Why Two Pounds Of Dirt From Mars Costs $9 Billion | So Expensive | Insider

this red dirt will be the most expensive substance known to mankind if we can bring it back from mars it will take three missions to collect and retrieve less than one kilogram or a little over two pounds one mission will examine and collect samples it launched from earth in july 2020 a second mission will gather the sample tubes and launch them into mars orbit a third mission will bring the samples back to earth and the total cost will top nine billion dollars so what makes samples of the dirt on mars so important that nasa needs to bring them back will they help us finally answer the question of whether or not we are alone in the universe heat shield set current speed is about 30 meters per second altitude of about 300 meters off the surface of mars the perseverance rover landed on mars on february 18th 2021 confirmed perseverance safely on the surface of mars ready to begin seeking the sound of past life [Music] percy as the rover is nicknamed arrived after years of meticulous planning and a seven month voyage through 300 million miles of space it's a feat considering only 40 percent of missions to mars have been successful and because it's all autonomous it has to work the first time or for baseball fans out there space is a one strike and you're out business percy will spend two years carrying out experiments and collecting samples of martian rock the mission costs nasa 2.7 billion dollars the rover is a mobile laboratory looking for signs of life and answers to some of mankind's biggest questions if there was life on mars exactly what was it a billion years ago was it four billion years ago did it predate or post-date life on earth you might want to know that because you might want to know for example where life originated first and maybe it's even possible some people suggested that life could have gone from one planet to another the rover is painstakingly searching for and identifying rocks in jezreel crater the site of an ancient martian lake bed even from space we can see that there was a lake in this crater that lake has not been present for billions of years and so we need to reconstruct this history and to tell a history of the place nasa picked this lake bed because it offers the best chance of finding evidence of life it will be one of the greatest discoveries in human thought i mean forget just science perseverance is the size of a small car built to analyze the martian surface with cameras radar x-rays and spectrometers then collect samples with drills and even lasers but despite the cutting-edge technology the instruments are nothing compared to the much larger and more capable instruments and labs found on earth and to see microbes and fossils in rocks one needs to cut rocks to look through them make thin slices and then use those microscopes and none of that is possible with the current rover technology a lot of the work before launch focused on guaranteeing that evidence of life gathered by percy is in fact martian life when we're sending spacecraft to mars we have to make sure that it's clean enough so that we don't contaminate the environment that we are trying to explore at nasa's jet propulsion laboratory in southern california engineers and scientists cleaned and tested the spacecraft to levels far beyond the most sterile operating room we've taken over 16 000 samples of the spacecraft we clean we trust but we always verify so and we're also extra paranoid about making sure it's clean so that's why it turned into 16 000 over 16 000 samples when neil armstrong returned with moon rocks they were stored in triple sealed aluminum boxes designed to protect their contents for about 10 days for this mission to mars engineers designed a system to protect samples for up to 10 years with more than 3 thousand moving parts nasa calls it the most intricate and technologically advanced system sent to space there are 43 titanium tubes that hold a core sample about the size of a piece of chalk the tubes are the cleanest thing that we have built at jpl it's ridiculously pristine there are clean rooms at jpl and clean rooms within clean rooms in a hyper clean room scientists blasted the tubes with air used deionized water on them and dipped them in baths of acetone and other chemicals to be ultrasonically cleaned then they were cooked all of those tubes went through 150 degree celsius bake out for 29 hours each tube can only be filled once so choosing samples is the job of an entire team and the tools they use are some of the costliest parts of perseverance tanya is on the team choosing those samples there's an instrument you can shoot laser beams at rocks and evaporate and make plasma and then analyze that plasma to see what elements are present in rocks which can tell us a lot about the rock composition but before percy shoots space lasers it has to see where it's going and where to aim that's the most advanced of 23 on-board cameras and takes nearly every picture or video you will see from mars for the next few years like everything else on percy it's built to withstand the extremes of mars sample collection will finish in 2023 almost a decade later around 2031 the samples will be picked up from mars and brought back to earth nasa and the european space agency are paying for the next two missions the european share is 1.8 billion dollars while nasa's costs will likely be much higher first a fetch rover will be sent to the martian surface its only job will be to go out grab the tubes and bring them back the fetch rover will then transfer the collected tubes into a rocket that lands with it its purpose another first blasting off from another planet rocket fuel is explosive and heavy so nasa is developing a way to make fuel on mars but mars atmosphere lacks oxygen a component of rocket fuel and that's where this gold square box being lowered into percy comes in moxie or the mars oxygen in-situ resource utilization experiment converts the mars atmosphere into oxygen if it works the second lander mission will carry a bigger moxie to create fuel [Music] so imagine that you have to build a rocket that will launch from earth travel seven months land on mars then when the samples are put into the nose cone point to a certain place in the sky and with 99.999 percent reliability fire and then dock with a waiting spacecraft big tall order that waiting spacecraft will launch from earth at about the same time the fetch rover does once it arrives it'll grab the basketball sized case containing samples and then that spacecraft using electric propulsion is going to turn around and fly back to earth and once it gets close it will drop off the earth entry vehicle and the earth entry vehicle is basically a heat shield with the samples inside and that earth entry vehicle will then land somewhere in utah nasa's independent review board projected the total mars sample return mission at nearly 9 billion but that only gets us to a landing in the desert not studying the samples which will likely push costs into the double-digit billions the apollo moon rocks came back to earth more than 50 years ago and remain important to science today if this little amount of martian dirt makes it back to earth we will have a final cost but in the end the value may be priceless so really we are doing this for the scientific community in the decades perhaps even centuries to come you

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Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021