Roving Mars

Space Exploration, began with dreaming.

Thousands of years of humans staring into the Heaven and wondering...

how did this begin?

What else is out there?

The earliest answers were given in myth and poetry.

Now, they are sought by space-edge technology.

And while each mission increases our knowledge,

it also leads our imagination farther and farther.

How did life begin?

Did it happen more then once in the Universe?

The answer may lie on Mars.

Roving MARS

Mars today is desolate, dry and barren,

and at first glance, has little bit in common with our own Planet.

And yet for more bit

we see what look like dry up lake beads and canyons.

Clues, that 3 or 4 billion years ago,

Mars may once have been wetter and more Earth like.

And since life's blast in here on Earth,

the question is:

Did it ever take place on Mars?

To answer this question, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

brought together a team of scientists and engineers

who's mission was to discover if Mars ever had what was needed to support life.

A geologist and astronomer at Cordell University,

Steve Squyres was chosen to lead the scientists team.

As principal investigator, he will direct the team search

for life's most essential resource: Water.

I've been working on a question of water on Mars for 28 years.

You can't learn what you need from a telescope.

You must be a geologist.

A geologist is here like a detective...

at scene of the crime.

A... something happened here long time ago.

What happened?

Was a warm? Was a wet?

Could life have been existed here?

The key is in the clues and the clues are in the rocks.

On Earth a geologist can find a interesting rock,

cracked open with a hammer and just look of what's inside.

But we're not ready to send a human geologist to Mars yet.

So we had to build a robot geologist.

And the only place this could be done

was the NASA's Jet-Propulsion Laboratory,

where some of the most innovative engineers in the country work.

We're talking about a robot, a rover that can go to Mars

land on the surface,

take a look around and then cut the cord and go.

Carrying everything it needs with it,

cameras, instruments, communication equipment, everything.

Something that can look inside rocks

and that can tell us what clues those rocks hold.

This place to me, is almost sacred.

This is the place where our rovers are assembled for the last time

before they live this Planet.

Everything that we do in this room, must be perfect.

Over 4 thousand people worked on this mission.

For every single piece of this spacecraft down to the tinniest one,

there was a person somewhere who conceive it, who nurture it,

who took it from a concept, to something real.

It's taking this team 3 years to design and build and test this rovers

and we still have work to do.

We can only launch, when the 2 planets are properly aligned

and that's just a month away.

But we still have tests to run.

We're working in shifts, we're working almost around the clock

and we don't know if we gonna make it.

Is no one person who could really get his arms around the whole thing and say:

I understand everything about this vehicle.

It's now burst the balance of our brains.

Well, this rover is... is more than roving geologist,

this rover also has to be... a... a spacecraft.

It actually have to fly itself from Earth to Mars

in addition, it has to do the very subtle and quick timing control,

of whole thinks it happen as it enters and lands the vehicle.

We had to stuffed all that intelligence and capability

into that little six wheels vehicle back there

a... so that it can get there safely on it's own.

I call our spacecraft, "the Origami spacecraft"

which means that's really a complicated series of folds.

We, had to punch holes on the Lander panels for the wheels to stay through.

We had to fold everything in this complicated shapes

to get this system to fit inside this tetrahedron.

It's beautiful, but had a price,

and at that price, in this case is complexity.

There've been missions to Mars since the 60's,

there've been dozens of them.

But 2/3 of those missions failed.

Mars is a spacecraft graveyard.

A spacecraft has to travel about, 300 million miles to get to Mars

at about 60,000 miles/hour.

But it still take 7 months to get there.

Trying to hit our landing side from that distance

is like shooting a basket ball from Los Angeles to New York,

and having it go through the hoop, without touching the rim.

The smallest mistake on our part could put whole mission in jeopardy.

Two of the last 3 missions to Mars were failures.

One spacecraft burned up in the Martian atmosphere,

the other one crushed on the surface.

This time NASA decided to send two identical spacecraft

to double our chances of success.

The two rovers were named: "Spirit" and "Opportunity."

The rovers have very different personality, they did even when they were babies,

back when we were first building them.

Spirit was our troublesome first born.

Every test we run it seems that we run it on Spirit first

and the first time we try something it usually doesn't work.

So, we run this tests on Spirit and they fail

and we try to fix things

and we run another test and that will fail too.

By the time we got to Opportunity, we learned stuff.

But things were much more smoother.

The biggest problem was that, we underestimated the size and weight of the rovers.

Once we realized how big they really had to be,

we also realized that the landing system we planned to use

couldn't get them to the ground in one piece.

As the rover get heavier, the Lander get heavier,

the Lander get heavier, the aero shove get heavier,

the whole thing get heavier and heavier and heavier.

From the very beginning on this mission it seem like nothing was going right.

The air bags were like the air bags on your car but way more expensive.

They inflated explosively around the vehicle and they cushion the landing.

The first time we tested them, they tore open and deflated.

Setbacks we know there are going to happen

I always tell people, when you start this projects...

a... the same thing probably what happened to Lewis and Clark

and captain Cook and their exploration.

A... what is guaranteed, is that there will be setbacks.

This rovers have to land using a supersonic parachute.

The parachute design we tought will work,

rip to shreds.

The lander had gotten so heavy that the chute just couldn't handle it.

We were practically out of time,

and all we had was a chute design that will destroy the spacecraft,

when we try to land.

We had to build a whole another set of new designs,

no less than 3 or 4 designs we had to test in the 3 months that fallowed

in our mad rush to make it to launch-pad.

We're running out of money, we're running out of time.

A... well, I mean the drop was successful

see a... the fact that the parachute exploded,

not a good thing.

Well yea, rather have it happen here than...

- Mars. - Yea.

That's right. Unfortunately, strictly speaking that chute that just exploded

- was the chute that we were planing on taking on Mars. - Yea

Mars is a tough place to send a spacecraft.

The average temperature is 60 degrees below zero.

It goes down to 100 below zero at night.

There could be dust storms to darken the sky for months at a time.

But if the rovers make it,

they'll give us the experience of what it whouldl be like to be on Mars.

We'll be able to look off to the distance and say: Yea! I like to go there!

And then I should say: Go!

And see what we find.

The rovers arm has the same dimensions as human arm,

with the shoulder an elbow and a wrist.

The arm tucks up tight

under the front of vehicle, for when we're driving around.

But when we get to a rock that we want to examine,

the arm, unstows...

and reaches out,

using all of his joints

to place the instruments...

on a rock... and begin the study.

The hand has four fingers.

One is a microscope,

two are spectrometers to tell us in detail what the rock is made off.

And a fourth one is call, "The Rat,"

the rock abrasion tool.

To examine the rocks, we've got to get to them

and Mars is very bumpy.

So, to deal with the bumps, our engineers came up with something called a rocker-boggy suspension system.

It's a very clever design that allows each of the six wheels

to go up and over a rock independently,

while the rover itself, hardly tilts at all.

Ok, come on in guys.

Now, stay clear! Watch it, watch it.

Stay clear of this thing 'cause it's going to move in a second... watch, watch the wheels.

Watch the wheels, watch the wheels...

It goes way beyond this single mission.

The eventual goal is to send humans to Mars.

But the first person to walk on Mars is not an astronaut today.

It's someone in high school, or in elementary school.

So, it's turning in place, then when it gets line up just right, we gonna drive it backwards.

We've invested so much work, so many years,

so much of our hopes and our dreams, in this rovers.

And then when you think about were they're going,

the ride they gonna get on the rocket,

the transit trough the space

what it's gonna be like when they're parachute goes out at Mack-2 going to the Martian's atmosphere?

You standing next to this little robot, and you realize

it's gonna spend eternity on the surface of another World.

It's going to another Planet, for real.

And once they're going, that's it.

After the rovers Launch we'll never going to see them again with our own eyes.

We've done everything we can to prepare them for the dangers they'll have to face.

But it's gonna be very hard to say: Good Bye!

Spirit will be Launched first, then Opportunity three weeks later.

Mars and Earth are both orbiting the Sun so they're always moving relative to each other.