.
On Mars, they can be as wide as a city block,
as tall as Mount Everest.
But it's not the size that makes them dangerous.
It's what you can't see that really does the damage.
On a windswept field in Arizona,
a team of researchers gets set to go hunting dust devils.
- We're trying to get a full picture
of what these dust devils are and what they're made out of.
- [Narrator] The idea is to study the devils we know
to be ready for the big ones on Mars.
- The reason what we're doing here
is important to the future of manned Mars exploration
is dust and dust devils could be a hazard.
These could be highly-charged,
could be dangerous to electrical equipment.
Could be a death knell for a manned crew, certainly.
If they aren't aware of it, that could be a problem.
- [Narrator] Steven Metzger lives to chase dust devils.
His ride is part pursuit vehicle, part mobile lab,
with three complete weather stations.
(engine rumbling)
My dust devil chase truck, Dasher,
is all about getting out into a dust devil,
'cause they don't come to us,
and from the ground on up, right close to the ground,
figure out wind speed and direction,
humidity, temperature, pressure.
- [Narrator] Another team joins the hunt
to study the same dust devil from a different angle.
They're using a powerful LIDAR system
that fires an astonishing 20 million flashes
of laser light per second.
It can detect the position and speed of dust devils
up to seven kilometers away.
The two teams try to zero in on the same dust devil,
but nobody knows where the next big one will appear.
- [Man] Steve, do you see the big red barn to the left?
- Well, that definitely classifies as a major dust devil.
That's the monster I wanted to catch.
Is the laser on?
Get it; yeah, yeah, yeah.
(wind whirring)
- [Narrator] Data pours in, and the results are startling.
Wind speeds inside the dust devil
are comparable to a force-one hurricane.
And the column of dust it's carrying
weighs as much as a midsize car.
That means one of those giant dust devils on Mars
could whip up a massive five tons of dust
as fine as baking powder.
- You could have a lot of mechanical wear
where the dust gets into gears
and your spacesuit breaks down.
You're not gonna be able to go out and explore,
which is the main reason you wanna go there
in the first place.
- [Narrator] But the most disturbing find
is the electrical activity.
It's a thousand times greater inside the dust devil
than in the surrounding air.
Swirling dust particles rub against each other,
turning the dust devil into a generator,
producing enough static electricity
to destroy most integrated circuits 10 times over.
So, the much bigger dust devils on Mars
could pack a lethal punch, shorting spacesuit electronics.
An astronaut might pick up thousands of volts
of static energy waiting to discharge violently
at the slightest touch.
For a spacesuit life-support system,
that could be devastating.
(electricity crackling)
By detecting the wind patterns that trigger dust devils,
the LIDAR technology being tested here
could be an early-warning system for astronauts.
- I believe that the type of instruments
we've been testing here are actually gonna be on
either Mars orbiters or Mars landers so that we can prepare
for that eventual first human mission to Mars.
- [Narrator] Since their terrifying landing,
the crew has had to confront a hostile planet
pushing their life-support systems to the limit.
Now, they must embark on the ultimate mission:
the search for life on Mars.
- It's almost unthinkable to imagine anything like life
as we now know it to have developed or to exist on Mars.
- [Narrator] It will be a difficult and dangerous search,
taking astronauts deep under the surface of Mars.
The answer to the greatest mystery of all
could be within our reach,
unless the Red Planet decides otherwise.
(dramatic orchestral music)
(reverent orchestral music)
(Multicom Jingle)