Mark Rober's CrunchLabs

If you look behind me, you'll see the center of the universe.

It's called the center of the universe

because that's NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

All of the orbiters, probes, and spacecraft

we've sent out into the solar system and beyond

send all their signals right back here to be processed.

That will never be more apparent than in a few days

when the next Mars rover, Perseverance,

concludes its seven-month journey to our neighboring red planet, Mars.

Autonomously navigating itself for a terrifying seven minutes,

traveling from 15 times the speed of a bullet

to a gentle three-miles-per-hour touchdown,

while live-streaming the key data the whole way.

As many of you know, for me, this is like coming home.

Long before I started making YouTube videos,

I came here to work every day for nine years,

seven of which were working on the last rover we sent to Mars, Curiosity.

Today, we're gonna talk to some of my old friends

and see the actual rover up close

as I bring you up to speed on everything about this rover landing.

Once you have an overview of what's gonna happen

and what it took to get us to this point,

I feel certain you're gonna feel just as pumped

about this historic landing as I am.

We're gonna talk about

the who, what, why, where, and how of this rover.

We'll start with the why and the where we're going.

3.5 billion years ago, Earth and Mars were pretty similar.

Both had liquid water on the surface

and both were protected from the sun's radiation with magnetic fields.

So it begs the question, if life first developed on Earth at that time,

could it have also developed on Mars?

This is a massive lake in Jezero Crater billions of years ago.

And this is it now.

This is where Perseverance is landing.

The bottom of an ancient lake the size of Lake Tahoe.

Using Earth as a guide, at the base of a river of fresh water

is where we have the best chance

of finding evidence of past biological life on Mars.

Thanks to Perseverance, we could be on the verge

of the monumental first discovery of actual life outside our planet.

Being able to pinpoint a landing spot this tight

shows how NASA is constantly advancing its technologies.

With Florida for scale,

here's an oval showing the uncertainty of the landing spot

for previous missions Pathfinder in 1997,

and then Phoenix in 2008, Curiosity in 2012,

and now Perseverance.

Being able to shrink a landing target gives you more options of places to land.

Plus, once you do land and start driving towards the actual science location,

it could shave off a year or more of drive time.

Not only does studying Mars help us understand Earth's past and future,

but the rovers are advance scouts,

taking data and notes for us on the ground and sending all the info back to Earth.

They're also testing new technologies that humans will need to use

when we're exploring the planet ourselves in the very near future.

Because the first person to set foot on Mars is alive right now.

And it could be you.

And if you're like, "But, Mark,

why would we spend resources and time exploring the solar system

when we have big issues here on Earth we haven't solved?"

I tackle that question,

giving five reasons we can't afford not to invest in space

in another video you can watch after this one.

So that's the where and the why.

Let's talk about how we're going to do that.

This is where it gets really wild.

Meet Perseverance.

I should mention, I have my monthly videos planned out about a year in advance,

which is why exactly this time last year,

I knew I needed to fly down to check out the rover

before it got shipped off to Florida to be launched.

Before I checked out the rover,

I stopped in to see Ben, who was my old boss.

He was leading a small team

that designed the jetpack that lowered the rover to the ground.

Now I heard he's all fancy, in charge of 400 people.

I wanted to get a sense of how things had changed for him.

So anyone we see walk by, you can, like, boss them around?

This guy? You can boss him around?

- Yeah, I can boss him around. - Okay, cool. Go on.

We first geeked out for a bit over parts from previous space missions.

A hardware wall like this is a great illustration

of what makes JPL such a cool place to work.

Actually, I designed this.

This is my hardware from GRAIL with Andy.

This was cool 'cause you got these flexures for temperature variation.

This isn't just for show.

When you're figuring out a way to do things,

these are examples of how it's been done before.

A lot are examples of the way you shouldn't do it.

- That's why my-- - That's why your hardware's up there.

We headed down to check out the rover and meet my friend Emily,

but before we could see it, we had to get suited up

because the rover is looking for signs of biological life.

We don't wanna contaminate our samples before we even arrive.

So a bunny suit and air shower can go a long way.

Emily was the vehicle-assembly lead for the descent and cruise stages,

which is a big responsibility.

This is the rover.

The flight rover. It will be on Mars 12 months from now.

It's so complex when you come up and get this close.

Perseverance is the most complex thing

humans have ever built and sent to another planet.

It's got laser, X-ray, and radar capabilities,

plus 19 cameras and a nuclear-powered battery system for energy.

While it might look similar to the past rover, Curiosity,

the science instruments are different because the objectives have changed.

The most notable difference is

the drill isn't there just to create rock dust to study on the rover.

Perseverance has a hollow drill bit

to core out a chunk of rock the size of a piece of chalk

and then package it up and leave behind 43 separate samples

for a future mission to collect and send back to Earth.

That way, we could study the samples for those past signs of life

using state-of-the-art instruments that we could never fit on a rover.

To capture that chalk-size rock sample,

not only is there an arm on the outside, but there's one on the inside too.

It is a miniature robot arm inside the body of the rover

that manipulates the sample tube.

- There's one right here. - Wow.

- So is this what you leave behind? - Exactly.

- This is, like, the poop of the rover? - Exactly.

Okay. Do you like that analogy? They didn't like it earlier.

- Yeah. - You like it? Okay, cool.

We like to say the rover's gonna poop out samples.

Okay, good. See? That's a good analogy.

Perseverance is only the first leg of returning a piece of Mars to Earth.

Future missions will complete what I call the "poop, scoop, and shoot" maneuver.

This is my friend Liz.

She's in charge of testing for the sample-retrieval system.

We're doing things that nobody else does, so we have to test it.

She tests different configurations

in a chamber that recreates the extreme temperatures and pressures

to make sure it will function on Mars.

'Cause once you send something to space, it's gone, and you can't exactly fix it.

So it just has to work,

which is why testing is such a big deal here at JPL.

My buddy Matt mentioned another way this is done.

We build two spacecraft. One goes to Mars. One we keep to test.