(uneasy music)
After traveling nearly 300 million miles
at warp speed, (thrusters firing)
NASA's Perseverance spacecraft is closing in on its target:
Mars.
If all goes well, this roving space lab
and the first ever Martian helicopter
will touch down on the red planet on February 18th,
but not before facing the riskiest part of the mission:
a fiery entry,
a harrowing high-wire act landing,
and seven long minutes of silence.
The rover will have landed or it will have crashed,
and we will not know until that signal gets back.
One way or another,
you're going to be on the ground in seven minutes.
In search of signs
that life once existed here long ago.
Are we alone?
I don't think so.
If we find ancient life on Mars,
it really changes everything.
Perseverance: Countdown to Impact.
(wind whistling)
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.
Four, engine ignition.
Two.
One.
Zero.
And liftoff.
The Perseverance rover
began its journey seven months ago
when it was launched atop an Atlas V rocket
July 30th, 2020, bound for Mars.
And Mach 1; Atlas V is now supersonic.
Making the launch window was fortuitous.
We always launch it at the optimal time
where Earth and Mars are positioned just right
to make that journey as short as possible.
Earth and Mars orbits are elliptical
and rarely align.
Earth is closer to the sun,
and Mars takes nearly two Earth years
to make a full circuit.
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.
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.
Perseverance is not the first rover
to explore Mars.
There have been four previous missions,
which have sent back amazing data and imagery to Earth.
Everybody knows the story of how we landed on the moon
and the first steps on the moon,
but a lotta people don't understand
that there were robotic precursors to those Apollo missions,
and they were very critical in paving the way
for taking technologies to Mars
and improving those technologies that are important
for that future human exploration.
(balloons inflating)
The Pathfinder mission is the first.
It lands in a cocoon of airbags in 1997.
Its rover, Sojourner,
is named after Civil War abolitionist Sojourner Truth.
Its primary mission is to prove
we can send robotic explorers to Mars safely.
This first rover mission lasts 83 days.
Twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity are next.
These robotic geologists make a startling discovery:
minerals that form only in the presence of water.
The news headline captures the world's attention.
Mars was once a water planet like Earth.
Curiosity, the largest rover, lands on Mars in 2012
and is still exploring Gale's Crater,
searching for evidence of microbial life.
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 key ingredients for the recipe of life
are water, sunlight, and certain organic compounds
like carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen.
The revelation about Martian water
gives new credibility to age-old questions.
Before Spirit and Opportunity,
the mantra was, "Follow the water,"
and now we've been able to move beyond that.
So, now, instead of just following the water,
trying to understand what was the chemistry of the water.
Was that water something that could've given rise to life?
Why did the environment change so much on Mars
that we once had liquid water and we don't anymore?
And Perseverance may just help
answer these questions,
as long as the carefully-chosen landing site
hosted water 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 crater 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 life
because we already know that Jezero has rocks and minerals
that could only form in water.
The Jezero Crater site, if you look at it from space,
is pretty obviously a delta.
We think that Mars was habitable
about four billion years ago.
So, the question is not just where was that life on Mars,
but also where could it be preserved
for four more billion years for us to find it later?
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.
The dress rehearsal: a dry lake bed in Death Valley
and geologic study in Australia,
places that share an uncanny similarity
to Martian geologic history.
One of the most exciting things about the rocks
that we'll be exploring on Mars is that they date back
to a period where we have the first evidence
of fossil life on earth, so about 3.5 billion years ago.
These are exactly the age of the rocks
that we'll have accessible to us in Jezero.
This is where the science team examines geology
and tests their instruments.
This rock is a sandstone, not unlike a rock
that we might actually find in Jezero Crater.
We would be interested in sampling a rock like this
to understand what each individual sand grain has to tell us
about Mars and its evolution.
But first, the rover must get there safely.
When Perseverance makes its final approach for landing,
the most dangerous part of the mission begins: EDL,
or entry, descent, and landing.
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.
This is when the spacecraft
and its protective aeroshell
will attempt to enter the Martian atmosphere
and perform a groundbreaking high-wire act landing.
Entry, descent, and landing
is all about getting the vehicle
from the top of the atmosphere down to the bottom safely.
We hit the atmosphere going 12-13,000 miles per hour.
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.
Friction from the air burns the heat shield,
with temperatures reaching 3,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
So, it's 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 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 under its parachute,
the rover takes pictures of the ground.
Its 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 it sees from the cataloged photos.
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 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 will not be able to communicate with Earth.
But 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.
For the science and engineering team,
comprised of hundreds of people, over a decade of work
comes down to seven nail-biting minutes.
A lot of things have to go right
in a space mission to get your spacecraft to Mars.
One way or another,
you're going to be on the ground in seven minutes.
All we can do is cross our fingers,
hope for the best, and cheer on the crew
that's making the launch happen.
Perseverance is armed
with a battery of seven instruments and 23 cameras
that address questions about life in the past,
in the present, and the future.
And with two microphones onboard,
we will actually hear the first true sounds of Mars.
(wind whistling)
For the first time,
we're gonna have that human sense on another planet.
We've never really heard our environment on Mars,
and I think it's gonna be exciting
to hear the entry, descent, and landing,
the wheels turning on the surface of Mars.
The rover will identify chemical elements
in the Martian soil, as well as organics and minerals
that may be signs of past microbial life.
The latest in camera technology
can capture features as small as a grain of salt.
The Mars 2020 instruments are really well-suited
to look for things that we call biosignatures,
which are signs that ancient life
might've been there in the past.
If something ever lived here,
Perseverance can find evidence of it.
You can't prove it until you actually can get down
and get your nose in the dirt.
(drill whirring)
A drill shares the turret
with the scientific instruments.
The drill bores holes and extracts core samples.
This is a system that allows us to take core samples
of rocky material on the surface of Mars,
carefully seal them in very sterile, clean vessels
for eventual return to Earth.
Once the sample is collected,
Perseverance stores 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.
Here, the samples are hermetically sealed.
No contaminants from the rover will ever enter the tubes,
and nothing can escape them.
And in a mission first, these collection tubes
will be the cleanest ever sent into space
to ensure whatever microbes come back
are Martian and not from Earth.
The last thing NASA scientists want to do
is contaminate Mars.
And at some point 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 cash
and bring the samples back to Earth.
This makes Perseverance part one 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 back from Mars.
The array of cameras on Perseverance
serve a multitude of purposes.
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 Mastcam-Z is used for long-distance driving
and infrared science,
and the nav cams used for autonomous navigation.
Temperatures are well within our limits,
so we're ready to go.
We are going to come up and do Mastcam.
The cameras work the same way as human eyes,
giving us a stereoscopic view of the landscape.
Mastcam-Z is effectively our eyes on Mars
in terms of recon and assessing what the terrain is doing.
The 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 camera
is that in addition to imaging invisible light,
they 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's extensive camera package
are not the only eyes on the mission.
Probably the most exciting experiment of all
is Perseverance's companion, dubbed Ingenuity,
the first ever Martian helicopter.
Within 30 days of landing,
the rover will deploy an experimental new craft.
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 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,
collecting pictures from above.
(camera shutter snapping)
From day one, this was the unwavering dream of our team,
to get our helicopter launched to Mars
so that we can get the opportunity
to do the first rotarcraft flight test
in the actual environment of Mars.
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.
And Mars has a much lower gravity,
just one-third that of Earth's, meaning less lift is needed.
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.
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's 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.
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 all just look cool.
But there's one more challenge.
With no human assistance and a lag in communication,
Ingenuity will have to fly on its own, autonomously.
(spacecraft humming)
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 reconnaissance.
The rover not only sees like a human,
it's designed to test new tools
for future human exploration.
Mounted on the body of the rover
is the Mars Oxygen In-Situ 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.
If we make some of our supplies in situ,
rather than bringing everything from Earth,
then we can reduce the cost of a human mission to Mars,
paving the way for future missions.
But MOXIE's not the last engineering test
Perseverance has in store.
The rover has a weather station
that'll keep track of wind, humidity,
dust levels, and temperature.
By studying the ways dust and water ice
interact with solar radiation,
this weather station analyzes conditions on the ground
that help predict the weather on Mars.
Perseverance also has sample fabric swatches
mounted on one of its instruments,
a critical test to see which fabrics hold up
in the harsh Martian environment so that NASA can develop
the safest spacesuits for future human explorers.
Thanks to Perseverance,
future explorers will wear the outfit
best suited for prevailing weather conditions.
(soft piano music)
In spite of a pandemic, the challenges of getting to Mars,
communicating with Earth, flying in Martian air,
gives a whole new meaning to perseverance.
Boy, you couldn't have named this thing any better,
(laughing) since we've had to deal with the pandemic.
And as I said before,
when it hit,
it was kind of like walking into a dark blind alley;
you just didn't know what was out there in front of you.
And so, it took some faith
to go forward and the determination
to deal with whatever came your way.
And I think that's the definition of perseverance, right?
Mars beckons us, knowing that in the deep past,
Mars may have once been an Earth-like world.
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!
What are the implications of that?
Did life on Mars somehow come from Earth
or is it an independent second genesis of life?
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.
(reverent orchestral music)
With Ingenuity and Perseverance,
we may soon unlock the secrets of the red planet
and a glimpse into our future.