(Multicom jingle)
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] After traveling hundreds of millions
of kilometers in deep space,
after surviving a blazing descent
through a dangerously thin atmosphere,
the humans have finally landed on Mars.
It is the most dangerous mission
in the history of space exploration,
and the most compelling,
the search for life on another planet.
- Are there others out there, and what are they like?
Are we the descendants of microbes
that somehow traveled from Mars to the Earth?
- [Narrator] Every minute on Mars
will cost half a million dollars,
but the real price may be measured in lives.
- If we're gonna find life on Mars,
it's gonna be a very difficult search.
We have to learn a lot more about life
in extreme environments on Earth.
- [Narrator] Around the globe,
researchers hunt down the ultimate survivors, bacteria,
clinging to life in the driest place on Earth.
Or the desolate frozen rim of an arctic crater.
Or deep underground in the far reaches of spectacular caves.
- Bacteria can be very resilient.
Could they survive in the lack of an atmosphere,
in the high radiation, the very dry conditions
on the surface of Mars?
- [Narrator] Life forms we may not understand,
and perhaps should fear.
- Any bacterial life that might exist on Mars
really could be hazardous to the human population.
- [Narrator] Could Martian microbes wipe out humankind?
For the first humans on Mars, the race to find life
may, in the end, threaten their own.
(dramatic music)
Every day on Mars has deadlines and mounting pressure.
Astronauts have to cover huge distances
in a merciless poisonous atmosphere.
They must search for life on a seemingly dead planet.
Water is the key ingredient to sustaining life,
but that disappeared
from the surface of Mars billions of years ago.
So astronauts will search the dry beds
of ancient rivers and lakes.
But where should they dig for those precious samples?
That's what scientists are investigating
in the Canadian Arctic near NASA's
Haughton Crater research station.
They call this place Mars on Earth
because it has so many similar features.
A perfect stage to rehearse the search for life
on the red planet.
- One of the most exciting things that you experience
in a place like Devon Island is that
every step you take, you are faced with a Mars wonderland,
catching insights into how you might explore Mars
and how to search for life there.
So Mars has a vast canyon system
with many tributary canyons.
It's still a mystery as to how they formed exactly.
- [Narrator] One theory is that they were formed
just as they were on Devon Island,
carved out by the movement of large bodies of ice.
And there's another striking similarity.
- We found astonishing resemblances
between the valley networks on Mars
and the valley networks that we see here on Devon Island
formed a long time ago by the melting of a large ice sheet
that covered all of this land.
And so, we are wondering now
if some of the ancient valley networks that we see on Mars
might have formed by ice sheets
that are now gone from the surface of Mars.
- [Narrator] But the most famous Martian feature
of Devon Island is Haughton Crater,
one of the best preserved large impact craters on Earth.
If there's anything alive on Mars,
odds are it's bacteria.
Canadian Space Agency's geologist Gordon Osinski agrees.
What he discovered here may change the way
astronauts search for them in the thousands of craters
that pockmark the face of Mars.
At first glance, it seems impossible
that anything could survive in this polar desert.
But under 90% of the rocks are colonies of green bacteria.
- They're there because underneath this rock,
they're protected from the intense UV radiation.
It's a slightly warmer, wetter environment.
- [Narrator] These bacteria are thriving today
because 23 million years ago,
an asteroid struck Devon Island,
exploding with the force of three million ton bombs.
(intense music)
It blasted a crater larger than the island of Manhattan,
and deeper than the Grand Canyon.
Boulders the size of buses
were thrown 10 kilometers from the impact.
Billions of tons of fractured rock were heaved up,
forming these huge, gray hills.
All life in the area was vaporized in a flash.
Every Martian crater was created
in the same catastrophic fashion.
But a few thousand years after the impact,
a crater may actually be more suitable for life
than the surrounding land.
- Now this is a very interesting rock we have here.
The impact event basically bubbles into the rock
so that life could invade there
so that these bacteria could actually survive
by living about a millimeter or two within the actual rock.
On early Mars, the underside of rocks
and within the cracks of rocks,
would be a great place for life to thrive
where it's protected from the intense cold
and the intense radiation.
- [Narrator] Life probably reappeared in Haughton Crater
around one of these strange orange mounds,
the remnants of hot springs which formed after the impact.
There, bacteria found two key ingredients for life.
Water and warmth.
The same might have happened in Martian craters.
- The structures that we see in here
are indicative of life,
and maybe on Mars, hydrothermal sites
will also be some of the best candidates to search for life,
and one really great thing we've been able to do here
was to map out where in the crater these vents are found.
And amazingly enough, they're just around the crater rim.
So on Mars, you could just send a rover, or human
to the outer edge of these craters
to look for signs of these hydrothermal vents.
The closer you look, you can find life surviving
in all these places where you never
would've thought it could survive.
It's gonna be exactly the same
as the first astronauts on Mars.
It's just gonna be amazing.
- [Narrator] Most scientists believe Mars was warmer
billions of years ago,
and its craters filled with water.
If so, they'd be an ideal place for life to take hold.
Water has now disappeared from the surface of Mars,
but fossilized Martian life might be buried
at the bottom of those dried up lakes.
- What would be preserved at a site like this?
What would we have to look out for
if we were to search sediments on Mars?
- [Narrator] The answer may lie
at the bottom of British Columbia's Pavilion Lake.
(ominous music)
For years, researchers like Darlene Lim,
a Canadian expert in ancient lake beds,
have been diving here, studying some amazing
10,000 year old carbonate formations.
These coral-like spires could be living examples
of some of the oldest forms of life on Earth,
and also possibly on Mars.
- The first time I saw these structures,
it was completely shocking.
- [Narrator] Carbonate formations are found in many lakes,
but those discovered here
are among the largest in the world.
Structures like this can only form on a planet
with large bodies of liquid water.
Finding similar fossilized reefs on Mars
would prove it was once warm and wet enough to sustain life.
Problem is, so far, space probes
have been unable to detect
large amounts of carbonate on Mars.
- Maybe it is that we're just not looking for them properly.
- [Narrator] So today for the first time,
a large fragment of the carbonate reef
is brought to the surface.
- [Woman] Wow, that is so cool.
- This one doesn't look like it's stirring up
nearly as much.
- Yeah.
Oh beautiful.
And it's an amazing piece.
- [Narrator] Samples are taken for shipment to laboratories
where they'll be analyzed and scanned,
so future space probes will know exactly what to look for.
The carbonates in Pavilion Lake
may provide other clues as well.
Researchers suspect these huge structures
were built by microscopic organisms
related to some of the most primitive life forms on Earth.
Exactly the kind of bacteria
that might have colonized ancient Martian lakes.
Fossilized bacteria are tough to identify,
but the Pavilion Lake carbonates
reveal the tiny telltale signature they leave behind.
If astronauts discover matching microscopic structures
in Martian carbonates,
they'll know bacteria once lived there.
And even more astonishing, that those Martian carbonates
were built by the same microorganisms
as those found on Earth.
It could mean that Mars and Earth are distant cousins,
evolved from the same spark of life.
- We would simply be members of the same family
just spread on two planets.
- [Narrator] Billions of years ago,
Mars might even have looked like Earth,
but now it's just a poisonous wasteland.
Could any Martian life have survived that radical change?
The answer might be buried in the driest desert on Earth.
(dramatic music)
The surface of Mars is blasted by life-destroying radiation.
The atmosphere is lethal and frigid,
as cold as the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth.
How could any life survive in this barren soil?
(dramatic music)
When the Viking probes went to Mars in 1976,
they found no evidence of life.
Were they right, or did they miss something?
The answer might be buried in the Atacama Desert
of Chile in South America.
- This is the only place on Earth that the Viking lander
could've landed, scooped up some soil,
and not detected evidence of life.
- [Narrator] NASA researchers like Chris Mckay
know there are traces of life here,
but those illusive bacteria
are as tough to find here as on Mars.
- Way I like to describe it
is we have a little patch of Mars here on Earth.
- [Narrator] About 2/3 the size of Italy,
the Atacama is the oldest, driest desert on our planet.
Hardly any rain has fallen here
for the last 10 million years.
- The Atacama Desert is 50 times drier than Death Valley.
Mars is more than 50 times drier than the Atacama,
but in the past, Mars was maybe
wetter than the Atacama even.
- [Narrator] Most scientists now believe
there were bodies of water on Mars
billions of years ago,
maybe giving life an opportunity to take hold.
Just as it does now,
around the few oases that defy the Atacama.
But the further we travel away from these oases,
the more the desert takes back,
so it's a kind of living portrait
of what happened on Mars as the water disappeared.
This offers clues about how life might have adapted
as the red planet became a desert.
(ominous music)
- So we have little islands of life that are surviving,
and one of our goals is to try to see
how those islands are shaped,
and also see if we can recognize it from space.
And we'll use that knowledge to map out Mars
and search for life on Mars.
- [Narrator] As a guide, researchers map out life
in the Atacama by checking the organic content
of thousands of soil samples.
- So we will collect samples that are meters apart.
Then we'll collect samples
that are hundreds of meters apart,
kilometers, hundreds of kilometers,
and we'll try to see soils that have life,
soils that don't have life.
- [Narrator] Soils rich in life are easier to find at night.
That's because some bacteria and organic material
turn fluorescent in ultraviolet light.
- [Chris] Let's turn off the lights.
Wow, look at all these colors.
This is really beautiful.
- [Woman] Look at that brilliant orange.
- [Chris] We might imagine this being used on Mars.
A rover going out at night
and turning on its UV headlights
and searching for fluorescent minerals
and maybe even organic material in the Martian rocks.
Okay, well that looks like--
On Earth, we find little oases of death
in a planet that's alive.
On Mars we'd be searching for little oases of life
on a planet that's dead.
The boundary between alive and dead is the same.
- [Narrator] The instruments astronauts will need
to locate pockets of life on Mars
can be tested in the Atacama.
That's where this place comes in.
The Yungay Research Station
doesn't quite look like a science lab.
But inside is state of the art equipment
for detecting life.
Scientists hope these probes will soon be flown to Mars.
But first, they will be given a test run
with the seemingly lifeless soil of the Atacama.
The dirt samples go into
what looks like an espresso machine,
except this one operates at huge pressure,
flushing out the tiniest trace of organic material.
- Those biological molecules you're looking for
won't be released from the rocks
unless you do those extreme things with water.
- [Narrator] Canadian chemist Alison Skelley
then puts the droplets into a probe
which can identify the chemical building blocks of life.
- So we're targeting the amino acids hoping that
if there was life on Mars, even though it's dead,
we'll be able to see that amino acid signature.
- [Narrator] The probe, 1,000 times more sensitive
than Viking, manages the impossible.
It finds life where none was detectable before.
If a Martian soil sample produces a spike like this,
it could be the first sign
the astronauts have discovered life.
The data will probably show this organic material
to be millions of years old,
but there's a slim chance the astronauts
might have found the ultimate prize, live bacteria.
It's an idea that comes once again
from studying death in the Atacama.
- In this desert, we find something
that we think is also occurring on Mars,
which is the production by sunlight of chemicals
which are constantly attacking the organic material.
The bacteria that we find in the soil here
have developed mechanisms
to repair that damage very efficiently.
So on Earth, we have a bug that we think is the super bug,
very resistant to dehydration
and also resistant to radiation.
But it may be that we go to Mars,
and find real super bugs that have learned to survive
the dryness and radiation on Mars.
This might be very exciting.
- [Narrator] But those bugs will be well hidden.
As the surface of Mars turned to dust,
bathed in radiation, bacteria probably migrated underground.
- My guess is that in any case, when we find life on Mars,
or evidence of life on Mars, it'll be underground.
Moving below ground, there's a zone in the subsurface
where there might be water, and there might be life.
- [Narrator] To find living cells,
astronauts will have to drill deep
under the surface of Mars.
They'll also need vehicles to get them to and from the site.
Will their technology be up to the challenge?
(dramatic music)
Mars has a surface area as big
as all of Earth's continents combined.
Astronauts will have no choice but to make long range,
and therefore perilous expeditions.
On Devon Island, a research team is trying to figure out
the logistics of those hazardous missions.
So Pascal Lee and two former NASA astronauts,
Mario Runco and Jeffrey Hoffman are planning an expedition
to the unexplored North Coast of Devon Island.
They want to take a closer look at the Mars-like gullies
that have long intrigued scientists.
Were those channels on Mars also carved by running water?
Extraordinary new pictures released by NASA
show that some of these gullies
appear to have been created as recently as a few years ago.
And where there was water, there might still be life.
Tests done on Devon Island established that an astronaut
wearing a cumbersome spacesuit
with a limited supply of oxygen
can't roam more than a few kilometers from his landing site,
even with the help of an open vehicle.
That's why the team will travel
on board this modified Humvee,
simulating a trip in a pressurized rover.
Inside a pressurized rover, the astronauts can travel
for days in a short sleeve environment.
Only when they reach their destination
will they need to put on their spacesuits.
During the trial, the team learns an important lesson.
To prevent the large Humvee from getting stuck,
it needs to be guided by at least two scouts.
One is way out in front, breaking trail.
The second's closer, showing the exact path to follow,
and in this case,
keeping an eye out for roaming polar bears.
On Mars, robotic rovers could do the job
identifying landmarks and obstacles
with the help of satellites.
(satellite beeping)
Nearing the gullies, terrain becomes so rough
the explorers will have to proceed on individual rovers.
(astronauts murmuring)
And there's another problem.
They can't be sure exactly where they are.
- That's the small lake in front of us,
and there's the gullies which we can't see.
- [Narrator] Compasses don't work on Devon Island
because it's too close to the magnetic North Pole,
so the team must rely on aerial photographs.
- Yep, sounds about right.
Gullies are two kilometers away.
- [Narrator] A compass would be just as useless on Mars
because there's no magnetic field.
Astronauts will eventually rely on GPS.
And if that fails, they'll resort to satellite pictures.
(dramatic music)
Four hours after leaving the research station,
our explorers finally get to the ridge
of the massive gullies.
They look just like the ones on Mars,
with a triangular crevice on top
and a narrow channel that runs down to a heap of debris.
Devon gullies were cut slowly over time
by melting snow and ice.
That water created little oases of life for bacteria.
Maybe the same thing happened in the gullies on Mars.
- [Researcher] So an early result from this project,
it seems like what's at the bottom of the gully
is richer in microbial life,
than what's near the top.
- [Narrator] So when astronauts search the gullies on Mars,
this is where they should look.
Another lesson is learned from this trial.
- The idea that we'd be able to go 100 kilometers
in your spacesuit in one day is just not gonna happen.
- [Narrator] A pressurized rover may be needed for trips
as short as 10 kilometers.
As the team is about to leave, a spectacular find.
- We're walking around,
and one of the people in the group, Pascal,
just happened to see this pattern.
This is an incredible fossil!
You don't send robots out to find fossils,
because they don't have the situational awareness
that a person does.
So, when we finally do get people on Mars,
the rate of discovery is gonna go up just immeasurably.
- [Researcher] Everywhere there is liquid water on Earth,
there is life.
Might there have been life on Mars?
Might there even be still life on Mars today
wherever liquid water might be present, perhaps deeper down?
- [Narrator] Since Mars is so cold,
liquid water will most likely be found
thousands of meters underground.
On the barren rim of Haughton Crater,
a prototype Martian drill is already being tested.
The roughnecks are researcher Brian Glass
and his team of scientists.
On Mars, power will be precious,
so this drill uses only as much energy
as a couple of light bulbs.
Of course, no one promised it would be fast.
- How deep are we at the moment?
- 206.1 centimeters.
- My drill took three days
to go two meters into frozen, broken rock,
but we're already more than double the depth
of the hole in the we drilled last season,
so that's a step forward.
- [Narrator] Drilling on Mars will be a slow process,
so the next challenge is to design a rig
that can operate on its own
without astronauts watching over it.
- [Brian] What my project does is in some sense
it replicates a human drilling team.
So we have software that does that.
It listens to the drill,
what noises is it making,
how the shaft wiggles as it goes down,
just like a human would.
- [Narrator] When the drill detects a problem
it can't handle, it calls for help.
Overall, the drill performs better than the team had hoped.
A small victory that may help unlock Mars' deepest secrets.
Space probes have already detected
large amounts of underground ice on Mars.
There might even be pockets of liquid water
about two kilometers below the Martian polar caps.
- It's the sort of environment one might actually find
living creatures, if we are going to find them there.
- [Narrator] If the drill hits water,
it could gush out in a snowy spray,
freezing instantly in the Martian super cold air.
- The most appealing argument for life on Mars
is that it would've followed the water.
- So we have to make this work.
Find out what's there, find out if there's life,
help figure out our own place in the cosmos.
- [Narrator] If the drill fails, the astronauts will set out
on their boldest expedition to find life
at the bottom of a Martian cave.
(dramatic music)
The burning lava fields of New Mexico.
5,000 square kilometer maze of razor sharp volcanic rock.
For microbiologist Penelope Boston,
this is where we can learn more
about Martian underground life.
- We know that Mars is not internally dead,
although it's a less active planet than Earth,
and there may very well be volcanic hot spots
spread in many places around the planet.
- [Narrator] Volcanoes can spawn underground rivers of lava
that leave behind huge tunnel-like caves.
They're called lava tubes.
- So we're standing here on this lava bridge,
which is the remains of the roof of this tube
that once filled this entire area.
On Mars because of the low gravity,
the tubes are between two and 10 times
the size of these tubes.
- [Narrator] Martian lava tubes
can be over 60 kilometers long,
and wide enough to accommodate a city block.
- [Penelope] Those tubes may actually
contain organic chemicals,
and most significantly possibly organisms.
- [Narrator] Penelope Boston and her party
finally reach the most impressive lava tube in the area.
- [Penelope] All right, watch your footing, kids.
A lot of loose breakdown here.
- [Narrator] As our explorers descend,
the air gets colder with every step.
- [Penelope] At the minute we get into
the entrance of the cave,
it's almost like going to another planet.
The walls are saturated with water.
The temperature is hovering around the freezing mark.
- [Narrator] But there are life forms
that call this place home.
- [Penelope] The bacteria are just everywhere.
All of this white material on the walls
shining with water droplets,
you can see it all over the ceiling,
all over above us, and it's easy to get to.
- [Narrator] Using sterilized tools,
the researchers take small samples of the bacteria.
- When we actually look at them with electron microscopy,
each one of these little dots on the wall
is like a major metropolitan city for people.
It's really an entire civilization, if you will,
of these little tiny guys.
And these organisms can derive their food
from the bare rock surfaces,
so they're essentially acting as rock eaters.
It gives us a fresh perspective on what to look for on Mars.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Exploring a lava tube on Earth is dangerous.
On Mars, it could be suicidal.
Many rovers equipped with cameras
and life-detecting sensors
could be sent in first,
establishing an underground communication network.
But sooner or later, the astronauts will want to see
with their own eyes.
- Lava tubes dating back to the time when Mars was very wet
might be really excellent locations to search for life.
These protected from the harsh radiation exposure,
warm because of the activity of volcanism nearby,
would work really well for the proliferation
of some form of microscopic life.
- Those organisms may even in fact be alive today
because abundant biology can be run with energy sources
that are disconnected from the sun,
and so that's a very exciting possibility.
- [Narrator] The first extraterrestrials
the human race encounters might live in a drop of water,
eating rock on a Martian cave wall.
It would be the most stunning discovery
in the history of space exploration,
especially if this life turns out
to be different from life on Earth.
- Then we would be in the presence of a form of life
that would have started independently of life on Earth.
- So then we know that in our own solar system,
life started twice.
And if it started twice in our own backyard,
then we know that the galaxy is full of life.
(soothing music)
- [Narrator] But any form of alien life taken back to Earth
could be a biological time bomb.
- [Paul] If we bring back a rock sample
from Mars to analyze,
we will wanna be extremely careful
to make sure that nothing associated with that rock
really could be hazardous to the human population.
(suspenseful music)
- We don't know if Martian life and Earth life
can live together, so we have to be careful
until we understand better.
- Let's make sure that we protect ourselves
as best we practically can.
Let's isolate, and be cautious.
- [Narrator] After an epic 18 months stay on Mars,
the anxious crew prepares to come back home.
There is one last challenge, Martian weather.
If satellite pictures reveal a major dust storm
is brewing, they're in trouble.
Fueled by hundreds of giant dust tornadoes,
Martian storms can whip up 400 kilometer per hour winds.
Quickly spreading over areas the size of continents.
And generating as much electrical activity
as 2,000 thunderstorms.
- A dust storm can wreak havoc
for the last generator, the last solar panel,
the last chip that controls your computer system.
You can imagine all sorts of irrevocable damage.
(wind whistling)
(thunder booms)
- Comm link's down again.
- [Narrator] A monster storm could rage for months,
but the astronauts must blast off Mars as scheduled.
Any delay could be disastrous.
- If you don't launch within that launch window,
you can't catch up with the Earth.
It's as simple as that.
(ominous music)
- [Narrator] Leaving the astronauts
stranded on Mars for another two years
is effectively a death sentence.
Whatever the Martian weather is like,
the ascent vehicle must work perfectly.
Or it may become the most expensive tomb in history.
56 million kilometers from Earth,
six pioneers get set for the long journey home.
And they know that leaving Mars
will be far more dangerous than it was getting here.
For the last 18 months,
the lander has been parked in a deep freeze
with an average temperature of minus 63 degrees Celsius.
Cold starting the engine may be almost impossible,
risky at the very least.
- [Announcer] Liftoff of the 25th space shuttle mission,
and it has cleared the tower.
- [Narrator] In January 1986, unusually cold weather
in Florida contributed to the failure of a seal
in one of the solid rockets attached to the Challenger,
causing an explosion shortly after liftoff.
With the same type of oxygen-hydrogen engine
in the bitter cold on Mars,
the ascent vehicle could suffer the same fate.
- You've gotta make sure that the system is, if you will,
contained and resilient to the local environment.
(ominous music)
- [Narrator] The extreme cold is just one of the problems.
Martian dust is 10 times as fine as talcum powder,
which means it can easily contaminate
sensitive computer systems and compromise pressure seals.
Problems only the crew can fix,
because there's no back up on Mars.
Dr. Jim Longuski, nine year veteran with NASA's JPL
now teaches astronautics at Purdue University.
- When you compare say the launch of the shuttle,
or even the Saturn V to the launch of the Apollos,
we had hundreds of people on the ground
monitoring all the systems,
giving all the computer support,
and if anything went wrong,
they could always shut down the launch
and run a few technicians over there
to examine the vehicle, replace a part, and get it going.
- [Narrator] Alone, and often out of touch,
a message from Mission Control to the Mars crew
takes up to 11 minutes just to get there.
The question is not if there will be trouble, but when.
- Copy that, verify ignition procedure.
- You try as you might, you train as you might,
you build as you can to try and mitigate that risk.
However, let's face it,
things can go terribly, terribly wrong.
- [Narrator] A last minute snag
almost stranded Apollo 11 crew on the moon.
- Well, I was down there on the floor,
I was looking around and I saw a broken circuit breaker.
So I started looking along here
and it was the engine arm circuit breaker.
Now that's the one that has to be in
to get power to the descent engine,
and power to the ascent engine,
which we needed to get home.
- [Narrator] And without an ignition switch,
they weren't going anywhere.
Houston's solution was to use an ordinary ballpoint pen
to toggle the switch, and ignite the engine.
- [Man] You're cleared for takeoff.
- [Man] Roger.
- When it came to the Apollo program,
we had to consider what happens if something goes wrong,
and we can't get them back?
(rockets roaring) (intense music)
- [Narrator] Getting airborne is just the beginning.
The timing must be perfect to make the rendezvous
with the Earth return spacecraft waiting in orbit.
The mothership will be shooting around the planet
in a makeshift orbit at speeds
varying from 1,600 to 16,000 kilometers an hour.
That's up to 17 times the speed of a jumbo jet.
Everything has to work the first time.
The lives of the crew will be riding on it.
- If that rendezvous should fail,
not only does the mission lost, the crew is lost.
(somber music)
- [Narrator] If they make the rendezvous,
the crew then sets off on the final leg of a journey
that started nearly 24 months ago.
But they're still not free and clear.
There's always the danger of a microscopic,
but deadly stowaway.
- We really don't know if bacteria have existed,
or do exist there, can they cause disease in humans?
Can radiation affect the bacteria that we bring with us
in a manner that non-disease causing bacteria
all of a sudden become disease-causing bacteria?
All of that's unknown, so we need to protect that,
and then ultimately we need to protect Earth.
- [Narrator] If the astronauts find microbial life on Mars,
it must be handled with extreme caution.
The spacecraft interior makes an ideal breeding ground
if a rogue organism gets loose.
- If they run into something alive on Mars,
you're not surprised by it later on
only after they come back to the Earth.
- [Narrator] After the moon landing in 1969,
NASA worried that the astronauts
might bring back an exotic microbe.
So they developed the mobile quarantine facility,
a highly modified vacation trailer,
with an elaborate air filtration system.
Recovery engineer John Hirasaki
handled the moon dust cleanup.
- The fear was that if you had
extraterrestrial sources of
possible biological contamination, you could have
a runaway contamination of the Earth's biosphere.
You can get some very hostile invasive species occurring
that you really do not want.
- [Narrator] This quarantine facility
was state of the art in its day,
but the crew returning from Mars
will undergo much tougher scrutiny.
- As a planetary protection officer,
you have to be a bio cop.
You're making sure we don't take Earth microbes
to other places, where they might grow and thrive,
and if we bring something back
we wanna make sure it doesn't contain the Andromeda strain.
- [Narrator] Even so close to home, the Mars explorers
are still not out of the woods.
- If the crew members pose
an unsupportable threat to the Earth,
then they would have to agree
that returning to the Earth in that condition is impossible.
- [Narrator] The astronauts would wait in Earth's orbit,
or in a quarantine facility on the moon
until doctors were certain they posed no threat.
- [Astronaut] Oh that view is tremendous.
- [Narrator] Then, having survived
the mental and physical strain of an epic journey,
the astronauts face one final challenge,
picking up the pieces of the life they left behind.
- Three years of your life you've been away from Earth.
If your kids were 10 years old when you left,
they're gonna be 13 when you come back.
Leaving your family, your loved ones,
the whole environment of the Earth,
the impact of that is gonna be huge.
- [Narrator] The costs of a mission to Mars,
both financial and perhaps personal
will be staggering.
But that's the inevitable price
of becoming an interplanetary species.
The real question is whether the red planet
can support a human colony,
and a new way of life.
So begins the most dangerous and exciting adventure
in the history of human exploration.
Engineers and astronauts have overcome monumental obstacles,
but the next job will make those seem like child's play.
- At a certain point, the question is gonna open up,
can we make Mars a fully living planet?
Can we transform this desert
into a fully living world like the Earth?
- [Narrator] It sounds like science fiction,
but a growing number of researchers believe
it just might be possible
to turn the Martian desert into an oasis.
- Terraforming is a word
that was defined first in science fiction,
and it means just what it sounds like, terraforming,
making like the Earth.
But now we realize actually that for Mars,
terraforming is possible.
The fundamental challenge in making Mars a planet for life
is warming it up.
Well, we know how to warm up planets.
- [Narrator] There are two big theories
on planetary warming.
The first, we've already stumbled on,
using greenhouse gases to heat up the atmosphere.
- What we have to do no Mars is what we're doing on Earth,
produce these gases in factories.
- [Narrator] Hundreds of solar powered factories
would be set up on Mars,
and could begin to drive up
the temperature within 100 years.
The second theory on warming up Mars
is literally out of this world.
Gigantic mirrors the size of Texas,
floating in space to redirect and magnify the sun's rays.
- [Chris] That sunlight would add energy
to the polar regions,
warm them up, which would in turn
produce carbon dioxide gas,
which would add to the atmosphere and make it thicker.
- [Narrator] It will be a painfully slow process.
Just melting the ground ice could take several centuries.
And even when Mars is finally warmed up,
the atmosphere will still be poisonous carbon dioxide.
To sustain human life,
Mars will need a massive dose of oxygen.
- The only way we know how to make oxygen
over a whole planet is with plants.
So one of my interests is finding the plants
that will be the first Martian pioneers.
These little guys growing under the stone
are actually making oxygen.
These organisms can change a world.
Billions of years ago, Earth didn't have any oxygen.
It was organisms like these that produced the oxygen
that got biology started on Earth.
I think they could do the same thing on Mars.
- [Narrator] If humankind finds a way
to transform Mars into a living, breathing planet,
it may become the new world for the first wave
of trans-planetary immigrants.
- And this can happen once we have mastered
the use of Martian resources.
We'll be able to build more habitats.
We'll be able to build domes perhaps 100 meters in diameter
in which people can live in.
- I think Mars is a place we could go and live.
I think we can build the systems to be safe.
We can learn to make it a habitable environment
the way we've started to learn
in the Antarctic at the South Pole.
- [Narrator] Eventually, colonists might even be able
to live comfortably without spacesuits
or breathing equipment.
It sounds far fetched now, but the day may come
when Mars will serve as Earth's lifeboat.
- The dinosaurs were wiped out by a planetary impact,
probably a comet or an asteroid.
And when you see the devastation that was caused by
that wiped out god knows how many percentage
of the species on the planet,
those sort of things can happen again.
And so if you want to look at the noble image
and trying to have the species survive
beyond just our children and grandchildren,
a lot of people would say we have to get off this planet
and establish a foothold somewhere else.
- [Narrator] Since the beginning of time,
humankind has felt compelled to explore,
driven to open new frontiers.
(dramatic music)
No single nation or people can hope to reach Mars alone.
It will take an international effort
by governments all over the world.
The quest for the red planet is the first page
in a new chapter of human history.
- A thousand years from now, people will remember
the late 20th century, early 21st century,
in ways we can't imagine now.
But they will remember the big things.
They will remember if people got their act together
and got to Mars.
They will remember we found life around another star.
Those are the things worthy
of the space programs of the world.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] In the future, we may look back
on the early Mars explorers
as the pioneers of a new frontier in space.
And the red planet that once seemed so cold and distant
will be full of promise.
A place, like Earth, we may one day call home.
(dramatic music)
(Multicom jingle)