Brian Cox: Seven Days on Mars

Right now, that rover, Perseverance,

is 200 million miles away, on the surface of Mars.

It's on the floor of Jezero Crater, and it's taking the images

and collecting the samples that might tell us

whether life ever existed on the Red Planet.

Jezero Crater is one of the most important and enigmatic sites

in the solar system.

Around 3.8 billion years ago

it was filled with a lake.

But that lake is long gone.

Mars has become a dry and barren world.

Today, Perseverance and the Ingenuity helicopter

are searching the crater for signs of the life

that may once have lived there.

What they find could transform our understanding of life -

on Earth and throughout the universe.

It is certainly the most audacious mission

ever sent to the surface of another world.

TDL, this is mission. I have you five by five. How read?

I have you five by, as well.

This is a crucial seven days for the rover...

..and I've been given extraordinary access to the Perseverance mission.

I'll be following the rover's every move

as it attempts to travel further and faster than ever before.

Through its cameras,

we'll show you what it's like to stand on...

..and explore the surface of another world.

This week, we'll see the Red Planet

as no-one has seen it before.

This is Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

4,800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, California.

From the 1960s onwards, it's been the control centre

for Nasa's pioneering deep space missions,

and now it's the headquarters for the hundreds of scientists

and engineers who make up the Perseverance team.

JPL is a really special place for me because, way back in 1980,

I wrote to them because I was interested

in the exploration of the planets, and they wrote back!

And this is it.

Imagine the excitement when this brown envelope arrived

from California, filled with images of the solar system,

the moons of Jupiter, and the rings of Saturn.

This is one of the reasons I became a physicist.

Well, now, 40 years later,

I'm actually at JPL because, as I speak,

there is a rover roving across the Martian surface -

the first mission dedicated to the search for life on Mars.

And this week, we have unique access,

not only to Mission Control,

but also to the navigators who are plotting the path

of Perseverance around the boulders

and the mountains of Mars.

And we're also going to see the photographs,

the data come down in real time.

We're going to learn things about Mars that nobody

has ever known before.

Can't wait.

Just over a year ago, the world held its breath

as the Perseverance rover...

..the flagship of the Mars 2020 mission,

made its final approach towards Mars.

After seven years of development

and a six-month journey,

no-one knew if the 2.7 billion dollar rover

would make it safely onto the surface.

Since then, Perseverance has been exploring the area

around its landing site in Jezero Crater,

sending back the most extraordinary images.

With the exception of the occasional animation,

every image of Mars in this programme

has been captured by the cameras on Perseverance,

or the other spacecraft around Mars.

Perseverance's mission is to search for signs of long-extinct life.

What it discovers

could answer one of the great existential questions...

..are we alone in the universe?

This is JPL's Space Flight Operations Facility

or, better, Mission Control.

And this room is iconic for anyone that's into space flight,

because this is the room in which all those dramatic moments

that we all remember happened.

The dive of Cassini into Saturn,

the landing of Curiosity,

and Perseverance on Mars.

They're talking now to the solar system,

anything that's out there.

This is where all the data comes down from the Perseverance Rover.

TDL, this is five by, I have you five by.

I have you five by, as well.

This morning, the crew in Mission Control are waiting

to hear from Perseverance,

which is currently 200 million miles away on the surface of Mars.

To find out how communication works across such vast distances,

I've come to see Rick Welch.

So this room, sometimes, we call the centre of the universe.

This is where all the data comes to this facility

from all our spacecraft out in the solar system.

So you can see up on the screen the different antenna.

We actually have antennas at three locations around the Earth,

which allow us to really look out and see spacecraft, no matter

what planet they happen to be at.

How does that work?

Because Mars is... What is it? About 200 million miles away,

give or take, at the moment.

Right now, as you said, we're about 300 million kilometres away,

and it's probably about 16 minutes to get our signal

all the way to Mars, one way.

So compare that to the moon. It only takes a couple of seconds

for a signal to get back and forth to the moon.

So even when we had astronauts there,

it seemed like we could talk back and forth in real time.

You know, 16 minutes is really too long to do any kind

of real-time communication.

This delay in communication between Earth and Mars

determines so much of how the mission operates.

Because the team are unable to control the rover in real time,

they must compile detailed sets of instructions to send

to Perseverance every day.

So the scientists and engineers here on Earth

spend about eight hours deciding the next things for the rover to do,

and building the commands. We then send that up in the Martian morning.

The rover is on its own to execute those the best it can.

And then we hear back in the Martian afternoon

what actually happened on Mars.

Oh, so that says, "Next UHF two hours."

So is that... is that what that means? That's right.

So we're very interested in getting our downlink today to see

how the rover is doing.

And that will be arriving here in about two hours.

While the crew in Mission Control wait...

..Perseverance is uploading its latest data

to one of several spacecraft in orbit around Mars.

That spacecraft will relay the data back to Earth in two hours' time...

..which gives me time to explore the JPL campus.

JPL is set in a beautiful location in the mountains around Pasadena.

It's about ten miles from Los Angeles.

And there's a reason that it's here,

isolated, because it began life as a rocket test facility.

And the thing about rockets when you're testing them,

is that sometimes they explode.

But in the 1950s, this became the centre of America's exploration

of the solar system and beyond, and the first American satellite,

Explorer 1, was built and controlled from here,

as were all those things I grew up with -

Voyager, Cassini, and now, the latest, Perseverance.

And in here, in the Mars yard, we're going to meet its twin.

This is Optimism.

Engineers like their acronyms, so that actually stands

for Operational Perseverance Twin with the Integration of Mechanisms

and Instruments Sent to Mars.

But it is, in every important way, an exact engineering replica

of Perseverance.

There are a few things missing.

For instance, on Earth, it's not safe for the rover to be powered

by nuclear battery, so instead it's plugged into the mains.

But, for example, it has exactly the same

flight computers as Perseverance.

So if they want to upload new software, then they upload

it to that first, and test it to make sure it works.

And it's quite an imposing thing, isn't it?

It's bigger than I thought.

Weighing over a ton on Earth, and standing just over two metres tall,

the rover is a beast.

And it's packed with instruments designed to scrutinise

the Martian surface.

Among them are 19 cameras, more than any other spacecraft.

Five are mounted at the top of the mast

to give a human-like eye-level view

of the Martian landscape.

Lower down, cameras focus on the area in front of the rover...

..where the robot arm is deployed to study and sample the surface,

looking for signs of life.

In just over a year, the rover's cameras have sent

over 200,000 images back to Earth.

This morning, the latest batch of photos

are just about to arrive at JPL...

..and I'm going to look at them with the leader of the science team,

Ken Farley.

So here we have one of the images that just came down from Mars today,

and it's a great landscape looking off to the north and east

in Jezero Crater.

Yeah. And do you still get excited by the idea that nobody's ever seen

this planet from this angle before? It's completely new data.

How could you not? I mean, this is just...

I love it. This is... Every day, to be able to take in a landscape

like this and be surprised by things that we see.

Still exciting to see it every day.

Can you describe what we're seeing in this image? In the foreground,

you see the area that we've been exploring for most of the last year.

That's the crater floor.

And then the thing that just captures everybody's attention,

including mine, is the delta.

And the delta is very distinctive and it's got a flat top.

You can see the flat top on the left side. Yeah.

That's about 40 metres high.

The delta is the most important feature in Jezero Crater,

and it's the reason Perseverance was sent here.

It was formed at the mouth of a river that flowed into the lake

that once filled the crater.

The delta's layers of sedimentary rock