(intense upbeat music)
It'll will begin
with a series of rocket launches from Earth.
(rocket blaring)
Each powered by more than 10 million pounds of thrust,
(rocket blaring)
delivering some 50 tons of people
and provisions beyond our atmosphere.
(rocket blaring)
Once a spacecraft leaves Earths orbit,
it'll be some eight months before it reaches Mars' orbit.
Then finally, a white knuckle plunge
toward the surface of the red planet itself.
(static whizzing)
This is how our human civilization will begin on Mars.
Once there we'll harvest water, build our homes,
grow our own food.
We may even attempt to raise children on Mars,
tempting our bodies to evolve traits we would never find
on Earth but the vision for a future
on Mars began even before the birth
of NASA or the European Space Agency.
That vision began nearly a century ago,
connecting Nazi war machines
to a nearly forgotten space race and a series
of epic launchpad failures to a series
of blockbuster discoveries on our nearest neighbor.
Today, we're going to announce
that under certain circumstances,
liquid water has been found on Mars.
This is the story
of how we took our first steps toward becoming Martian.
(intense upbeat music)
(wind howling)
Now, Mars is basically our cold little sister.
It has about half the diameter of Earth
which means it has about one third the gravity
that we experience here on Earth and
so the atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide
but it provides very little greenhouse effect and
so the swing from day time temperatures
to night time temperatures can be around a 100 degrees.
The air can't be breathed and the pressure isn't correct
and the dust could be toxic.
And to it off,
its surface is bathed in radiation.
Mars is a planet that was not made for humans,
yet less than a 100 years ago,
some scientists still held out hope
that it could be home to another intelligent species.
From the mid to late 1800s
when telescopes were developed
that were good enough to see the surface of Mars,
people were dreaming about the civilizations
that could live there.
People like Nikola Tesla
and others were wondering if perhaps some
of the structures that they thought they observed on Mars,
things that appeared like lines that they interpreted
as canals might be an indication,
not only of life on Mars
but perhaps sophisticated sentient beings.
There would be zones
that were dark some years and light other years.
We now know those were due to giant global dust storms
but at the time they were convinced that
that was indication of plants growing
in different locations or some kind of storms.
To many, Martians were engineers
who had built a network of canals so massive they could
be seen from Earth and then came the breakthrough
that would finally put Mars,
not just in view but within reach.
They now realize what sort
of terror weapon they were up against and
that they had no defense whatever against it.
World war Two,
Germany's V2 ballistic missile transforms
how wars are waged
and teases a future beyond our atmosphere.
It's a brutal destructive entry into the space age.
After the war, the architect of the V2,
Wernher von Braun,
along with more than 100 German scientists
and weapons engineers were spirited out
of Nazi Germany and into the United States
to continue their controversial yet groundbreaking work
for their former enemies but in his spare time,
von Braun's thoughts were elsewhere.
Wernher von Braun in the 1950s was inspired
to write out specific plans
for how we could reach Mars and settle a colony there.
His detailed notes consider everything
from crew safety to the amount
of cargo that could be carried between planets.
He would share his vision first
in a book and later in a Disney primetime special.
That will make possible the long trip
to Mars with only a small expenditure of fuel.
950 Rocket launches would deliver astronauts
and materials into lower orbit where an armada
of Mars bound spaceships would be constructed
by space walking astronauts in a weightless assembly line.
This unusual ship will
be 500 feet across and will carry a small landing craft
for the final descent to the Martian surface.
Each detail of the mission
was carefully choreographed
around the alignments of Earth and Mars.
It's only really feasible to do
that about every two years when the Earth
and Mars are relatively close together
in their respective orbits.
When the planets reach their ideal alignment
and are separated by just under 60 million kilometers,
von Braun's astronauts leave Earth's orbit
and head for Mars, a 260 day trip.
When our ship reaches Mars,
the landing craft will be released carrying men
and supplies to the planets surface.
By the time the astronauts return to Earth,
they'd have been free of Earth's gravity for 969 days.
Over 500 days longer than the current record
for the longest mission in space.
von Braun was thinking really far ahead of his time.
von Braun's vision
captured American's fascination.
A plan for permanently settling on Mars was still a ways off
but exploring this new frontier felt not just possible,
but imperative.
The first race for Mars had begun.
The U.S. and Russia we're competing
to get rockets in space and they were working
as fast as they could to develop new technology
to do things that just had never been done before.
By 1960, the Soviets were
on a major winning streak,
having been the first to put an animal
in space and the first
to launch a satellite into Earth's orbit.
It wasn't anywhere near the scale
of what von Braun had envisioned
but in October, 1960,
the Soviet Space Program makes two attempts
to be the first to Mars, both fail.
When the launch window reopens in 62,
the USA joins the effort to leave Earth.
On this year though, NASA's Mariner Program is heading
for Venus instead of Mars.
Mariner 1 fails to reach its destination.
Then, Mariner 2 performs a fly-by a Venus
as planned becoming humanity's first successful mission
to another planet.
With three more failed Soviet missions,
Mars remains out of reach.
When the launch window opens again in late 1964,
the race for Mars is running red hot.
Three probes will be launched in a span of just four weeks,
two more fail and then there's Mariner 4.
You get to launch day when there's one
of the highest risks of failure in the mission.
Sitting there watching a rocket launch
when that's a project that you've worked
on for years and you're excited
to see happen is, is so exciting.
It's just this thrilling moment and also terrifying.
And there's nothing quite like that sound
when something gets tossed out into space off our planet.
Mariner 4 has a clean launch
and is sent on its way to Mars.
Equipped with a telescope and a television camera,
Mariner 4 headed for Mars.
It's mission, to take close-up pictures
which would hopefully resolve the mysterious wave
of darkness and other unanswered questions.
Onboard, a collection of sensors
that will reveal the true nature
of the condition on Mars and most importantly,
a camera with enough processing power
to send 21 pictures back to Earth,
if the mission goes to plan.
There's so many perils in the solar system,
not just with your machinery
but the solar system itself is spewing out
high energy particles, not just from the sun
but from other galaxies and those can disrupt communication
or instruments aboard your vessel.
Speeding through space
at more than 10,000 miles per hour,
guided by the star of Canopus,
Mariner 4 approaches Mars on July 14th, 1965.
It's been zipping through space
for eight months and now it'll have just one day
to photograph and probe the planet
before cruising past it and entering the sun's orbit.
The scientific team back at the Jet Propulsion Lab
in Pasadena, California can do little more than wait
to see if their mission has been successful.
(electronic ringing)
Then, the sound they've all been waiting for.
It'll take days for computers
to convert this digital code into images,
far longer than it would take a trained scientist
to do the same.
They started coloring in squares based
on the little bits of data they were getting back.
So they could see the pictures
that were being returned piece by piece.
In all, Mariner 4 photographs around 1%
of the Martian surface and reveals a landscape as parched,
cratered and as empty as the moons.
When we see the Mariner 4 images
for the first time, it really made people realize
that Mars is not a living planet.
The scientists who have examined Mariner's pictures
are not yet willing to identify any
of the controversial canals.
These and other conclusions
about the planets surface will have to come later.
It's onboard sensors capture
for the first time, the troubling data
that still haunt Mars mission planners today,
daytime temperature readings of minus 100 degrees Celsius,
air pressure, less than 1% of Earths and the absence
of a protective magnetic field
which leaves the planet exposed to intense radiation.
They know now that the planet is even more inhospitable,
more desolate compared to Earth than it was thought to be.
I think it's possible
that people could have seen the images
from Mariner 4 and decided, you know what?
It's not worth spending any more time
or resources exploring Mars or even trying
to have humans reach Mars
but luckily that's not what happened.
Clearly, humanity kept focus on Mars,
even if it didn't completely understand
what it was looking at.
This is the theory.
If the Martian atmosphere contains carbon dioxide
and methane and they are exposed
to the ultraviolet radiation of the sun,
they may produce sugar.
In other words, there may be a constant sugar fall on Mars.
Each of the dozens of missions
to Mars since the 1960s has sharpened our view
of the red planet while the data
about its climate and radiation load is
as daunting now as it was in 1965.
What we now know about its water resources gives us
far more hope about our chances
of visiting or even settling there.
In 1976, Viking,
our first operational Mars lander gave us our first view
of the Martian surface
from the Martian surface.
To the trained eye,
the images of the hardscrabble landscape told a story
of ancient river beds and floods.
It's a story that we now understand well.
Around three and a half to four billion years ago,
Earth and Mars probably actually looked very similar.
Both had liquid water on the surface in the form
of rivers and lakes and possibly small oceans
and yet over time,
Earth retained its water and kept this thick atmosphere
because it has a magnetic field that protects it
from the solar wind and Mars was very small
and didn't have that magnetic field and slowly lost a lot
of the water to space.
The discovery that water had once flowed
over the surface of Mars rekindled hope
that there could still be water somewhere on the planet.
(indistinct), lift off.
That mystery would be solved some 30 years later
by another NASA robot, the Phoenix Lander.
Touchdown, ground, safely.
The basics of what it discovered can
be demonstrated with simulated Martian dirt
or regolith and a chunk of store-bought dry ice.
This is dry ice,
it's CO2 in the form of ice
which you can see is sublimating to form a gas.
So it's going straight from a solid state
to a gaseous state because CO2 is stable
as a gas in our atmosphere.
Water on Mars in the extremely thin CO2 atmosphere
that's present there,
is stable, just like this dry ice is here on Earth.
It's only stable as a gas basically and up near the poles,
it's stable as ice and so ice in the mid-latitudes
of Mars would behave just like this CO2 ice behaves here.
In other words,
most of the surface water ice
on Mars would have long since sublimated
into water vapor, the way dry ice turns straight
to vapor here on Earth.
However, there is some ice
on Mars in the mid-latitudes that's protected.
So it would be just like if we had this CO2 ice
and we protected it by covering it up
with the Mars regolith and
so if there's a thick enough layer of regolith over the ice,
it can actually protect it
for an extended period of time on Mars.
You can see there's actually a lot less
vapor coming up off it,
there's a lot less CO2 gas escaping just like on Mars
where some of the water ice
is protected under layers of dirt.
In 2008, NASA's Phoenix Lander
performed a similar experiment
up near Mars' polar ice cap with a similar result.
There's not water ice exposed at the surface like this
but there is water ice just below the surface covered
in a thin layer of regolith.
Using its robotic arm,
Phoenix scraped off the top layer
of Martian dirt exposing what looked like sub-surface ice.
Two pictures of that scrape taken four days
apart told scientists all they needed
to know about what that material was.
So it'd be just like removing the dirt here
and leaving a chunk of ice out on the surface.
Now you can see that as soon as the ice is exposed,
it starts sublimating again
and there's a lot more vapor coming off
of this chunk of ice.
Similarly, with the Phoenix Mission,
when we exposed a chunk of ice, it actually disappeared.
Only one substance would sublimate on Mars'
frigid low pressure surface like that, water ice.
For those dreaming of settling on Mars,
Phoenix's discovery was a game changer.
Water ice means water to drink,
water to grow crops,
water to be broken down and used
for rocket fuel and oxygen and we now know
that water ice doesn't just form below the top layer
of Martian regolith,
microscopic traces of water ice can also hide
within the seemingly dry regolith.
So we did a little experiment here.
We froze just a little bit of water
with some of the regolith and you can see from this
why it's hard to find even small amounts of water on Mars,
even though it is there.
So these two glasses look very similar,
nearly identical but the little tiny bit of water in one,
as we put these two glasses out here in the sun,
will actually condense around the edges of the glass.
For as long as we've been studying Mars,
water has been in the picture.
It's only in the last few years, however,
that we've really been able to see it.
It's a discovery we just keep remaking,
you know, all throughout my career, I've heard about,
oh, we just discovered water on Mars, again,
in a new way, you know, at the poles
or in these sediments or possibly
in these structures that we see on the side of sand dunes.
Mars has very little water compared to Earth
but there actually is a lot
of water ice stuck at the poles of Mars.
So if you added the north pole and the south pole
and if Mars were a perfectly round marble
and you put all of that water as liquid water around Mars,
you would actually have a global ocean
about 22 meters deep around the entire planets surface.
And now, we even have proof
that liquid water exists deep
below the surface of Mars' poles.
We are here today
to present you our results and the fact
that we have found liquid water on sub-surface of Mars.
There may not be canals on Mars
but there are natural reservoirs of water and ice.
Resources that Wernher von Braun and the architects
of the Mariner Mission could never have imagined.
With that water, we now know
that not only is there a chance
that life can exist on Mars,
there's a chance that human life can
be supported long-term on Mars
but for humans to become Martian,
we're going to need to do more than just mine water
from Mars' frozen ground.
We're going to need to source food and shelter
for our Martian settlements on Mars itself,
all while the deadly conditions
on Mars challenge the strength
of our bodies and take aim at our fragile genetic material.
Getting humans to Mars may take about a century
of effort but it'll be just the first step
in our quest to become Martian.
(upbeat music)