(wind whooshing) (tense music)
The desert plains of Isidis Planitia.
Thousands of square miles of sand, rocks,
and whispering wind.
The memory of a vast lake haunts this region.
Brooding in undisturbed silence for millions of years.
But that silence is about to be broken.
(spacecraft whooshing)
(dramatic music)
A strange visitor will soon appear in the eastern skies.
If all goes according to plan,
it will come in for a landing.
(wind whooshing)
(parachute billows)
Over there behind the dunes.
It's a new rover.
And the start of our next exploration of the Red Planet
and the search for the signs of life.
(dramatic music)
Meet the Mars 2020 rover.
NASA hosted a contest to name the rover,
and they received over 28,000 submissions.
They chose the name Perseverance.
Perseverance! (audience cheering)
Suggested by a seventh-grader in Virginia.
We, as humans, will not give up.
We are a species of explorers
and we will meet many setbacks on the way to Mars,
however, we can persevere.
(upbeat music)
It's been Mars 2020 for about five years,
so it'll take us a little time to get used to the new name.
Perseverance is the fifth rover
to join NASA's family of rovers on Mars
and its mission would never have been possible
without the work of its earlier predecessors.
(wind whooshing)
(balloons banging)
(parachute billowing)
The first one landed in 1997.
It weighed only 23 pounds and was the size of a toy.
It was called Sojourner,
in honor of the Civil War abolitionist Sojourner Truth.
It was an engineering test that proved we could safely land
a working robot using low costs airbags.
Sojourner lasted 83 days.
(funky music)
Next came to twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.
These were more than automated rovers,
they were robot geologists.
What they discovered astonished mission planners
and scientists alike.
Both Spirit and Opportunity found minerals that form
only in the presence of water.
This means that long ago,
Mars once had water flowing on its surface in abundance.
(water splashing)
Flowing water also means the air on Mars
was once more dense.
it's evidence that shows Mars once had a warm climate
like Earth, but something changed.
Mars today is a cold, dry, desert world.
It's a stark windswept landscape
of dust, sand, and spectacular rock formations.
But if we look back in the past,
Mars was once warmer, wetter, and even had lakes and rivers
like we would recognize on the surface of Earth today.
The revelation about Martian water
gave new credibility to an age-old question
that once brought ridicule and scorn
to any scientists who dare to ask, was their life on Mars?
Which is why this 200 foot tall Atlas V rocket
is going to Mars to help us learn more.
Right there, guys.
Okay, let's hold it there.
A reliable veteran
of the American launch industry.
Atlas Vs have lofted many interplanetary probes,
including the proceeding Curiosity rover.
(suspenseful music)
This time it's carrying Perseverance,
NASA's next rover to Mars.
For a planetary geologist like Bethany Ehlmann,
the launch itself can cause tension.
A lot of things have to go right in a space mission
to get your spacecraft to Mars.
All we can do is cross our fingers, hope for the best,
and cheer on the crew that's making the launch happen.
This valuable spacecraft
that has taken years to put together
for hundreds if not thousands of people,
it all depends on what happens in the next few minutes.
And it should be on its journey to Mars very shortly,
Adding to the pressure
is the urgency of the launch.
(tense music)
Earth will soon pass Mars as both planets orbit the Sun.
Astronomers call the moment of closest approach
between the two planets an opposition.
This is the time to jump from one planet to the next.
In getting to Mars we wanna shorten the travel time
to as short as possible.
(rocket whooshing)
Launching at opposition
reduces the interplanetary flight to about seven months
and cuts the overall cost of the mission.
If they miss the launch,
NASA will have to wait for the next opposition,
two years from now.
We always launch it at the optimal time
where Earth and Mars are positioned just right
to make that journey as short as possible.
These launch windows happen once every two years,
we're seizing the opportunity with Perseverance
and it's going to be then a seven month trip to Mars.
The question is where to land?
Mission planners want the best place to find signs of life.
This means water must have been there long ago.
We have picked the landing site to be
on the western edge of the Isidis Planitia impact basin.
And we're going right here to a place called Jezero Crater,
which once when Mars was warmer and wetter, hosted a lake.
An environment very different
from what we're gonna see when we land today.
This ancient lake bed is the same size
as Lake Tahoe in California.
It's an excellent place
to look for possible Martian in life.
On Earth, lakes are filled with living creatures.
Evidence of that life is preserved in the mud and sand
deposited on the bottom of the lake.
Could the same be true for Mars?
The rover's instruments will closely examine
the ancient rocks of the bygone lake.
(dramatic music)
But first, the rover must get there safely.
(intense dramatic music)
One of the most exciting parts
of getting to Mars is the landing sequence.
It's been said that the Mars atmosphere
is too thin to be useful but too thick to ignore.
Meaning it heats the spacecraft up by friction,
but it doesn't slow it down.
The spacecraft must hit the atmosphere
at just the right angle.
Hit the atmosphere too shallow
and the vehicle skips off into space
like a stone skipping over water.
Hit the atmosphere too steep and it burns up like a meteor.
It's a landing sequence
that worked for Perseverance's predecessor,
the Curiosity Rover in 2012.
It strikes the air at over 13,000 miles per hour.
Friction from the air burns the heat shield
with temperatures reaching 2,100 degrees centigrade.
That's 3,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
So it was heating up, heating up, heating up.
And finally, it gets to a portion of the atmosphere
where the atmosphere actually acts
to slow down that spacecraft.
That's when the parachute deploys.
It's very shortly after the heavy heat shield,
which has protected it from the heat drops away.
So with that parachute out and it's a supersonic deploy
and it's also one of the riskier parts of the mission.
You don't want that parachute to tear.
And then what happens is the radar starts to see
where we are relative to the ground.
The rover and its descent stage
detach from the parachute.
The descent stage is called a sky crane.
It takes over the landing and fires its engines.
As it descends, the rover takes pictures of the ground.
It's onboard computer rapidly compares the images
with pictures stored in its database.
This computer lines up features it sees in the new photos
with features cataloged in its database.
If the rover is descending toward dangerous ground,
it can change direction
and move toward a safer place to land.
Slows, hovers, and then lowers via sky crane.
The rover on the edge of this tether,
when contact is sensed with the ground,
that tether is cut, that descent stage flies away
and the rover falls, what should be no more than a meter,
to hit the surface, but gently.
For a few minutes,
the spacecraft descending toward the ground
will not be able to communicate with Earth.
As with the Curiosity rover,
people might remember the seven minutes of terror.
We're gonna have a similar period of communications blackout
because it just takes time for that radio signal
to go from Earth to Mars, Mars to Earth.
(jets roaring)
And we're gonna have that period
where it will have happened on Mars.
The rover will have landed or it will have crashed.
And we will not know until that signal gets back.
Those minutes of blackout are some of the most
heart-pounding moments,
as you wait to see what happened with the spacecraft.
(jets roaring)
Perseverance is now ready for its mission.
As the expression goes, to seek out life
and boldly go where no one has gone before.
To do this Perseverance is armed
with a phalanx of seven instruments and 23 cameras
that address questions about life in the past,
in the present, and the future.
(gentle pensive music)
The rover will be able to identify
chemical elements on the Martian soil,
as well as organics and minerals
that may be signs of past microbial life.
The latest and camera technology
can resolve features as small as a grain of salt.
If something ever lived here,
perseverance can find evidence of it.
(suspenseful music)
A drill shares the turret with the scientific instruments.
The drill can bore holes and extract core samples
1/2 inch wide and 2.4 inches long.
This is a system that allows us to take core samples
of rocky material on the surface of Mars,
carefully sealed them in very sterile, clean vessels
for eventual return to Earth
(suspenseful music)
Once the sample is collected,
Perseverance can store the sample in a revolving chamber
located inside the rover.
This chamber is called the sample cache
and it has storage for 47 empty tubes available.
Here, the samples are hermetically sealed.
No contaminants from the river will ever enter the tubes
and nothing can escape them.
At some point yet to be determined in the future,
a site will be chosen
where the sample cache will be deposited.
This will become a depot.
Perseverance will spend the rest of its mission,
bringing sample tubes to the depot.
A future mission will collect the cache
and bring the samples back to Earth.
This makes Perseverance the first part
of a sample return mission.
I think we have a lot to learn, life or no life,
about the evolution of our solar system, about our planet,
by looking in-depth at rocks brought that to Mars.
(gentle groovy music)
The Mastcam-Z instrument
consists of two fixed focus, but zoomable cameras
that are mounted on either side of the rover mast.
So they let us get a stereo view of the landscape,
just as our eyes do.
The instrument consists of two zoomable cameras
mounted on both sides of the rover's mast.
Temperatures are well within our limits.
So we're ready to go.
We're going come up and do Mastcam.
The two cameras work the same way
as human eyes,
giving us a stereoscopic view of the landscape.
You know, I'm most nervous about this one.
So I'm gonna split the difference
and put him right down the middle.
To plan our rovers activities
we use images that were taken by the rover
with the left and right eye camera
to build 3D terrain models.
And with our red and blue anaglyph glasses
we can see the train in 3D like the rover would see it.
The Mastcam is mounted, as the name suggests,
on a pole that approximates the eye line of a human
6 1/2 feet tall.
Mastcam-Z is effectively our eyes on Mars
in terms of recon and assessing what the terrain's doing.
Mastcam-Z is used
to choose targets for a closer look
and to get a sense of the terrain surrounding the rover.
What's special though about the Mastcam cameras,
in addition to imaging invisible light,
the image out into the near-infrared wavelength ranges,
and this near-infrared lets us get a compositional picture
of when chemistry and mineralogy are changing in the rocks.
The rover not only works like a human
it's designed to test new tools
for future robotic and human exploration.
Mounted on the body of the rover
is the Mars Oxygen NC2 Resource Utilization Experiment.
Also known as MOXIE.
MOXIE will synthesize oxygen out of the Martian atmosphere
to create a gas that would be breathable
by future humans on the surface.
And MOXIE is a demonstration of this technology.
The Martian atmosphere
is about 96% carbon dioxide.
MOXIE is a test to see if we can process Martian air
to make liquid oxygen for rocket fuel and for breathing.
The idea comes from an exploration strategy
of living off the land.
(dramatic music)
If we can make some of our supplies in situ,
rather than having to bring everything from Earth,
then we can reduce the cost of a human mission to Mars.
And the chances of its sustained success
are greatly improved.
But MOXIE's not the last engineering test
Perseverance has in store
to further future human exploration.
The rover has a weather station
that will keep track of wind, humidity, dust levels,
and temperature.
By studying the ways dust and water ice
interact with solar radiation
this weather station will build a database
of conditions on the ground
that'll help predict the weather or Mars.
Perseverance also has sample fabric swatches
mounted on one of its instruments.
It's a test to see which fabrics
hold up in the harsh Martian environment.
Thanks to Perseverance, future explorers will wear
the outfit best suited for prevailing weather conditions.
(wind whooshing)
(tense music)
But the rover has one more experiment
that's as old as our dreams of exploring Mars,
a hitchhiker that may radically change
the way we explore the Red Planet.
Within 30 days of landing,
the rover will deploy an experimental new craft,
a helicopter.
What we're then hoping to do
is a series of flight tests.
First maybe, just up and hover.
Then maybe up and a meter.
Then maybe up and up to a couple tens of meters away.
The helicopter has a camera, has two rotors,
and we're hoping to prove out this new technology
that we can fly other spacecraft on Mars.
That we can do drone-based exploration aerially on Mars,
collecting pictures from above.
Its name is Ingenuity
and if it works Mars will be the second world
to see a first flight.
From day one,
this was the unwavering dream of our team.
To get our helicopter launched to Mars
so that we can get that opportunity
to do the very first rotorcraft flight test
in the actual environment of Mars.
It's extremely difficult to fly at Mars
because the atmosphere is so thin.
Compared to Earth's Mars' is less than 1%.
So the first and foremost challenge
is to make a vehicle that's light enough to be lifted.
And then the second is to generate lift.
The rotor system has to spin very fast.
2,000. 2,200.
2,400. 2,600.
We're spinning between 2,000 and 3,000
revolutions per minute and it takes a lot of energy.
So it's that balance of a very light system
yet having enough energy that's needed
to spin the rotor so fast to lift.
You'll also see that the blades themselves
are much longer and their configuration is different.
And that's because to take advantage
of the minimal amount of lift
that's provided through Mars atmosphere,
you have to have a much larger blade size
for any given payload than you do on Earth.
Our experiment window is 30 Martian days.
So we have planned up to five flights
of incremental difficulty.
Very first flight,
the main thing is we wanna get the legs off the ground.
And so we will basically go up about three meters
and we'll hover there and then come down again.
And that will be the first really major milestone.
Most of our flights will be
at the three to five-meter height.
We will be going horizontally
again at a few meters per second.
So our priority will be to get back engineering telemetry
and not so much images,
but I'm sure we'll return a few
because they'll obviously this look cool.
What's really most important
is everything we're learning here
is for the future rotorcraft systems
that we want to introduce it to space exploration.
(helicopter blades whirring)
There are unusual challenges
to powered flight on Mars.
The air on Mars is indescribably thin,
just 1% of the thickness of the atmosphere here on Earth.
This is offset by two things.
The Martian atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide,
which is a denser gas than the nitrogen, oxygen,
and carbon dioxide gases that make up the air on Earth.
The lower gravity of Mars,
just 1/3 that of Earth's, means less lift is needed.
But there's one more constraint.
Since no humans would be around,
and since there's a significant lag in communication,
Ingenuity would have to fly autonomously
and take care of itself.
Ingenuity is gonna scout ahead of the rover,
hopefully demonstrating powered flight on another planet,
which would be awesome and cool,
and open up a whole new suite of recognizance.
It'll be a unique moment
in the history of both Mars and Earth.
Mars beckons us knowing that in the deep past
Mars may once have been an Earth-like world.
(gentle sweeping music)
I mean, I think if we find ancient life on Mars,
it really changes everything.
We have suddenly then learned that the universe
does not just have one planet with life,
that it had two.
That's tremendous.
And I think we would immediately continue exploring
to really try to flush out,
what are the implications of that?
Did life on Mars somehow from Earth?
Or is it an independent second genesis of life?
And the answer to that question is really important
because it tells us how rare or how common
life is likely to be in the universe,
which is I think one of the most profound questions of all.
Are we alone?
I don't think so. Probably not.
There are a lot of stars and planets out there,
but finding life on Mars
would be one of the first steps in that direction
to really understanding how much life is out there
in our universe.
In spite of the pandemic,
the challenges of getting to Mars,
and the difficulties with communication,
and the challenges of flying in Martian air,
if we have tenacity and perseverance,
we may soon learn the secrets of the Red Planet
and find out something new and good within ourselves.
(dramatic music)
(suspenseful music)