♪ ♪ 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 Perseverance collects. 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 1 and 2... ...through the twin rovers
Spirit and 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
Perseverance mission. 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: Curiosity found
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 Curiosity rover 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: Perseverance is
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 Perseverance will 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 Perseverance rover. 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: Perseverance will 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: Perseverance is 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 called Optimism. The rover and the computer
that it has on board is exactly the same as the one
that's on Perseverance. 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. ♪ ♪ (click) (chime) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ To order this program on DVD,
visit ShopPBS or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS. Episodes of "NOVA" are available
with Passport. "NOVA" is also available
on Amazon Prime Video. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪
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