(soft dramatic music)
We are starting the straighten up
and fly right maneuver.
The navigation has confirmed (crowd applauding)
that the parachute has deployed.
Now has radar lock on the ground.
Current velocity is about 100 meters per second.
We have planning of the landing engines
at about 2.6 kilometers from the surface of Mars.
Current speed altitude is about 300 meters
off the surface of Mars.
Skycrane maneuver has started
about 20 meters off the surface.
After traveling nearly 300 million miles,
NASA's Perseverance spacecraft has reached its destination.
Mars.
Tango delta.
Touchdown confirmed.
Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars.
(crowd cheering and applauding)
On February 18th, the rover touched down,
right on target in Jezero Crater,
captured for the first time ever from multiple cameras.
Kicking up little wisps of dust,
you can see these little dust plumes.
Those images that bring us in
to the process of our exploration.
The science team and the world
wait for seven long minutes for the confirmation signal.
Vehicle's going on a rollercoaster ride and you are too.
(soft dramatic music continues)
We're trying to land the biggest, heaviest,
and most complex rover we've ever built
at the most dangerous landing site we've ever attempted.
You have to be constantly terrified.
You have to respect it.
The same time, you have to somehow believe
that you can do it or else you'd never try
to put a car on the surface of Mars.
It's crazy.
The Perseverance Mission
has traveled all this way in search of signs
that life existed here long ago.
Being able to go to Mars and actually collect a sample
and carry it all the way back here,
this will be incredibly important
to help us answer questions about
whether or not life actually existed on Mars
3.5 billion years ago.
If we find ancient life on Mars,
it really changes everything.
(soft dramatic music continues)
(soft ethereal music)
(wind howling)
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.
(rocket blasting) And lift off.
The Perseverance rover began its journey
July 20th, 2020, atop an Atlas rocket.
And mach one, 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 aligned.
Earth is closer to the Sun
and Mars takes nearly two Earth years
to make a full circuit.
(soft upbeat music)
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.
(soft pulsing music)
Perseverance is not the first rover
to explore Mars.
There've 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 lot of 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 for future human exploration.
(loud whooshing)
The Pathfinder Mission is the first.
It lands in a cocoon of airbags in 1997.
It's 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 last 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.
(soft upbeat music)
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 have 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 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 4 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?
(soft upbeat music)
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 test 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, you know, what each individual sand grain
has to tell us about Mars and its evolution.
But first the rover has to get there.
(soft dramatic music)
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 enters the Martian atmosphere
and attempts to land in one piece.
Actually, a sound landing is all about getting the vehicle
from the top of the atmosphere down to the bottom safely.
And we hit the atmosphere going, you know,
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.
(spacecraft crackling)
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.
(parachute whooshing)
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 Skycrane.
It takes over the landing and fires its engines.
As it descends under its parachute,
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.
Perseverance will be the first mission
to use terrain relative navigation.
So while it's descending on the parachute,
it will actually be taking images of the surface of Mars
and determining where to go based on what it sees.
This is finally like landing with your eyes open.
Having this new technology really allows Perseverance
to land in much more challenging terrain
than Curiosity or any previous Mars mission could.
If the rover is descending
toward dangerous ground, it can change direction
and move towards a safer place to land.
This time, Perseverance is carrying a camera
to take pictures
but also a kind of second brain to help it figure out
what those pictures are telling it
and match it up with an onboard map from a satellite.
That allows it to figure out exactly where she is.
She can then fly to safe spots that are nearby.
Here in safety bravo.
We have completed
our terrain relative navigation
about 300 meters off the surface of Mars.
It slows, hovers, and then lowers via Skycrane.
Skycrane maneuver has started.
The rover on the edge of this tether.
When contact is sensed with the ground,
the 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.
Tango delta.
Touchdown confirmed.
Perseverance is safely on the surface of Mars.
(crowd cheering and applauding)
Ready to begin seeking the signs of past life.
(soft orchestral music)
For a few minutes,
the spacecraft will not be able to communicate with Earth.
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 there.
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.
We're trying to land the biggest, heaviest,
and most complex rover we've ever built
at the most dangerous landing site we've ever attempted.
It's absolutely treacherous for landing.
And there are rocks to the east.
That would be a bad day for us if we were to land on them.
Amongst the rocks and the craters and the cliffs,
these things are hazardous to the rover,
but these are the things that are interesting
to the scientists.
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.
Thus far, all instrument checks
have passed with flying colors
from its first test drive, to the robotics, and cameras.
Kicking up little wisps of dust,
you can see these little dust plumes.
Those images that bring us in
to the process of our exploration.
And with two microphones on board,
the world has now heard the first gust of wind
from the red planet.
(wind buzzing)
(air whooshing)
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 buzzing)
A drill shares the turret
with the scientific instruments.
The drill bores holes and extracts core samples.
(drill buzzing)
This is a system that allows us
to take core samples of rock material 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 cash
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 cash
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.
(air whooshing)
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
(soft relaxing music)
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 navcams used for autonomous navigation.
Temperatures are well within our limits
so we're ready to go.
We're 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, you know, 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.
(Rover buzzing)
What's special though, about the Mastcam cameras,
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, you know, when chemistry and mineralogy
are changing in the rocks.
(soft orchestral music)
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.
Ingenuity Mars helicopter is finally at the destination
that it is designed for.
Soon, the rover will deploy
this experimental new craft.
Next major milestone will be
when the rover deploys the helicopter to the surface.
And that marks the first moment that Ingenuity
operates on its own in a standalone manner.
And if the first flight is successful,
we have up to four more flights.
The helicopter has a camera, has two rotors,
and we're hoping to prove out this new technology
that we can fly the other spacecraft on Mars.
(Ingenuity buzzing)
Collecting pictures from above.
(camera snapping)
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 1/3 that of Earth's, meaning less lift is needed.
(soft cheerful music)
(helicopter whirring)
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.
(helicopter whirring)
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 inches 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, you know,
because they'll always 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.
(Ingenuity buzzing)
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.
As importantly, being able to fly
will enable us to get to places that we cannot get to
with rovers and astronauts,
like sides of steep cliffs, deep inside crevices,
areas of high scientific interest.
It will be game-changing.
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.
(wind howling)
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 upbeat music)
In spite of the pandemic, the challenges of getting to Mars,
communicating with Earth, flying in Martian air,
gives a whole new meaning to Perseverance.
These are complex systems put together in a way
that we can operate a vehicle,
that we can build software that makes that vehicle work.
And doing all of that remotely without as much interaction
has been hard for the team.
I worked from my laundry room for the last several months.
People say they can't hear me because the washer's going.
I mean, everybody has these challenges
that are going on because this is not the way
we typically would design a Mars mission.
I think it has changed how we think about the problem.
I know this hasn't been easy.
I'm not even sure we've even been all in the same room
at the same time.
You've done everything we've asked for.
I mean, you've battled anomalies, you've done everything.
You delivered a healthy spacecraft.
Boy, you couldn't have named this thing any better
since we've had to deal with the pandemic.
And as I said before, you know, 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 a determination to deal with whatever came your way.
And I think that's the definition of Perseverance, right?
It represents a huge human lift to make this happen.
That image and the details therein
really pull us humans here on Earth
into the result of all of that hard work.
The mission is scheduled
to last at least one Martian year, about 687 Earth days.
Ingenuity and Perseverance are sure to inspire
with ongoing science, sights, and sounds from Mars.
Knowing that in the deep past,
Mars may have once been an Earth lake world
only increases the anticipation
of one day bringing samples back to Earth
that could finally reveal the mysteries of the red planet.
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.
(soft victorious music)
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.
(dramatic orchestral music)
(camera snapping)
With Ingenuity and Perseverance,
we may soon unlock the secrets of the red planet
and a glimpse into our future.
(dramatic orchestral music continues)