Lift-off.
Lee: We are the only generation that will ever explore
The solar system for the first time.
It is no question whatsoever that landing on mars
Is one of the most difficult technological jobs
That the human species has ever tried.
[ cheering ]
All the right stuff that life is made of
Is on mars.
I was stunned. "my god, it's positive!" I said.
Levin: That's life, I know it. I know it when I see it.
Garvin: This is a new mars.
The story's only gonna get better.
-- Captions by vitac -- www.Vitac.Com
Captions paid for by discovery communications
All stations, this is flight director.
The dc25 command has been transmitted to...
Casani: My job was chief engineer for mariner 4.
We're sending a spacecraft from earth to mars
On a journey that's gonna last nine months.
Half the distance to the sun, almost.
You're plowing new ground.
All stations, standby for status reports.
Grumm: The launch was a little bit scary
Because maybe half the launches blew up of the pad
And there was a lot of other failures.
They have affirmed.
The reason people come down to watch a launch
Is 'cause they're hoping to see an explosion.
That's usually the period of time
Where things, if they're gonna go wrong, do go wrong.
6, 5, 4, 3...
2, 1, 0.
This thing could fail, you know?
Ignition.
♪♪
Lift-off.
[ radio chatter ]
♪♪
I think for mariner 4, there was a great sense of hope.
♪♪
This is mariner control center at jpl.
Mariner 4 is 134.217 million miles from earth
And 50,142 miles from mars.
Pyle: So, it's July of 1965,
And we're about to have this encounter with mars.
2-8-1-5.
We received a signal that means
The spacecraft had detected the planet.
0.74 degrees from where we wanted to be.
Man: Yeah, I noticed that.
We had all gathered together.
A lot of people have their fingers crossed.
About 12 minutes from now, we should be able to determine
That the recorder is running,
Although we will not be able to determine definitely
Whether pictures are actually being recorded on the tape
Until they are played back.
♪♪
Pyle: The flyby itself takes a matter of hours.
♪♪
Grumm: The spacecraft automatically took a set of about 22 pictures.
Picture will cover an area
Of approximately 176 miles squared
On the sunlit side on the planet.
There it is.
There's some cheering, but mainly it's just relief that,
Yeah, we -- we did it.
What are we gonna do when we see h-e-l-p stamped out?
[ laughing ]
Pyle: The scientific instruments are sending back data,
And that's of interest, but of course,
What we're waiting for are the pictures.
The pictures were everything.
But...
The picture-taking sequence was not precise as predicted.
...There were some anomalies in the telemetry.
The last I heard was that there was some funny business
In the first 10 picture recording.
There were extra "stop record" signals,
So there was speculation that the tape recorder had started
And then stopped early.
The mission operators and our bosses,
They thought the worst.
Man: That tv system,
Which should have turned the tape recorder on and off,
May have failed.
♪♪
The next morning, we were wanting to handle the issue
Of proving to the bosses that the tape recorder was working.
There was an artists' shop on the way to work.
So they bought these crayons called pastels,
Then took them back up to jpl.
This data's coming back on a teletype machine.
It's going tum-tum-tum-tum-tum-tum-tum-tum.
And then you had to take scissors
And cut them up into strips
And then mount those up on a board on the wall.
The numbers represented the intensity of light at one pixel.
Each one of those numbers, he assigned a color.
And in that way, you assemble a paint-by-number picture.
♪♪
The picture was about 40,000 numbers.
The word spread.
Other people started joining in, cutting tape and coloring.
And it took eight hours to finish the picture.
When we saw the final image...
...We had accidentally created a piece of art.
♪♪
And then a tv crew arrived and broadcast a picture.
♪♪
Casani: You know what, it represented
The first image of mars
Taken from any place but the surface of the earth.
Pyle: And it was really a stunning thing to see.
Pyle: The colors were vivid,
And it was very saturated and beautiful.
♪♪
It was really striking.
So when you finally saw the real photographs...
-Facedown, right? -Yeah, facedown.
♪♪
Pyle: ...It was this horrid-looking,
Gray, dead world.
♪♪
Carr: When the mariner pictures came back,
All it showed was craters, just like the moon,
It was -- it was kind of a big disappointment.
♪♪
It didn't show any indications of canals
And past civilizations.
It was a letdown.
Pyle: For the public who had grown up on this idea of mars
As a place that could be thought of as another earth...
...That whole martian empire
Was just smashed to red dust in an instant.
This planet died.
You know, mars died.
♪♪
The next mission to mars was gonna be the viking mission.
People had to invent everything --
Heat shields, parachutes.
T-minus 10, 9, 8...
This was like the first cathedral,
The first renaissance voyage over the oceans.
...2, 1.
But it's to another planet.
Ignition.
That's big stuff.
♪♪
Pyle: So, mariner 9 comes along in 1971.
Public interest is starting to wane.
There's a certain ennui about, "we've been there,
We've done that, what's the big deal?"
Unfortunately, as we approach the planet,
We realize that there's this huge dust storm
That was pretty well masking everything on the surface.
♪♪
Mariner 9 was reprogrammed by nasa to hold back.
We had no idea how long the storm was going to last,
And this was critical
Because we were using up resources on the spacecraft,
And we're getting a little concerned.
♪♪
The dust storm lasted about three months.
♪♪
Fortunately, the planet started to clear.
♪♪
And it revealed all these incredible geologic features.
There's this huge canyon that was as long
As the united states is wide.
Green: There were things that really shook our foundation.
And olympus mons is that object.
If you stuck it on the united states,
You would cover the state of missouri.
The top is almost poking out of the atmosphere of mars.
Carr: Mars was just an incredibly different planet
From what we had expected.
The only reasonable expectation
Was that these were eroded by large waterfloods.
Green: You see deltas like the end of the nile delta.
That flowed into a low area,
Which must have been the ancient ocean of mars.
Mars was a blue planet in its past.
The question now is, was that enough to start life?
We need to go to mars with a life mission.
♪♪
The next mission to mars was gonna be the viking mission.
Now, this was the most ambitious mission
That had ever been launched to mars.
It had not one, but two orbiters.
More than that, for the first time ever,
Nasa was gonna attempt to land a craft on mars.
These were two separate landers,
Each of which had high-tech stereo cameras,
A robotic arm.
Perhaps most importantly, though,
They had the science experiments
That they hoped would detect life.
Nothing like this has been tried before.
People had to invent everything --
Heat shields, parachutes, throttleable engines to land.
We had to invent it all as we went.
T-minus 10, 9, 8...
This was like the first cathedral,
The first renaissance voyage over the oceans.
...2, 1.
But it's to another planet.
Ignition.
That's big stuff.
Lift-off.
♪♪
Well, between the launch and arrival to mars
Was about nine months.
♪♪
Carr: We had no idea what to expect,
Even some very basic things like, what was the footing like?
[ laughs ] were we going to sink into a meter of dust?
Good roll. Attitude hold.
[ radio chatter ]
Lee: It is no question whatsoever that landing on mars
Is one of the most difficult technological jobs
That the human species has ever tried.
Confirms coordinate transformation change.
We release the lander.
[ radio chatter ]
And at that point, it is going thousands of miles an hour
As it hits the martian atmosphere.
9,000 feet coming up.
So the aeroshell slows you down.
You're still going faster than the speed of sound.
-We're affirmed. -Lander confirmed.
Then the supersonic parachute is deployed.
Deployed.
At 1 mile in altitude,
The parachute was jettisoned.
Separation.
So then we have to fire the engines
All the way to the ground.
4,600 feet, 188 feet per second.
We were holding our breath each and every moment.
[ all speaking indistinctly ]
That had never been done before.
-3 feet per second. -Come on.
Acs is close to vertical.
-Repeat. -Acs is green.
[ radio chatter ]
♪♪
The next mission to mars was gonna be the viking mission.
For the first time ever,
Nasa was gonna attempt to land a craft on mars.
We have to fire the engines all the way to the ground.
We were holding our breath each and every moment.
Touchdown.
[ cheering ]
Yes, we have a touchdown time of 12 hours, 12 minutes.
[ cheers and applause ]
What we knew when it landed on the surface
Was only that a signal was being transmitted.
We knew nothing else.
We had to wait 40 minutes.
So we're waiting for the data to start coming up.
The lander camera, it basically scanned like this.
And there's a first piece of information coming in.
Strips of the picture
Became available little by little by little.
-Rocks. -That's beautiful.
May not look like much, but it's something.
We started seeing some dirt,
Then we started seeing some rocks.
[ people shouting ]
Then we started seeing more rocks.
It's just incredible to see
That mars, you know, is really there.
Then we started seeing the foot pad.
[ applause ]
♪♪
It was a world with climate.
We saw frost condensates form on mars.
We saw the sunset. We took early morning, sunrise.
We watched dust storms over the period of hundreds of sols.
It's not easily forgotten.
Lee: We are the only generation that will ever explore
The solar system for the first time.
[ cheers and applause ]
When we landed successfully on mars,
Humanity had for the first time become a category-two species.
A category-one species is one whose sphere of influence
Is only its planet and its moons.
A category-two species reaches out and discovers
What's in its solar system.
♪♪
Pyle: We wanted to find out if there was life on mars.
Well, how do you do that back in that day?
The life science experiments for viking were fairly basic
In design, but very ingenious.
Clark: We humans, we breathe in oxygen, but we exhale co2.
Plants breathe in co2 and they release oxygen.
In other words, metabolism.
The biology experiment on viking
Had three separate investigations,
And each one was testing for a different type of metabolism.
Levin: When nasa accepted my experiment,
We called it gulliver because it was going to a far-off place
Looking for tiny, little beings.
But nasa changed it to a much more serious name,
The labeled release experiment.
♪♪
It took 12 days after viking landed
Before we conducted the first experiment.
The viking arm extends out about 10 or 12 feet
From the spacecraft.
It then is dragged back in, collecting its sample,
Which it puts into a sample distribution box.
Samples are then distributed to the individual experiments.
The experiment ran for seven days.
Straat: To say that there's life on mars
Would be an astronomical discovery,
Probably a greatest discovery ever, ever.
[ clock ticking ]
It was 10 days before the first data came in
From the labeled release experiment.
I was surrounded by several members of the team,
Including gil.
And I hit the print button, and we all waited.
And then all of a sudden, in a flash...
...There were the data points, and it was a positive response.
I was stunned. "my god, it's positive!" I said.
Levin: That's life, I know it. I know it when I see it.
Certainly everybody on the viking mission
Became a biologist,
And nobody was willing to say that that was life.
They all had alternative explanations for it.
Man: The best guess at this point would be...
Harrison: The general interpretation was,
Well, there must have been something geologic
Or some property of the soil on mars
That gave this positive result.
Clark: The second factor was that another experiment,
Which was norm horowitz,
Did not see important responses to what they did to the soil.
Man: At least there are no data, and it's because...
Straat: Norm horowitz was far more skeptical,
And he was absolutely convinced there wasn't any life on mars.
Levin: Norm horowitz' position was very strange.
He said not only is there no life on mars,
But we now know why there's no life on mars --
It has no liquid water.
I feel he was not objective. [ laughs ]
A scientist has to keep an open mind.
Scientists were in the ice fields of antarctica.
They found a rock that had a slightly unusual color to it.
He had a smoking gun. We had a rock from mars.
♪♪
Pyle: We wanted to find out if there was life on mars.
Well, how do you do that back in that day?
Straat: Then all of a sudden, in a flash...
...There were the data points, and it was a positive response.
Levin: That's life, I know it. I know it when I see it.
The concept of saying, "okay, we found life,"
Was all about each of these experiments,
We're going to be able to say, "I found life,
I found life, I found life."
So you had to have positive indication
For each one of those.
The other two life-detection tests were negative.
Levin: Nasa didn't entertain that the error may have been
With the instrument looking for organic matter.
Man: We don't know that.
Lee: We have not definitely proved
That viking did not find life.
Unfortunately, the people who were
The highest-ranking scientists
Had their say and drowned out the people who were saying,
"but, but, but, but!"
[ overlapping chatter ]
Zilch.
There was nothing,
Pyle: So norman horowitz concludes at the end of this process,
"it is now virtually certain that the earth is the only
Life-bearing planet in our region of the galaxy.
We have waked from a dream.
We are alone."
♪♪
Well...Well, how does he know?
[ laughs ]
♪♪
Levin: I sent him a letter trying to convince him,
And he sent me a letter back
Saying, "gil, what you said is all nonsense.
There there's no reason for us to communicate any further."
And that broke my heart. Yeah.
♪♪
Lift-off.
[ radio chatter ]
The viking results certainly caused a hiatus
In mars exploration,
And even longer hiatus in looking for life.
Picture will cover an area
Of approximately 176 miles squared.
We lost the mars program for a whole 20 years.
Man: What are we gonna do when we see h-e-l-p stamped out?
[ laughter ]
Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon.
Welcome to nasa headquarters
And what promises to be a very exciting
And controversial news conference today.
♪♪
So, if I can introduce the team.
First, everett gibson from the johnson space center.
He's a geochemist with over 20 years of investigations
And lunar sample work.
In 1984, scientists were in the ice fields of antarctica.
They found a rock that had a slightly unusual color to it.
♪♪
And it was picked up and brought back.
And then one of the scientists at nasa
Was able to analyze this rock.
And he realized the gases that were trapped in this rock
Matched exactly the gases that the viking spacecraft
Had measured from the surface of mars.
He had a smoking gun.
We had a rock from mars.
What I would like to do this afternoon
Is lead you through our story,
Which is a bit of a detective story.
We had a rock from mars
That, in an area, it had these carbonate globules.
So what we then did is take some of the carbonate globules,
Gave them false names,
Sent them to stanford university.
They did the analysis.
A spectrum appeared -- organic matter in our samples.
Not just one sample, multiple samples.
The dedication, knowledge, and painstaking research...
We worked on it for four years.
...Have brought us to a day
That may well go down in history for american science,
For the american people, and indeed humanity.
One evening we were looking around, scanning, looking,
And suddenly we started finding these segmented structures.
And that caught our attention.
These segmented structures looked like a desiccated worm.
The simplest explanation to us is that they are the remains
Of martian life.
Good afternoon.
Presidents don't tend to make big speeches about space,
So it took over the media.
If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be
One of the most stunning insights
Into our universe that science has ever uncovered.
But then when it started
Becoming more and more scrutinized
By other scientists taking a look at it,
It became more and more generally accepted
By the community that these were actually
Features that were left behind
By a geological process and not by life.
I am determined that the american space program
Will put its full intellectual power and technological prowess
Behind the search for further evidence of life on mars.
Lift-off with the mars observer
And america's return to the red planet.
♪♪
Garvin: The question was asked,
Do we go to the surface with some new thing?
Do we put outriggers on a lander
To make it tougher, or do we move?
They said, "okay, what would science want?"
And science said we want to be mobile and go.
And so we went for it.
Two rovers.
Two landing sites. Two payloads.
Spirit and opportunity were two solar-powered robots
That would have the ability to rove around and analyze
Rocks and soil on mars.
And lift-off of the delta ii rocket carrying the spirit
From earth to planet mars.
♪♪
And liftoff of the delta ii rocket carrying the spirit
From earth to planet...
Pyle: Now, in the post-viking era,
The missions shied away from explicitly searching for life
And instead went for the next best thing.
Green: If you were to ask the astrobiologists,
"give me a definition of life
So that I could go out and find it in the solar system,"
The key ingredient is water.
Positions look good.
So spirit and opportunity were looking for
Water-modified rocks.
Jettisoned all 6 solids and we just ignited the other 3.
The whole concept was, let's follow the water.
T-plus 20 seconds, and a good evening from the flight deck.
At this time, we are approximately
5 minutes, 53 seconds from mars.
Weather today at the landing site
Is expected to be fairly mild
With temperatures averaging about minus-15 degrees c.
And there is no chance of rain today.
At this time.
We invite you to sit back, enjoy the landing.
It's gonna be an even ride.
Two, one.
The vehicle has now hit the top of the martian atmosphere.
We are moving at a speed of 12,187 miles per hour.
Entry plus 30, altitude 60 miles.
Parachute deploy has been detected.
[ cheers and applause ]
Positive indication of parachute deploy.
Heat shield separation detected.
We have confirmation from the spacecraft that...
The rocket has fired. We have confirmation.
[ cheers and applause ]
We are now awaiting confirmation
Of positive signals...
Getting a bounce signal.
[ cheers and applause ]
[ radio chatter ]
Signal has stopped. Hold on.
We have a momentary lost signal.
As the spacecraft is bouncing on the surface,
It is difficult to maintain lock.
We need to reacquire the signal
To have positive confirmation of a safe landing.
We're seeing it on the ltp.
[ cheers and applause ]
We're on mars, everybody.
♪♪
Golombek: Spirit landed in a region called gusev crater.
During the landing site selection process,
We used a camera that was on the mars global surveyor,
And it trained and took pictures of the ground.
Gusev crater has a drainage channel
That extends for thousands of kilometers
Through the ancient highlands,
And looks like it filled that crater up with a lake.
This was a location where sedimentary rocks
That could tell us about the environment,
When it was active, would be.
We got images pretty quickly.
♪♪
Harrison: We thought it might be landing in the middle of an old lake.
Unfortunately, we got there
And all we could see basically was volcanic stuff.
♪♪
Golombek: We were crestfallen that none of our predictions
About what materials would be there were --
You know, that we were wrong.
The opportunity was completely different.
Pyle: Opportunity really hit the bull's-eye
Because it landed in a place called eagle crater
In which mother nature's done you a big favor.
At some point, she slammed a meteorite
Into the surface of the planet, excavating this big hole
And basically gave you this archeological dig, if you will.
For a geologist, outcrops are currency,
And we saw sedimentary rocks.
♪♪
Green: When geologists go out in the field here on earth,
They want to look for layers of sediment
That have accumulated over time.
But this level was where the dinosaurs were,
And at this level they died,
And at this level, new life became.
That's what we found on mars.
Golombek: There was this treasure trove of information
That just came flooding back.
These were not igneous rocks.
These were sedimentary rocks
That would have been formed by liquid water.
They had gone through periods of groundwater
That had changed their composition.
And this is where it really gets interesting.
Garvin: We see these little bead-like things in the soil.
We thought, "what could these be?"
I mean, people started conjecturing.
But when we put the infrared eyes on them,
We can see iron and oxygen in them.
We're thinking, "holy crap, batman!"
♪♪
Pyle: Opportunity really hit the bull's-eye
Because it landed in a place called eagle crater.
Garvin: We see these little bead-like things in the soil.
We thought, "what could these be?"
We're thinking, "holy crap, batman!"
We found hematite.
Green: Hematite is a mineral here on earth
That's formed in water -- and a lot of it,
And moving water that allows this mineral to be formed.
And they were all over the place!
Holy gosh. We found the holy grail.
♪♪
Pyle: Now, the spirit and opportunity mission
Was expected to last just 90 days,
But as both of them traversed the martian surface,
They soon blew right past that.
♪♪
Green: We hopped from crater and crater.
They outdid their warranty by factors of hundreds.
Golombek: We're several years into the mission
That we had real trouble with spirit.
Spirit had lost one drive wheel.
And that was the end of spirit, yeah.
But opportunity just shines like a radiant star,
'cause this rover keeps going and going and going.
Garvin: We started to see the kind of mineral signatures
That were the stuff of dreams, that support water
As a persistent liquid phase.
-Water that forms... -...Deposited by water...
-Acid-rich... -River flows, groundwater.
This is just this ongoing saga of water.
Then in 2012, a new rover drops into the party --
Curiosity, equipped with a drill
And carrying an entire laboratory on its back.
This machine rolled into town
And immediately changed our view of the red planet.
Green: As we dug into the soils and we found, to our delight,
It had carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,
Nitrogen, phosphorous, and sulfur.
That's everything between these two fingers.
All the right stuff that life is made of
Is on mars.
Pyle: Meanwhile, after 15 years on the service,
Opportunity had covered a record-breaking 28 miles,
Documenting every step of the way.
It's this unstoppable machine. It just keeps driving.
♪♪
And then in June of 2018...
...Here's a dust storm in the distance.
It turns out to be a whopper.
Golombek: The sun was almost blacked out.
And at that point, there was no power
Getting to the panels, and we've lost contact.
♪♪
We tried for months and months and months
Until there was just nothing.
And at that point, you eventually, you know,
You say that's the end, yeah.
♪♪
We're watching the flight commanders sending off
The last commands to the rover.
We did basically four final pings.
The light-time delay comes and goes, we got no signal,
And everybody just kind of sits there in silence.
♪♪
And then the manager of the mission, john callas...
This concludes operations for mer-1, spacecraft I.D. 253.
...Says, you know, "thank you for your 15 years of service."
Thank you.
"but, you know, this is the end.
So, you know, this is mer signing off the net."
Mer project off the net.
When we look at these missions, it's an enormous legacy.
♪♪
What we know about mars really has been built up
Over a series of missions, and we've learned
Really spectacular things in each and every one of them.
Lee: Mars was wet, warm, and wonderful,
And there's no reason to believe
That life did not develop on mars 4 billion years ago.
The story is getting sharper -- water,
Habitable environments in the past, organic molecules.
This is a new mars.
The story's only gonna get better.
♪♪
I am now 95 years old.
Never give up -- never, never,
Never, never, et cetera.
[ laughs ]
♪♪