The Universe: MAJOR DISCOVERY on Mars (S5, E2) | Full Episode | History

in the beginning there was darkness and then  bang giving birth to an endless expanding   existence of time space and matter every day  new discoveries are unlocking the mysterious   the mind-blowing the deadly secrets  of a place we call the universe where are the martians on the red  planet's poison-packed surface   or in newly found sources of water did  martian life survive an apocalyptic attack are martians microbial or monstrous at last  the answers are here in mars the new evidence i believe we can send humans to orbit  mars and return them safely to earth   and a landing on mars will follow when we land on mars there may be  billions of martians waiting for us only they probably won't look  like this or this but like this microbes bacteria evolve to survive on a planet  with one percent of earth's atmospheric pressure   an arid world where temperatures can  plunge to 220 degrees below zero now even   if that upper surface is so nasty that doesn't  mean that just little ways under the surface   wouldn't be a much happier place  for for microbial life on mars is their life on mars just a decade ago my answer  would have been very different than it is today   because we've learned so much a few decades ago  it would have seemed like science fiction but   we now know that on earth some bacteria cluster  around thermal vents at the bottom of the sea others thrive in pockets of liquid water inside 12  feet of antarctic ice our knowledge of microbial   life on earth has increased so much that i think  you know there's still a good chance that some   kind of primitive life may have formed  on mars and existed there at some point how could life have first formed on  mars maybe with a flash of lightning   the spring of 2006 even as some scientists are  claiming mars doesn't have lightning earth-based   microwave detectors find it in friction-filled  storms of red dust but it's not lightning like   we know it associated with rainstorms it doesn't  rain on mars it's what's called dry lightning   and this dry lightning or static electricity  could have been the trigger for martian life   once you have lightning you've got a  new source of energy that can affect   your chemistry and and alter things in the  atmosphere even on the surface at some level   a famous experiment seeking to  replicate the creation of life on earth   ran an electric current through a mix of water  and common gases creating a soup containing   organic compounds and the building blocks of life  amino acids by hitting things with electrical   discharges you cannot necessarily generate  life but maybe make the preconditions for life but did dry lightning help jump start life on  mars or did it kill the chance for any life at all   lightning on mars could create things  like hydrogen peroxide which could then   lead to other chemicals that would destroy  organic material and sterilize the surface   life-giving jumper cable or fatal electric chair  the jury is still out on what dust storm lightning   has done to mars but what always happens with  mars is about the time we think we understand it   we discover new things that make us realize  we still have a lot of mysteries to solve so how do you find bacteria too small to be  seen living under the surface of a planet   48 million miles away the life that's most  likely to be prolific the life that you'd   find the most number of organisms if they did  exist is the one that's hardest to find a ball like climbers scientists look for life on mars  by making connections linking this observation   to that deduction hoping the  evidence leads in the right direction and if the facts aren't there you start  over it's hard to look for life so   the mission designers have said well let's first  figure out if there are habitable places if   there are places that would be friendly to life  and the key element for life as we know it is   water on earth liquid water is required for  life even if it's a small pocket in the heart   of a glacier you still need the fluid nature of  water for the processes of life to take place according to early space probe photos   mars was just a dead red rock its thin  atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide and so it seemed were the polar ice caps you know in the 70s we might have expected that  there was no possible water or life on mars   the picture is much different today in the 21st  century more advanced space probes have revealed   that a lot of the earlier information was wrong it turns out there's about a hundred  times as much h2o in mars polar ice caps   as in all five of north america's great lakes so even in the polar caps today there's  probably enough water to cover the surface   about 20 or 30 feet deep but it's really not  about whether we think there's water on mars   but whether there's liquid water on mars that's  the key question because even microbial life   could not have evolved on mars unless there  was liquid water early in the planet's history   in order to find liquid water on mars we  actually look in a whole variety of ways   from 1997 through 2006 nasa's mars global surveyor  searches for water-based minerals using a highly   sensitive spectrometer every chemical element  has a particular signature associated with a   sort of fingerprint and when light interacts with  it it re-emits that light in a very specific way   that's characteristic to that given element and so  that's telling you what things are made of by just   looking at the light they emit it's similar to the  way the human ear can pick out specific vibrations some notes boom out other notes are not so loud in much the same way spectroscopists are  interested in selecting out those particular lines   the surveyor spacecraft had spectrographic pay  dirt hematite a combination of iron and oxygen   hematite shows that ancient mars could have had  flowing water because the mineral is also found   on earth in environments that once interacted  with liquid water these round rocks from utah   they formed in a sandstone by fluid  water flowing inside the pores of the   rock and moving iron around so that the iron  actually cements together these little spheres   and the ones on mars are quite a bit smaller than  these but they're thought to form the same way   the surveyor's mission is over  but today five probes are taking   pictures and measurements of mars europe's  mars express circumnavigates the equator   nasa's mars odyssey and the more recent mars  reconnaissance orbiter or mro soar over the poles meanwhile two robot rovers explore the surface  seeking evidence of ancient water in the rocks   spirit is in a very hilly rocky dusty rugged kind  of place it's very sort of reddish and bright   when you see the pictures from that rover  opportunity on the other side of the planet   is in a very flat place darker more kind of  a chocolatey brown color than a reddish color in the spring of 2008 the five probes are  joined by a sixth nasa's phoenix lander may 25th 2008 as anxious men and women on earth  watch their monitors the phoenix lander ends a   nine-month space journey flaming through the  martian atmosphere at 12 500 miles an hour we taught the baby to fly you know  we gave him all the wisdom and now   we have to let it go and do the job any  landing on mars is incredibly difficult   and the chaos happens within six or seven minutes  from the top of the atmosphere to the surface   we call it the seven minutes of terror that's  how much time phoenix has to cut its descent   speed from 12 500 miles an hour to five if  not mars will have one more impact crater years of effort is being tested whether it's  going to happen or not the parachute deploys caught live by the mars reconnaissance orbiter thrusters slow the plummet for a near  perfect landing near mars north pole phoenix will search for  frozen water under the surface   but has it already found more than was expected   a photograph of one of the lander legs seems  to show something that should not be there there is new evidence that mars could once have  supported life mineral deposits show that water   once flowed on the surface nasa scientists  look for evidence of water wherever they   can find it on mars but in the spring of 2008  they may have found it in an unexpected place   the phoenix lander newly arrived near mars north  pole has something strange on one of its legs   some colleagues think that those are water  droplets forming in that environment which is uh a   little curious because it's very cold uh it's not  at all obvious that water should be stable there   but it could be really salty it could be briny and  so it has a lower melting point that's possible   i don't know what the blop of water on the phoenix  lander leg was or the thing that looked like that   scientists are split and internet  blogs run wild with speculation   but in the end it's all speculation   the unfortunate thing is the data that we have  are really kind of fuzzy right at the limit of   resolution you really want to go up there and take  a much better picture of it but it may ultimately   be a question that can't be answered although the  droplets on its leg remain a mystery to this day   when phoenix's robot arm digs two  inches under the martian surface   it confirms a prediction as it hits  hard icy soil containing frozen water   mars odyssey predicted that phoenix would land  on an icy soil with a little bit of dust on top   phoenix went touched it we got another key part  of planetary science which is getting ground truth while the phoenix team expected water ice they're  surprised by something else the lander's laser   detects in the martian sky snow not carbon  dioxide snow but water crystals as on earth   snow's on mars which is indeed cool phoenix saw  it first dissipating high in the atmosphere and   eventually actually falling to the surface  and then sublimating and going back to a gas   when the sun came back up it really is  one of the first times we're really seeing   the surface atmosphere water cycle in  this case gas to solid solid back to gas   meanwhile roving robots explore near the equator  spirit and opportunity use high-resolution imaging   and spectroscopy to find evidence of minerals and  landforms shaped by water in mars ancient past   a day in the life of a mars rover starts as  the sun rises and illuminates the solar panels   that wakes up the rover the radio commands  are sent from the earth to tell it what to do   this time drive 10 meters forward and then stop  and turn 20 degrees and then take a panorama   with these color filters looking off in that  direction near the end of the day one of the nasa   orbiters like the mars odyssey orbiter the mars  reconnaissance orbiter is passing overhead and   we know when that's going to happen the rover will  transmit data from that day up to that orbiter and   then that over to relays it back to the earth and  while it's sleeping we've got those pictures that   it just sent back and other data and now we're  trying to figure out what happened did it do what   we were expecting it to do did it do something  unexpected is it in some dangerous situation in early 2008 signals from spirit indicate trouble   its right front wheel jams when the phoenix team  tries driving the rover in reverse the dragging   wheel gouges several inches into the soil and hits  silica on our own planet where do we find silica well hydrothermal environments maybe that's what  we're seeing on this other world as well so a lot   of the excitement about silica is because  of that that connection to our own planet   that indicates that hey maybe those  kinds of environments existed on mars   as well in fact the spirit rover may be  parked at one right now right next to it   what may have been an ancient yellowstone-like  hot spot it's a classic accidental discovery   and raises the question could mars have  current underground thermal activity   is mars still hot in its interior it certainly is  there's no way that mars has completely cooled off   all the heat of its accretion all the heat of its  formation some of it is still there plus heat from   radioactive elements there's definitely sufficient  heat inside of mars to make hot fluids percolate   but there is that possibility where you might  find liquid water at some depth in the crust yes in yellowstone and at hot springs all over earth   many different species of bacteria feed  and grow in the gas and mineral-rich waters   could hidden hot springs be breeding grounds for  life on mars we would love to send electromagnetic   sounding instruments to the planet because  they could actually tell us whether there   is liquid in the crust at some depth  that would be fantastic then we know while the spirit team wonders  about mars underground mysteries   the phoenix team finds another  surprise on the surface two percent of the soil around the phoenix lander  is composed of perchlorates combinations of   chlorine and oxygen the discovery of perchlorates  on mars has been fairly controversial because   on earth it's a very toxic substance on earth  perchlorates are used as propellants in fireworks   and rockets this was a  surprise this was a discovery   why is it even there how is it forming the  question for chlorides is a really good question   and it's not a there's no definitive answer  perchlorates do occur naturally in places like   chile's atacama desert as ultraviolet radiation  from the sun transforms chlorine and oxygen   and on mars many of the same kinds of chemical  reactions might be happening on the surface   we don't understand the details of  even on the earth let alone on mars   the other challenge with perchlorates is they  affect some of the experiments that people use   to look for organics for carbon-based  molecules like you might find in life   some scientists are now reconsidering the  famous 1976 experiments by the viking lander   when viking went to the surface in 1976 they  found no evidence whatsoever of organics one   of the recent theories that's being bandied  about it is that if you did have perchlorates   in the soil that those might have actually  broken down the organics in the same process   you were using to try to detect  them as you heated the soil up perchlorates may have destroyed organic  materials in the viking experiment   and on earth they're a key  poison in many chemical runoffs   but perchlorates are also power  sources for certain bacteria   bacteria actually used to eat toxic wastes and  in terms of life it's a good news bad news thing while microbes might feed on the toxic soil it could be deadly for humans on mars we  don't know how that perchlorate compound   might be changing the surface the surface  might be in some kind of a superoxidated   state that could ultimately prove to be  for example corrosive to astronaut suits one thing is certain after five months  of exploration phoenix's mission is   threatened by a dust storm sweeping across the  martian plains burying everything in its path in a storm so fierce the phoenix lander is doomed when nasa's phoenix lander  digs into frozen water on mars   it finds new evidence that the red  planet could once have harbored life   but in the autumn of 2008 phoenix's own life is  about to end on mars the wind comes along and   whips up the dust which is very very fine grain  like flour extremely fine grained material whips   it up into the atmosphere and slowly settles  out blanketing everything red dust coats the   solar panels of the phoenix lander sunlight  its only source of power can't get through   the phoenix lander has to spend a  lot of time recharging its batteries   because we know that it's going to get very  cold at night and it's going to have to run   those heaters at night to stay alive on november  2nd 2008 phoenix shuts down for the last time as the martian winter deepens  frozen carbon dioxide piles up   and imprisons the probe in a tube of dry ice   but phoenix's data continues to be analyzed  going to mars and taking measurements on   the surface getting detailed data  about the history of mars and mars   chemistry of the surface was an essential piece  to determining for sure that water existed on mars water is essential to life but  according to the latest evidence   it's only one of many forces that  shaped mars you can kind of break   down our thinking of mars now into maybe  like four quarters of a football game the first quarter from about 4.6 to 3.2 billion  years ago is action-packed mars forms along   with the other planets as swirling gas and  debris combine and cool into a rocky world then mars is bombarded and scarred by meteoroids   there was a lot of cratering going on and  then towards the end of that period there   was a lot of geologic features that suggest  that there was water flowing on the surface   that new evidence includes this  series of ridges photographed in 2009   by nasa's mars reconnaissance orbiter it's the  first definitive lakeshore discovered on mars   the remains of a lake the size of north america's  lake champlain every piece of evidence about the   presence and the history of water on mars is  so important to determining whether we might   be alone in the universe some scientists even  say that three and a half billion years ago   an ocean the size of the atlantic covered one  third of mars maybe uh with enough time and   enough water life formed on mars as well as the  first quarter of mars history ends the second   starts with a bang as volcanoes reshape the  planet there was significant volcanic activity olympus mons is the biggest  volcano in the solar system   so we know there were big volcanoes in the past  mars is blanketed with black volcanic basalt   like the basalt found around hawaiian  volcanoes and the chemicals released   from volcanoes including sulfur mixed with the  water that was left and make things acidic kind   of like acid rain on earth and that sort  of thing at the same time the atmosphere   seems to be shrinking and water becoming  more scarce and less stable on the surface   the loss of mars's atmosphere meant that liquid  water could no longer exist on its surface   water exists on the surface of the earth  only because of the atmospheric pressure   pushing down on it whatever water  is on mars evaporates or freezes in the third quarter of its history mars  probably begins turning red from ferrous oxide   rust in the dust take a fresh volcanic  rock in hawaii or iceland and let it sit   on the earth's atmosphere and it's  going to turn red and brown over   time it's going to oxidize same kind  of thing could have happened on mars   in its final quarter mars goes into a deep freeze  from around 100 million until 2 million years ago   large glaciers form and carve out  new patterns in basins and craters from a warmer wetter planet to a cold dry world  mars in a nutshell according to recent evidence   it had a thicker atmosphere it had  water it may have had rain it had snow   uh has all kinds of things that are familiar to  us and it's just fascinating to think that we   can go back in time with these missions and study  an early sort of earth-like mars that's now gone but while there's strong evidence for past water  on mars these 2009 satellite pictures seem to show   something impossible flowing liquid water on the  surface there could be events when water that has   been kept subsurface or frozen comes gushing  out and runs down the walls of these craters this is one of the most exciting things  in the past decade is seeing those   pictures of the gullies because when i grew up  i was i was taught that there's no way liquid   water could be stable on mars today and this  uh kind of flies in the face of of the physics   right and that's that's kind of exciting because  it means that we might have something wrong the initial announcement of finding them proposed  that ice was melting or an aquifer coming up   there's a whole different set of theories in  recent study that it could be from carbon dioxide   the dry ice going to a gas and then that gas  basically doing a gas lubrication of the sand   that's flowing down and frankly it's still  in the midst of exploratory science right now   and some of these marks have been  shown to be dust flows i hope not   all of them i'd like them to be water from  ancient oceans to yesterday's flowing gully   the search for water and life on mars is an  ongoing quest a quest that like a climber's   path along an unfamiliar course is filled with  false starts and unexpected detours that's what   happens when this photograph taken near the  martian equator reminds a lot of people of this could mars once have supported life   mineral evidence from probes like  the spirit rover is encouraging   but it can be radically over interpreted we  have to be careful not to jump over a line   that goes beyond what uh the current data the  current experiments the current hypotheses can   support but it's hard as human beings not to just  jump over that line in 2008 thousands jumped to   an incredible conclusion when a picture taken by  nasa's spirit rover goes viral across the internet   doesn't this figure look amazingly like  pictures supposedly taken of bigfoot is this   proof of life on mars no it's a two-inch tall  rock we still do not have definitive evidence   for the existence of life on mars ever like the  19th century canals and the 20th century face   the martian bigfoot is a 21st century trick  of the light and sometimes people don't know   how to distinguish between the facts and the  science fiction if there is or was life on mars   it probably evolved very  early in the planet's history   when mars still had a magnetic field  shielding it from harmful space radiation   the evidence that mars used to have a  magnetic field lies in the crustal rocks   most of the crustal rocks have a magnetic  field frozen in when they solidified   these magnetic rocks scattered across the red  planet give mars its own version of earth's   northern lights as discovered in 2008 although it  may not register as visible light to human eyes   on earth when charged particles from the  sun get trapped in earth's field lines   and smack into the atmosphere they cause the  atmosphere to gain energy and then emit a glow the european spacecraft mars express recently  detected aurora on mars and what's actually   happening there is that there are charged  particles streaming down magnetic field   lines being made by remnant magnetization in the  crust but how did mars lose its magnetic field one theory a little less than four billion  years ago as mars cools its molten iron core   solidifies and stops turning the motions  within the core weren't sufficient   to generate an electric current  producing a magnetic field but there is also a faster and far more violent  hypothesis another more recent idea that's pretty   controversial is that mars had one or more fairly  large moons that were actually captured satellites and those moons tidally heated the interior and  kept it molten allowing currents to be generated   and thus producing a magnetic field now if  a half a billion years after mars formation   those moons crashed into the planet that  could have destroyed the magnetic field   for most scientists the pieces of the impact  theory don't fit could satellites large enough   to do such damage lose enough inertial  energy to be captured in the first place this idea that mars had moons that crashed  into it within the first half billion years   is pretty unlikely but it's  not completely impossible questions about mars magnetic field and the  search for life intersect here in the martian   meteorite alh 84001 in 1996 some scientists  say it contains fossilized martian microbes   more scientists say the objects are non-biological   all the time since then people have been working  on this poor little potato sized meteorite   extracting more and more information but there's  actually has some new results being presented   in april 2010 researchers with new radiometric  tools announced that earlier estimates of the   meteorites age are wrong it's actually younger  by a half billion years than we thought roughly   the older date had placed the rock at a time  when mars was still solidifying maybe too early   for even microbes to have it walked the new date  places the meteorite at just under 4.1 billion   years old that of course is the time 4.1 billion  years ago when if you thought mars was habitable   that would be the time you would choose because  we think there was water flowing on the surface   and it was warmer and it was the thick atmosphere but how can a meteorite from mars end up on earth that's what christina m from  dallas texas wanted to ask the universe when   she texted us what makes part of one planet fly  off and land on another great question christina   we've actually found meteorites here on earth  that are undeniably from mars there's about 50   of them known well what we think happens is  that asteroids occasionally slam into mars   and throw chunks of rock out into space  and earth's gravity can also pull them in   so they land here and we find them and in this way  we can actually study pieces of mars here on earth in 2010 nasa announces that more advanced electron  microscopy of alh 84001 reveals new details of   iron oxide crystals called magnetite a mineral  within its own magnetic field that on earth   can be created by certain ocean-dwelling bacteria  bacteria here on earth have figured out how to   grow magnetite crystals in their own bodies that  help them to orient to the earth's magnetic field   in order to help them swim in the  ocean and orient while feeding are the crystals in alh 84001 fossilized magnetite  created by martian bacteria to help them hunt and   feed in an ancient ocean when mars still had its  magnetic field more than four billion years ago   if they are fossils of course they'd indicate  that early mars had fairly sophisticated life   that's still being batted about  and bottom line is there's still   a heck of a lot of scientific work  being done and a lot of debate about   mars meteorites and whether there's  any evidence of past life in those but the latest and most compelling  evidence of martian life   isn't in an ancient meteorite but on mars  today even though this new evidence is invisible for years scientists looking for life on  mars have followed the water but there   may be something to follow that's even more  dramatic between 1999 and 2009 spectrographic   observations of mars detect a combination  of carbon and hydrogen called methane gas   the discovery of methane on mars in mars  atmosphere was a real surprise to people   plumes of the gas seem to be coming from  a few hot spots during the martian summer   the trouble is there shouldn't  be any methane on mars   on mars even just the presence of methane is  a little bit mysterious because it breaks down   on earth the unstable methane molecule  disintegrates after about 300 years   but on mars high doses of ultraviolet radiation  and perhaps the newly discovered dry lightning   in the thin dusty martian atmosphere break  the methane down in just a few months and   so if you see it there it means there must  be something resupplying it even though it's   being broken down it's getting resupplied  where's the martian methane coming from   on earth volcanoes produce vast amounts of methane  but even though mars has olympus mons the largest   volcano in the solar system it hasn't erupted for  millions of years so what are the other choices   methane can be produced underground when basaltic  rock gets turned into a mineral called serpentine   and that releases methane and that  methane could seep up through the   ground and come out of the atmosphere but  this process requires hot liquid water   which hasn't yet been found on or within mars  it could be volcanoes which we don't know to be   active on mars so that would be interesting could  be some subsurface chemistry with liquid water   which we don't know to be on mars so it'd  be interesting or it could be due to biology   on earth 90 of methane comes from  bacteria in animals and plants   is the martian methane coming from underground  colonies of bacteria the discovery of methane on   mars led to headlines of us having definitively  found evidence for life on mars and entire chat   rooms were set up to discuss these various  creatures but in fact though the discovery   of methane is interesting it doesn't mean that  we've found creatures wandering around on mars   maybe it is life it's an arrow to something and  maybe the thing at the end of the arrow is life   the search for the source of martian  methane has become a priority for explorers   and is on the mission list for the next rover to  be sent to mars so we're looking at a so-called   test bed version of the mars science laboratory  rover and the mars science laboratory when it gets   down to the surface we'll measure methane so we'll  know the answer once that rover gets down there   the mars science laboratory dubbed curiosity  will launch in the fall of 2011 and land in 2012.   it's the size of a small car and will use an  amazing new landing technique the sky crane at about 60 feet above the ground the  rover is separated from the descent stage   and lowered on a line which we call  the bridle and slowly lowered to the   ground and lowered to the ground when the  rover's wheels touch down on the ground   the descent stage detects that it cuts  those lines and then it flies away and   it crashes safely far away and the rover is on  the ground on its wheels ready to go do its job   the high frequency radar essential to  the sky crane landing is mounted to a   helicopter and taken for a test drive  at california's edwards air force base when you're coming down on mars we do a  bunch of simulations and analysis to go   ahead and give us bounds of what we expect  to see in terms of descent angles in terms   of attitude rates on the parachute during the  entry descent and landing the radar tells us   where the ground is and how fast we're going  that information is used by the control system   to control the thrusters to make sure  we touch down at a nice gentle speed we test little pieces here and little pieces  there so the first time that we test it   for real is on mars the key objective of the  mars science laboratory is to search for signs   of ancient habitats and so the rover will rove up  to areas that had been soaked in water in the past   and may have trapped organics so if we find  those kind of layers we can go up to that kind   of a rock and we can drill into it and take  the material from inside the rock and tell   with a lot of precision what the rock is  composed of and whether there's organics in there   the mars science laboratory will be one more  link in a chain of exploration to understand   that bright red dot in the dark night sky put  together all the new evidence and it adds up   to the need for more evidence we don't  know how the magnetic field was lost we   don't know exactly how the atmosphere was lost  we don't know where all the water went we don't   know whether the methane is produced by life  or just regular abiotic chemical reactions but maybe questions that baffled the 19th and  20th centuries will be answered in the 21st i asked five other mars scientists what  percentage chance would each of you give   that life ever formed on mars four of us thought  it was maybe greater than 90 chance that there   had been at some time and maybe now life on mars  and two of us thought it was less than 15 percent   and the follow-on question then is if you think  that there is less than 15 chance is it really   worth going to look for it and the answer  was immediately absolutely i don't think that   rovers and landers and orbiters are going to  find life on mars my personal opinion i think   it's going to take people i think there will come  a day when when people go to mars digging and   drilling and thinking and just going with context  and gut feel and putting the pieces of a very   complicated puzzle together i'm optimistic they're  going to find evidence of past or present life you

Channel: HISTORY

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Keywords: Mars: The New Evidence, The Universe, Red Planet, life, water, lakes, frozen poles, aurora, snow, lightning, dust storms, methane, history, history channel, history shows, history channel shows, history the universe, the universe show, the universe full episodes, the universe clips, full episodes, the universe season 5 episode 2, the universe s5 e2, the universe s05 e2, the universe 5X2, Season 5, history clips, universe, the universe season 5, watch the universe, Episode 2

Id: kC9ShKDNaAo

Length: 44min 23sec (2663 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021