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It's a physical quest, it's a spiritual quest, | 0:00:06 | 0:00:10 | |
it's a reach out there for what our place is in the universe. | 0:00:10 | 0:00:14 | |
When I joined NASA, I was going to Mars. | 0:00:14 | 0:00:17 | |
I was not just dreaming, I was going to Mars. | 0:00:17 | 0:00:21 | |
Mars has captured our imagination more than any other planet, and that's for one reason above all - | 0:00:41 | 0:00:45 | |
the hope, the possibility that there may be life on Mars. | 0:00:45 | 0:00:49 | |
This idea is so enticing that we've long wanted to go there. | 0:00:49 | 0:00:53 | |
We've even imagine Martians coming to earth and invading us. | 0:00:53 | 0:00:56 | |
For 40 years, we've been able to address the question | 0:00:56 | 0:00:59 | |
of whether or not there's life on Mars through science, | 0:00:59 | 0:01:02 | |
and the BBC has been there for every revelation. | 0:01:02 | 0:01:05 | |
From the first tantalising images of the surface... | 0:01:05 | 0:01:09 | |
We've just had some amazing photographs sent back | 0:01:09 | 0:01:11 | |
by the American probe to Mars, Mariner 6. | 0:01:11 | 0:01:14 | |
You can see there some of the dark areas, which may be vegetation, | 0:01:14 | 0:01:17 | |
and at the bottom you can see the white polar cap, which has always | 0:01:17 | 0:01:20 | |
been thought to be due to some kind of icy or frosty deposit. | 0:01:20 | 0:01:24 | |
..to the excitements of a successful landing. | 0:01:25 | 0:01:28 | |
The stakes are high when only half of missions make it. | 0:01:28 | 0:01:32 | |
Now it looks after all as if the Beagle may have crash-landed. | 0:01:35 | 0:01:40 | |
When the first evidence of life on Mars filled our screens, | 0:01:40 | 0:01:43 | |
it seemed possible that we were no longer alone in the universe. | 0:01:43 | 0:01:46 | |
It had 10 to 12 segments in it | 0:01:46 | 0:01:48 | |
and appeared to have a head and appeared to have a tail. | 0:01:48 | 0:01:53 | |
Horizon and the BBC have followed the hopes and dreams of astronomers | 0:01:53 | 0:01:57 | |
as they explore the red planet and its mysteries, | 0:01:57 | 0:02:00 | |
and bring us closer than ever to finding life on Mars. | 0:02:00 | 0:02:04 | |
Mars is the planet in our solar system that's most like Earth. | 0:02:17 | 0:02:21 | |
It has days and seasons. It's covered in valleys and volcanoes. | 0:02:21 | 0:02:26 | |
There's even evidence that water once flowed across the surface. | 0:02:26 | 0:02:30 | |
We've seen it up close, in photographs, | 0:02:30 | 0:02:32 | |
and decades of exploration | 0:02:32 | 0:02:34 | |
means we now understand much | 0:02:34 | 0:02:36 | |
about the geology, atmosphere and geography of the Red Planet. | 0:02:36 | 0:02:40 | |
But our fascination with it | 0:02:40 | 0:02:42 | |
really comes down to the one question that remains unanswered. | 0:02:42 | 0:02:46 | |
If Mars is like Earth, then has there ever been life on Mars too? | 0:02:46 | 0:02:50 | |
Finding evidence of life on Mars is a tantalising prospect for us all. | 0:02:56 | 0:03:00 | |
Proof would show that this is not a miracle unique to Earth. | 0:03:00 | 0:03:04 | |
And if it happened twice in our solar system then the universe must be teeming with life. | 0:03:04 | 0:03:09 | |
The idea of life on Mars is as old as the observatories themselves. | 0:03:11 | 0:03:17 | |
By the late 1800s, telescopes have become powerful enough | 0:03:17 | 0:03:20 | |
for astronomers to map the surface of Mars. | 0:03:20 | 0:03:23 | |
They observed light and dark patches | 0:03:24 | 0:03:27 | |
and thought these could be seas and forests. | 0:03:27 | 0:03:29 | |
Some astronomers, like Percival Lowell, even believed that | 0:03:30 | 0:03:34 | |
they'd seen canals on the surface, built by intelligent life. | 0:03:34 | 0:03:38 | |
That Mars is inhabited by beings of some sort or other | 0:03:38 | 0:03:41 | |
we may consider as certain as it is uncertain what those beings may be. | 0:03:41 | 0:03:47 | |
From childhood, we have been fascinated by what Martian life might look like. | 0:03:48 | 0:03:52 | |
DISTORTED ROAR | 0:03:52 | 0:03:54 | |
Something is happening to the children of Mars. | 0:03:54 | 0:03:58 | |
Timar, as leader of the Martians you must do something about it. | 0:03:58 | 0:04:02 | |
I know. But what? | 0:04:04 | 0:04:06 | |
Astronomers at NASA also imagined what life on the Red Planet might be like. | 0:04:16 | 0:04:21 | |
But once they applied science their ideas were quite different. | 0:04:21 | 0:04:25 | |
On Mars, deadly ultraviolet radiation from the sun | 0:04:25 | 0:04:29 | |
penetrates to the surface. | 0:04:29 | 0:04:32 | |
Life forms on Mars may have silica shells | 0:04:32 | 0:04:34 | |
to protect them against this radiation. | 0:04:34 | 0:04:37 | |
We know that Mars is very dry. | 0:04:37 | 0:04:40 | |
Life forms on Mars may have developed special ways of preserving their water content. | 0:04:40 | 0:04:46 | |
There may be a kind of plant, an ice-eater, | 0:04:46 | 0:04:49 | |
with fine, root-like probes, | 0:04:49 | 0:04:52 | |
searching, not for liquid water, | 0:04:52 | 0:04:54 | |
but searching the permafrost, reaching down to get at that ice. | 0:04:54 | 0:04:59 | |
For Horizon, these imaginings were a step too far. | 0:04:59 | 0:05:02 | |
Other scientists had something smaller in mind. | 0:05:02 | 0:05:06 | |
The biologists were more sceptical. | 0:05:06 | 0:05:08 | |
But they'd already begun to design experiments to test the possibility | 0:05:08 | 0:05:11 | |
that micro-organisms may have survived on Mars. | 0:05:11 | 0:05:15 | |
One theory was that they were dormant and that a cocktail of nutrients would awaken them into life. | 0:05:17 | 0:05:22 | |
Another experiment did imagine that plant-like cells | 0:05:27 | 0:05:31 | |
had adapted to the harsh ultraviolet light on the planet | 0:05:31 | 0:05:34 | |
and might still survive. | 0:05:34 | 0:05:36 | |
But even these ideas about life on Mars were guesswork. | 0:05:37 | 0:05:41 | |
To truly understand what it might be like, we needed to find out more about the planet itself. | 0:05:41 | 0:05:46 | |
Yet the most sophisticated telescopes couldn't show astronomers | 0:05:46 | 0:05:49 | |
much about the surface or atmosphere. | 0:05:49 | 0:05:52 | |
It was just too far away. | 0:05:52 | 0:05:54 | |
They had to get closer, and that meant going into space. | 0:05:54 | 0:05:58 | |
By 1959, an unmanned spacecraft had successfully reached the moon. | 0:06:00 | 0:06:04 | |
But Mars is over a thousand times further away. | 0:06:04 | 0:06:08 | |
Getting to the Red Planet | 0:06:08 | 0:06:10 | |
would mean pushing current technology to the limit. | 0:06:10 | 0:06:14 | |
It is difficult to overstate the extraordinary challenge involved in getting to Mars. | 0:06:14 | 0:06:18 | |
The moon is only 380,000 kilometres away, but takes nearly three days | 0:06:18 | 0:06:23 | |
travelling at speeds of up to 40,000 kilometres an hour to reach. | 0:06:23 | 0:06:27 | |
And missions to Mars make these journeys appear pale in comparison. | 0:06:27 | 0:06:31 | |
With 450 million kilometres to cross and round trips of more than a year, | 0:06:31 | 0:06:35 | |
tiny errors in navigation are going to leave you literally lost in space. | 0:06:35 | 0:06:40 | |
And these aren't the only risks. Space is fraught with hazards. | 0:06:40 | 0:06:43 | |
Hard vacuum, solar flares, radiation, searing heat, freezing cold, | 0:06:43 | 0:06:47 | |
all of which can destroy your spacecraft or its delicate electronics. | 0:06:47 | 0:06:52 | |
If anyone was going to be able to solve the problems of getting to Mars, | 0:06:52 | 0:06:56 | |
it would be the trail-blazing team at the jet propulsion laboratory, | 0:06:56 | 0:07:00 | |
who'd been testing and firing rockets since the 1930s. | 0:07:00 | 0:07:03 | |
Caltech's jet propulsion laboratory, | 0:07:11 | 0:07:13 | |
the oldest continuous rocket and missile activity in the Western world. | 0:07:13 | 0:07:17 | |
In this chamber, the spacecraft was subjected to a full spectrum of light | 0:07:21 | 0:07:26 | |
as intense as the sun's in an environment 300 degrees below zero. | 0:07:26 | 0:07:32 | |
Here, a technician in protective clothing measures the light intensity. | 0:07:32 | 0:07:36 | |
Then, in 1964, Mariner 4 was finally ready to launch. | 0:07:38 | 0:07:43 | |
Horizon took a look behind the scenes. | 0:07:43 | 0:07:46 | |
While the first man was orbiting the Earth, a spacecraft was being assembled to go to Mars. | 0:07:47 | 0:07:52 | |
Named Mariner 4, it carried a television camera to transmit live pictures back to earth. | 0:07:52 | 0:07:57 | |
In November '64 it was launched. | 0:07:57 | 0:08:00 | |
It was a shot in the dark. | 0:08:02 | 0:08:04 | |
The best maps available to the space scientists | 0:08:04 | 0:08:07 | |
were basically 19th-century, rough and ill-defined. | 0:08:07 | 0:08:11 | |
And yet the journey required incredible precision. | 0:08:11 | 0:08:13 | |
Mariner 4, travelling more than a million miles a day, | 0:08:13 | 0:08:17 | |
would take eight months to reach the planet, | 0:08:17 | 0:08:19 | |
and sweep by only a few thousand miles above the surface. | 0:08:19 | 0:08:23 | |
And on July 14th they made it. | 0:08:23 | 0:08:26 | |
CHEERING | 0:08:26 | 0:08:27 | |
As Mariner 4 swept past Mars, its black and white television camera | 0:08:30 | 0:08:34 | |
snapped 22 close-up pictures of the planet. | 0:08:34 | 0:08:37 | |
These images, the first-ever digital television pictures, were stored | 0:08:39 | 0:08:43 | |
on a tape recorder. Then they had to be radioed back to Earth. | 0:08:43 | 0:08:48 | |
Would you believe that our bitrates in those days were quite low? | 0:08:48 | 0:08:51 | |
I think it was 8.3 bits per second, | 0:08:51 | 0:08:54 | |
a little faster than a pretty good telegrapher can do dots and dashes. | 0:08:54 | 0:08:58 | |
So the eight bits per second came from Mars, from the spacecraft, | 0:08:58 | 0:09:02 | |
to the big antenna out in Goldstone antenna range. | 0:09:02 | 0:09:07 | |
And they were actually teletyped back | 0:09:08 | 0:09:10 | |
and they came in as little strips of zeros and ones. Incredible. | 0:09:10 | 0:09:14 | |
Yuri Van der Wood is keeper of JPL's planetary image archive. | 0:09:15 | 0:09:20 | |
Just outside the office, you will see that here are these little strips. | 0:09:20 | 0:09:25 | |
And you can see the groups of numbers | 0:09:25 | 0:09:29 | |
that indicate the strength of the return signal in light and dark. | 0:09:29 | 0:09:35 | |
As fast as we could staple these little strips on and we could colour them in, we started to see a picture. | 0:09:35 | 0:09:43 | |
Mariner's first picture shows the lower edge of Mars, | 0:09:45 | 0:09:48 | |
with the planet in the top of the frame and the black of space below. | 0:09:48 | 0:09:53 | |
To the old-timers particularly, it is a thing of tremendous value. | 0:09:53 | 0:09:58 | |
I would almost say I burn candles here at night, you know! | 0:09:58 | 0:10:02 | |
All the frames as we got them had about as much texture, | 0:10:02 | 0:10:05 | |
seemingly, to the eye, as this, | 0:10:05 | 0:10:07 | |
when you just made a Polaroid off the screen. | 0:10:07 | 0:10:10 | |
But since they were digital, they were computer numbers, we could subtract, and that's what we did. | 0:10:10 | 0:10:15 | |
But when the images were analysed the dream of finding life on Mars seemed remote. | 0:10:21 | 0:10:25 | |
Three centuries of exploration | 0:10:25 | 0:10:28 | |
overturned by a handful of fuzzy pictures. | 0:10:28 | 0:10:31 | |
Mars wasn't at all like the earth. | 0:10:31 | 0:10:33 | |
It seemed dead, like the moon. | 0:10:33 | 0:10:35 | |
The scientists, I think, | 0:10:37 | 0:10:38 | |
were shocked by seeing large, lunar-like craters. | 0:10:38 | 0:10:41 | |
The reason is that the craters on the moon had to have formed | 0:10:41 | 0:10:46 | |
very long ago, the very, very large ones. | 0:10:46 | 0:10:49 | |
And likewise on Mars. | 0:10:49 | 0:10:51 | |
And to find them still preserved there meant that the planet had not | 0:10:51 | 0:10:56 | |
recycled its surface the way the earth does. | 0:10:56 | 0:10:59 | |
There must have been no rainfall, no weathering, | 0:10:59 | 0:11:02 | |
no transport in any way comparable to that of the Earth for billions of years | 0:11:02 | 0:11:07 | |
in order for Mars now, or even parts of it, to resemble the moon. | 0:11:07 | 0:11:11 | |
In 1969, they tried again, | 0:11:16 | 0:11:18 | |
sending two spacecraft with more powerful cameras. | 0:11:18 | 0:11:23 | |
Scientists were hopeful that, although Mars looked like the moon from a distance, | 0:11:23 | 0:11:27 | |
close-up pictures from Mariner 6 might reveal something unexpected. | 0:11:27 | 0:11:31 | |
We've just had some amazing photographs sent back by the American probe to Mars, Mariner 6. | 0:11:31 | 0:11:36 | |
And just look at that! | 0:11:36 | 0:11:37 | |
Craters on Mars, very similar to those of the moon. | 0:11:37 | 0:11:41 | |
And the largest crater on that picture is about 160 miles across. | 0:11:41 | 0:11:45 | |
And remember, when Mariner took that picture, it was only about as far | 0:11:45 | 0:11:48 | |
from the surface of Mars as we are from Moscow. | 0:11:48 | 0:11:52 | |
And I wonder how those craters got there. What are they? | 0:11:52 | 0:11:54 | |
Are they due to things hitting Mars or are they volcanic? | 0:11:54 | 0:11:58 | |
I believe myself that most of them are likely to be volcanic. | 0:11:58 | 0:12:01 | |
It was Mars' geology that got space scientists really excited. | 0:12:01 | 0:12:05 | |
And there was still a hope that, despite appearances, | 0:12:05 | 0:12:08 | |
conditions on the surface might be suitable for life. | 0:12:08 | 0:12:11 | |
That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Look at those little craters. | 0:12:11 | 0:12:14 | |
This is a narrow-angle camera view and the scale... | 0:12:14 | 0:12:20 | |
on that...is approximately 50 miles across the picture. | 0:12:20 | 0:12:25 | |
But, besides cameras, the spacecraft carried a battery of instruments. | 0:12:25 | 0:12:29 | |
They measured the atmosphere and found it was painfully thin. | 0:12:29 | 0:12:33 | |
A pressure of only seven millibars, 100 times less than Earth, and containing mainly carbon dioxide. | 0:12:33 | 0:12:39 | |
Temperature readings suggested that the pole caps were not ice but frozen carbon dioxide. | 0:12:39 | 0:12:45 | |
Mars was even colder and more hostile than we'd thought. | 0:12:45 | 0:12:49 | |
The scientists were disappointed. | 0:12:49 | 0:12:52 | |
They might not have found evidence of life, but seeing the surface of Mars up close for the first time | 0:12:52 | 0:12:58 | |
was a major achievement for the Mariner team. | 0:12:58 | 0:13:01 | |
While programmes like Horizon reported on the findings, Mars was largely ignored by the public. | 0:13:01 | 0:13:08 | |
In 1969, they had their eyes firmly set on the moon. | 0:13:08 | 0:13:12 | |
Two, one, zero. | 0:13:12 | 0:13:15 | |
We have commencement. We have lift-off. | 0:13:17 | 0:13:19 | |
We've just heard that all over the world there are | 0:13:33 | 0:13:36 | |
33 countries who have stayed up to take these pictures live. | 0:13:36 | 0:13:39 | |
More than half a billion people tuned in to see Aldrin and Armstrong walk on the moon. | 0:13:39 | 0:13:44 | |
-OK, I'm going to move it. -Roger, we see Buzz going about his work. | 0:13:44 | 0:13:48 | |
At the time, it was the single most watched live event in history. | 0:13:48 | 0:13:53 | |
The moon landings are an incredible thing to watch even now, | 0:13:53 | 0:13:57 | |
but by the time we set foot on the moon we already knew a lot about it. | 0:13:57 | 0:14:01 | |
To my mind, even more amazing things were being learned about Mars by the Mariner teams. | 0:14:01 | 0:14:06 | |
But, while Apollo beguiled the public, in the background | 0:14:09 | 0:14:13 | |
scientists were preparing to try something even more ambitious in scale, | 0:14:13 | 0:14:18 | |
actually landing on the surface of Mars. | 0:14:18 | 0:14:21 | |
America may have beaten Russia to put a man on the moon, but the space race hadn't ended there. | 0:14:21 | 0:14:26 | |
The Soviets already had Mars on their minds. | 0:14:28 | 0:14:31 | |
They were close to launching a spacecraft that would land on the Red Planet. | 0:14:31 | 0:14:36 | |
And in 1971, when the probe Mars 3 successfully reached the surface, | 0:14:38 | 0:14:43 | |
it appeared Russia had won the contest. | 0:14:43 | 0:14:45 | |
But disaster struck. | 0:14:47 | 0:14:49 | |
The lander stopped transmitting information back to earth after just 90 seconds. | 0:14:49 | 0:14:53 | |
Would NASA's attempt fare any better? | 0:14:58 | 0:15:01 | |
One of the Viking team showed off their design, | 0:15:10 | 0:15:13 | |
a machine made in the image of man. | 0:15:13 | 0:15:15 | |
First of all there are two eyes. | 0:15:17 | 0:15:20 | |
And the eyes are even better than those eyes which a human being has. | 0:15:20 | 0:15:23 | |
They can see not only in colour, but also in stereo and in the infrared part of the spectrum. | 0:15:23 | 0:15:29 | |
It has a sense of touch - the meteorology boom. | 0:15:29 | 0:15:31 | |
It tells it the temperature, whether it's hot or cold, | 0:15:31 | 0:15:33 | |
the relative humidity and how much the wind is blowing. | 0:15:33 | 0:15:36 | |
It has an arm so it can extend out into the area around it | 0:15:36 | 0:15:39 | |
and pick up sand and bring it back to the other laboratories on board the lander. | 0:15:39 | 0:15:43 | |
It has a sense of hearing, in two different ranges of frequency. | 0:15:43 | 0:15:46 | |
Then of course it has this fantastic sense of smell which is personified by the organic chemistry experiment. | 0:15:46 | 0:15:52 | |
This sense of smell is far more powerful than our olfactory | 0:15:52 | 0:15:55 | |
and can distinguish between the various aromatic compounds which may be in the air. | 0:15:55 | 0:15:59 | |
But by far the most important feature of the lander is its brain. | 0:15:59 | 0:16:04 | |
This particular brain of course is a computer. | 0:16:04 | 0:16:06 | |
It sits down inside the lander, it's roughly the size of a suitcase, | 0:16:06 | 0:16:10 | |
weighs 52lbs and has a vocabulary of 18,000 words. | 0:16:10 | 0:16:14 | |
This brain not only controls the lander | 0:16:14 | 0:16:17 | |
in response to the specific commands that we give it from the Earth, but it makes decisions on its own. | 0:16:17 | 0:16:21 | |
The lander brain determines its altitude, determines its navigational parameters | 0:16:21 | 0:16:26 | |
and makes logical selections on such things as when to throw away the heat shield, | 0:16:26 | 0:16:31 | |
when to pop the parachute and when to turn on the terminal descent engines. | 0:16:31 | 0:16:35 | |
It is because of these decision-making capabilities | 0:16:35 | 0:16:38 | |
that the lander truly stands out as a piece of automatic intelligence. | 0:16:38 | 0:16:42 | |
And because it has this automatic intelligence it has really earned its name of "robot". | 0:16:42 | 0:16:47 | |
But don't let this simple explanation fool you. | 0:16:51 | 0:16:54 | |
Building a craft to reach the surface of Mars and operate once there | 0:16:54 | 0:16:58 | |
was an exceptionally difficult technical challenge. | 0:16:58 | 0:17:01 | |
Viking was launched in 1975 and made it into Mars' orbit without any hitches. | 0:17:03 | 0:17:08 | |
As the team gathered for the probe's landing, they knew the final seven minutes of its ten-month journey | 0:17:12 | 0:17:17 | |
were the hardest part of the mission. | 0:17:17 | 0:17:20 | |
Viking would have to survive a fiery plunge through the planet's thin atmosphere, | 0:17:21 | 0:17:26 | |
slowing from a speed of nearly 21,000 kilometres per hour to land safely on the service. | 0:17:26 | 0:17:33 | |
-23 Gs. -2,600ft. -On terminal descent. | 0:17:37 | 0:17:42 | |
1200ft, 140ft per second. | 0:17:42 | 0:17:44 | |
Coming down...straight down. | 0:17:44 | 0:17:47 | |
May I have a screen for touchdown? | 0:17:47 | 0:17:50 | |
..1.5 degrees per second max. 22 Gs. | 0:17:50 | 0:17:53 | |
Touchdown! We have touchdown! | 0:17:53 | 0:17:55 | |
And there's the first piece of information coming in. | 0:18:09 | 0:18:12 | |
Oh... Oh... | 0:18:15 | 0:18:16 | |
Say something. | 0:18:18 | 0:18:19 | |
Yeah, I'm supposed to say something at this point. | 0:18:19 | 0:18:22 | |
I just don't feel like talking! | 0:18:22 | 0:18:25 | |
-Well, there are rocks. -There are rocks, yes. There's rocks and... | 0:18:25 | 0:18:29 | |
It's just... Oh, it's just incredible to see that the... | 0:18:29 | 0:18:34 | |
Mars, you know, is really there. | 0:18:34 | 0:18:36 | |
Um...instant interpretation is always a little bit hazardous, | 0:18:36 | 0:18:42 | |
nonetheless many of these boulders | 0:18:42 | 0:18:45 | |
do look very similar to ones that we've seen in... | 0:18:45 | 0:18:48 | |
desert terrains here. | 0:18:48 | 0:18:50 | |
Some of these boulders may be vesicular, | 0:18:50 | 0:18:54 | |
that is, basalt rocks possibly, | 0:18:54 | 0:18:57 | |
volcanic rocks that have solidified in a gas-charged environment, | 0:18:57 | 0:19:01 | |
and these gases produce vesicles, or holes. | 0:19:01 | 0:19:05 | |
It just looks like a... perfect set down. | 0:19:05 | 0:19:10 | |
The first picture of the Martian panorama. | 0:19:11 | 0:19:14 | |
As you look at the field of view in general, | 0:19:17 | 0:19:20 | |
I think the most striking impression is one of a lot of rocks. | 0:19:20 | 0:19:24 | |
And this automatically brings to mind | 0:19:24 | 0:19:26 | |
the fact that we had a good deal of luck, | 0:19:26 | 0:19:29 | |
because some of these rocks are about two, three metres across, | 0:19:29 | 0:19:33 | |
and had the spacecraft landed on those rocks | 0:19:33 | 0:19:36 | |
it would have been disabled. | 0:19:36 | 0:19:38 | |
Probably permanently disabled. | 0:19:38 | 0:19:40 | |
Later high-resolution pictures | 0:19:42 | 0:19:44 | |
confirmed the rocks were volcanic but lying on dunes of fine sand. | 0:19:44 | 0:19:48 | |
On the second day, the first pictures in colour. | 0:19:50 | 0:19:54 | |
Mars was indeed the Red Planet. | 0:19:58 | 0:20:01 | |
Or at any rate, blue-red. | 0:20:01 | 0:20:03 | |
But the colours were false. | 0:20:04 | 0:20:06 | |
It was noticed that one of the cables on the space craft wasn't orange enough. | 0:20:06 | 0:20:10 | |
The colour was corrected and Mars turned even redder. | 0:20:12 | 0:20:16 | |
The reason for their mistake? | 0:20:20 | 0:20:22 | |
The sky. Everyone had assumed it would be blue, like on Earth, | 0:20:22 | 0:20:26 | |
but on Mars scattered dust turns the sky pink and makes sunsets purple. | 0:20:26 | 0:20:31 | |
But they weren't just there for the scenery. | 0:20:33 | 0:20:36 | |
It was time to answer the question of whether there was life on Mars. | 0:20:36 | 0:20:40 | |
By the morning of the eighth day the arm had taken its first soil sample. | 0:20:40 | 0:20:44 | |
There was a clear trench on the surface and the biological laboratories returned their analyses. | 0:20:44 | 0:20:50 | |
Across 200 million miles of space | 0:20:56 | 0:20:58 | |
came the message that was hoped to end three centuries of speculation. | 0:20:58 | 0:21:03 | |
These traces were to be the final arbiters of life on Mars. | 0:21:10 | 0:21:14 | |
They came from a machine on the lander that could make a detailed analysis of the soil. | 0:21:16 | 0:21:21 | |
Technically, it was a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer, a miracle of miniaturisation. | 0:21:21 | 0:21:26 | |
It could sniff out what molecules were present in the soil. | 0:21:26 | 0:21:30 | |
Its life-detecting task was to search for organic matter in the soil of Mars | 0:21:32 | 0:21:37 | |
by analysing what gases the soil gave off when it was heated, | 0:21:37 | 0:21:41 | |
in a tiny oven the size of a matchbox. | 0:21:41 | 0:21:44 | |
Within a few weeks the instrument on Mars had produced a complete fingerprint of the soil. | 0:21:47 | 0:21:52 | |
At first, it looked Earth-like. | 0:21:52 | 0:21:55 | |
There was nitrogen, carbon dioxide, argon and traces of oxygen and water. | 0:21:55 | 0:21:59 | |
But on Earth the heavier molecules of living systems would show further down the chart. | 0:21:59 | 0:22:04 | |
And on Mars the peaks weren't there. | 0:22:04 | 0:22:07 | |
For the biologists it was a bombshell. | 0:22:09 | 0:22:12 | |
Their tests had said life, and yet life without organic matter was unheard of. | 0:22:14 | 0:22:19 | |
So, some questioned the spectrometer's sensitivity. | 0:22:19 | 0:22:22 | |
Others speculated about cannibal micro-organisms | 0:22:22 | 0:22:26 | |
that lived by consuming their own organic debris. | 0:22:26 | 0:22:30 | |
The scientists couldn't explain it. | 0:22:30 | 0:22:32 | |
The Martian soil was active in the instruments on the lander, but there was no organic matter. | 0:22:32 | 0:22:37 | |
The building blocks for life were there, but life itself wasn't. | 0:22:38 | 0:22:42 | |
Unfortunately, even the tantalising nature of these results | 0:22:44 | 0:22:47 | |
wasn't enough to persuade politicians to support another trip to the Red Planet. | 0:22:47 | 0:22:52 | |
In fact, it was to be 17 years before we would go back to Mars. | 0:22:53 | 0:22:57 | |
And then, in 1992, a new era of Mars exploration began | 0:23:01 | 0:23:06 | |
with the launch of Mars Observer. | 0:23:06 | 0:23:09 | |
We have lift-off! | 0:23:10 | 0:23:11 | |
Lift off of the Type-3 rocket with the Mars Observer | 0:23:11 | 0:23:15 | |
and America's return to the Red Planet. | 0:23:15 | 0:23:18 | |
I believe that before Apollo celebrates the 50th anniversary | 0:23:18 | 0:23:24 | |
of its landing on the moon, the American flag should be planted on Mars. | 0:23:24 | 0:23:29 | |
Observer was the first of five US missions to Mars in the 1990s. | 0:23:30 | 0:23:34 | |
The Red Planet was very much back on the agenda. | 0:23:34 | 0:23:37 | |
And we have lift-off of NASA's Mars Global surveyor, | 0:23:37 | 0:23:41 | |
as America begins its journey back to the Red Planet. | 0:23:41 | 0:23:45 | |
But, despite their high hopes, more than half of NASA's missions to Mars that decade failed. | 0:23:45 | 0:23:50 | |
Now, it's a mistake many of us have made, but then most of us aren't in charge of missions into space. | 0:23:53 | 0:23:58 | |
Scientists at NASA couldn't work out why the Mars Orbiter, worth a small £78 million, | 0:23:58 | 0:24:03 | |
got lost in space, until someone pointed out that they'd planned everything in feet and inches | 0:24:03 | 0:24:09 | |
rather than metres and centimetres. | 0:24:09 | 0:24:11 | |
Eight days ago, as it approached the Red Planet, contact with the craft was lost. | 0:24:11 | 0:24:16 | |
This was the moment when NASA scientists realised something had gone horribly wrong. | 0:24:16 | 0:24:22 | |
The American space agency NASA is on the verge of having to admit to another embarrassing failure. | 0:24:22 | 0:24:27 | |
The Mars Polar Lander would be the second spacecraft that it's lost in just two months. | 0:24:27 | 0:24:32 | |
And there's still no convincing explanation for what might have gone wrong. | 0:24:32 | 0:24:37 | |
The strain is starting to show. | 0:24:37 | 0:24:40 | |
Three days on, and still no sign of their lost lander. | 0:24:40 | 0:24:43 | |
NASA engineers had thought it was just a case of a misdirected communications antenna. | 0:24:43 | 0:24:49 | |
Now it looks likely that the spacecraft could be seriously damaged. | 0:24:49 | 0:24:54 | |
Thousands of functions are performed during a space mission. | 0:24:55 | 0:24:59 | |
Just one man-made mistake can be catastrophic. | 0:24:59 | 0:25:02 | |
These failures were a timely reminder. | 0:25:02 | 0:25:04 | |
Crossing millions of miles with pinpoint accuracy, and withstanding | 0:25:04 | 0:25:08 | |
the rigours of space to reach Mars, were an extraordinary challenge for a spacecraft and its operators. | 0:25:08 | 0:25:13 | |
Success was never guaranteed. | 0:25:13 | 0:25:16 | |
Faced with the technical difficulties of even reaching Mars, the prospect of actually | 0:25:18 | 0:25:22 | |
finding life on the Red Planet was beginning to seem unrealistic. | 0:25:22 | 0:25:26 | |
But then a breakthrough came from an unexpected place. | 0:25:28 | 0:25:31 | |
Here, on Earth, geologists had been investigating Martian meteorites | 0:25:33 | 0:25:37 | |
in the hope they might reveal more about the Red Planet. | 0:25:37 | 0:25:41 | |
And they found something incredible. | 0:25:41 | 0:25:44 | |
For the first time in human history, evidence has been discovered of life on another planet. | 0:25:44 | 0:25:51 | |
The announcement was made by American scientists late last night. | 0:25:51 | 0:25:54 | |
A spokesman for the US space agency, NASA, called it a startling discovery. | 0:25:54 | 0:25:59 | |
MUSIC: "Life On Mars" by David Bowie | 0:25:59 | 0:26:01 | |
We have a number of forms, which is very tempting for us to interpret as Martian micro-fossils. | 0:26:12 | 0:26:19 | |
Today, rock 84001 speaks to us | 0:26:19 | 0:26:23 | |
across all those billions of years and millions of miles. | 0:26:23 | 0:26:28 | |
If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most | 0:26:28 | 0:26:32 | |
stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered. | 0:26:32 | 0:26:36 | |
The usually sober Horizon got swept up in the story. | 0:26:39 | 0:26:43 | |
It devoted a whole programme to NASA's announcement | 0:26:43 | 0:26:47 | |
that they thought they'd discovered Martian life in a meteorite. | 0:26:47 | 0:26:52 | |
The unlikely location of this discovery was Antarctica. | 0:26:52 | 0:26:56 | |
Each summer, a US expedition heads south to hunt for meteorites. | 0:26:58 | 0:27:04 | |
It's led by Ralph Harvey. | 0:27:04 | 0:27:06 | |
If you wanna go somewhere on Earth where the rocks you find must have | 0:27:06 | 0:27:11 | |
fallen from the sky, you go to a place where there's a great natural white sheet on the ground. | 0:27:11 | 0:27:18 | |
Antarctica is perfect for that. | 0:27:18 | 0:27:19 | |
Any rock you find at the top of 10,000 ft pile of ice and snow had to have fallen there from the sky. | 0:27:21 | 0:27:27 | |
When you find a meteorite, it's just really exciting. | 0:27:30 | 0:27:33 | |
You can go for hours and nobody will find a meteorite, and all of a sudden you run into one. | 0:27:33 | 0:27:38 | |
It's a break, so everybody gets together. | 0:27:38 | 0:27:40 | |
Yeah, another one. | 0:27:42 | 0:27:44 | |
OK... | 0:27:46 | 0:27:48 | |
We ran into the rock. | 0:27:50 | 0:27:52 | |
I remember it was bigger than other rocks we had been collecting. | 0:27:52 | 0:27:56 | |
Because of the brightness of the area, and the colour of the snow | 0:27:56 | 0:27:59 | |
and ice, and the dark glasses, it had a very green tint to me. | 0:27:59 | 0:28:03 | |
And we were all excited for being in this beautiful area and finding this green rock. | 0:28:03 | 0:28:09 | |
It just really stood out in my mind. | 0:28:09 | 0:28:11 | |
I even wrote it down in my journal. | 0:28:11 | 0:28:12 | |
At the end of the season, the find was shipped back to Houston, to NASA's Johnson Space Centre. | 0:28:18 | 0:28:25 | |
Meteorites are named after local post offices where they fell, | 0:28:25 | 0:28:29 | |
and obviously there's no post offices in Antarctica. | 0:28:29 | 0:28:33 | |
So we named them after the local features. | 0:28:33 | 0:28:35 | |
And ALH stands for Alan Hills. | 0:28:35 | 0:28:37 | |
84 is the year it was collected. | 0:28:37 | 0:28:39 | |
And 01 was the first lab number we pulled out. | 0:28:39 | 0:28:43 | |
Once in the lab, the rock was photographed, described and catalogued, | 0:28:47 | 0:28:51 | |
then put into storage among all the others waiting to be studied by scientists around the world. | 0:28:51 | 0:28:56 | |
The true nature of this meteorite was nearly lost to science forever. | 0:28:56 | 0:29:00 | |
Unfortunately, 8401 was misclassified as a rock like this. | 0:29:00 | 0:29:05 | |
This is a diogenite. | 0:29:05 | 0:29:07 | |
It's a coarsely crystalline rock from the asteroid belt. | 0:29:07 | 0:29:12 | |
And so 8401 lived its life for 10 years | 0:29:12 | 0:29:16 | |
in a curation facility at the Johnson Space Centre | 0:29:16 | 0:29:21 | |
under the label of diogenite, | 0:29:21 | 0:29:24 | |
until Dave Mittelfeld requested a specimen as part of his study of diogenites. | 0:29:24 | 0:29:30 | |
And then when he looked at 8401, he realised it wasn't a diogenite, | 0:29:30 | 0:29:35 | |
but in fact, was a member of a small group of meteorites, | 0:29:35 | 0:29:39 | |
rather like this one. | 0:29:39 | 0:29:42 | |
This rock is one of a small group that are very special indeed. | 0:29:42 | 0:29:47 | |
They have come to us not from the asteroid belt, but from our neighbouring planet, from Mars. | 0:29:47 | 0:29:55 | |
Scientists studied this piece of the Red Planet in microscopic detail, and found something extraordinary. | 0:29:57 | 0:30:05 | |
This is one thousandth of the width of a human hair, so these are extremely tiny things. | 0:30:05 | 0:30:12 | |
One evening, we were moving around and we came across a region | 0:30:18 | 0:30:22 | |
that appeared to be a little different from what we had normally seen. | 0:30:22 | 0:30:26 | |
And we kept scanning in at higher magnification, | 0:30:26 | 0:30:32 | |
and we saw something that caught our eye. | 0:30:32 | 0:30:35 | |
And we said, "What is that?" | 0:30:40 | 0:30:43 | |
We found this structure. | 0:30:43 | 0:30:46 | |
It had 10 to 12 segments in it. And appeared to have a head and a tail. | 0:30:46 | 0:30:53 | |
And we looked at each other | 0:30:53 | 0:30:56 | |
with a look that kinda said, "This can't be." | 0:30:56 | 0:31:00 | |
And the significance of the structure got to both of us. | 0:31:00 | 0:31:05 | |
I went home and that night, I had difficulty sleeping. | 0:31:05 | 0:31:10 | |
I was saying, "Could we have a micro-fossil here from Mars?" | 0:31:10 | 0:31:15 | |
If it can be established that life has arisen on Mars quite independently of Earth, | 0:31:22 | 0:31:29 | |
then in my view that would be a discovery more profound | 0:31:29 | 0:31:32 | |
than the work of Copernicus and Darwin and Einstein put together. | 0:31:32 | 0:31:36 | |
It would truly be the most amazing scientific discovery of all time. | 0:31:36 | 0:31:40 | |
NASA scientists believed they'd solved the centuries-old mystery | 0:31:40 | 0:31:44 | |
of whether life had evolved on other planets. | 0:31:44 | 0:31:47 | |
If our evidence continues to pan out, which we think it will, | 0:31:47 | 0:31:52 | |
it will show for the first time that we are not alone in this giant universe that we live in. | 0:31:52 | 0:31:59 | |
My first trip to NASA was shortly after this discovery. | 0:32:04 | 0:32:07 | |
The place was alive with anticipation. | 0:32:07 | 0:32:09 | |
People were wandering around wearing badges saying, "Mars or Bust". | 0:32:09 | 0:32:13 | |
But the excitement was short lived. Each of the lines of evidence that pointed towards | 0:32:13 | 0:32:18 | |
fossilised Martian life could be explained in other ways. | 0:32:18 | 0:32:21 | |
Scientists found that the organic material | 0:32:21 | 0:32:24 | |
in the meteorite could have been created by non-biological processes. | 0:32:24 | 0:32:28 | |
Or even be the result of contamination from Antarctic ice. | 0:32:28 | 0:32:33 | |
The scientific community was divided. | 0:32:33 | 0:32:35 | |
The only way to know if there had ever been life on Mars was to go back. | 0:32:35 | 0:32:40 | |
Despite the loss of several missions to the Red Planet in the 1990s, | 0:32:49 | 0:32:53 | |
scientists were determined to try and get to Mars once more. | 0:32:53 | 0:32:57 | |
And this time they had the search for life at the very heart of their operation. | 0:32:57 | 0:33:01 | |
The search for life is the search for liquid water. | 0:33:08 | 0:33:12 | |
Life on Earth is basically full of water. | 0:33:14 | 0:33:17 | |
Life forms are basically little bags of water with a few other ingredients added. | 0:33:17 | 0:33:21 | |
But water is the main component. | 0:33:21 | 0:33:23 | |
Water is what makes it work. | 0:33:23 | 0:33:25 | |
On Earth, all life is based on water. | 0:33:32 | 0:33:34 | |
It's the main constituent of every cell. | 0:33:34 | 0:33:38 | |
Because water is basically inert, it's the perfect medium for different types of molecules | 0:33:40 | 0:33:45 | |
to flow around, meet and react together. | 0:33:45 | 0:33:48 | |
It enables life to form. | 0:33:53 | 0:33:56 | |
Horizon took a look at NASA's attempts to find water on Mars. | 0:33:59 | 0:34:04 | |
When we look at the history of life on Earth, it appears to start very quickly. | 0:34:04 | 0:34:08 | |
Maybe a hundred million years. | 0:34:08 | 0:34:10 | |
That seems like a long time, but for a planet that's short. | 0:34:10 | 0:34:13 | |
So if there was water on Mars for a couple of hundred million years, | 0:34:13 | 0:34:17 | |
then life had a good shot at getting started there. | 0:34:17 | 0:34:19 | |
And soon they found evidence the water had been there for millions of years. | 0:34:24 | 0:34:29 | |
It was all because of one very important picture. | 0:34:42 | 0:34:45 | |
Sent back in December 2000, it was of vast formations of sedimentary rock. | 0:34:47 | 0:34:53 | |
Sediment is basically made of sand. | 0:34:55 | 0:34:58 | |
It can only have been deposited over millions of years by a huge body of water like a lake or an ocean. | 0:34:58 | 0:35:04 | |
It showed that not only had there been masses of water, | 0:35:07 | 0:35:10 | |
but it had been around long enough for life to form. | 0:35:10 | 0:35:14 | |
The sediments on the surface were now dry and exposed. | 0:35:17 | 0:35:20 | |
If they ever had contained life, it could not possibly have survived. | 0:35:20 | 0:35:24 | |
However, scientists hoped that microbes deeper down might still be alive, frozen in the ground. | 0:35:27 | 0:35:33 | |
To find the actual organic remains of a Martian organism, we're gonna need to go to frozen material. | 0:35:37 | 0:35:42 | |
In the ice, life might have been preserved, frozen in a state of suspended animation. | 0:35:44 | 0:35:50 | |
No-one at this stage could know if microbes formed millions of years ago could have survived on Mars. | 0:35:56 | 0:36:03 | |
But there were indications that it really was possible. | 0:36:03 | 0:36:07 | |
Once again it was Earth that would hold the key to life on Mars. | 0:36:11 | 0:36:15 | |
Antarctica, the closest place on Earth to conditions on Mars. | 0:36:17 | 0:36:21 | |
Until a few years ago, no-one thought life could survive being deep frozen for millions of years. | 0:36:23 | 0:36:30 | |
But research here has helped change that. | 0:36:30 | 0:36:32 | |
The ground here is permafrost, a mixture of soil and ice frozen together. | 0:36:36 | 0:36:41 | |
A group of Russian scientists teamed up with NASA to drill down into it in search of micro-organisms. | 0:36:44 | 0:36:49 | |
They drilled so deep, they reached permafrost laid down millions of years ago. | 0:36:53 | 0:36:58 | |
The frozen cores were taken back to their laboratory. | 0:37:02 | 0:37:05 | |
Samples were taken from the centre of the core, then they looked for signs of life. | 0:37:05 | 0:37:10 | |
They discovered that bacteria can survive in the permafrost | 0:37:23 | 0:37:26 | |
for far longer than anyone had thought possible. | 0:37:26 | 0:37:29 | |
They found bacteria that may turn out to have been at -20 degrees for more than 10 million years. | 0:37:42 | 0:37:48 | |
Probably we have now these bacteria from Antarctic permafrost | 0:37:50 | 0:37:56 | |
between eight and 15 million years old. | 0:37:56 | 0:37:59 | |
Bacteria had been buried alive here in frozen ground since the beginning of human evolution. | 0:38:01 | 0:38:08 | |
If life can survive in Antarctica for 15 million years, | 0:38:08 | 0:38:12 | |
then something could be waiting to be revived on Mars. | 0:38:12 | 0:38:16 | |
These discoveries put new urgency into the quest to find water on Mars. | 0:38:20 | 0:38:24 | |
There was now a real possibility they might find something alive. | 0:38:24 | 0:38:29 | |
But scientists needed little reminder that getting to Mars would be hazardous. | 0:38:40 | 0:38:45 | |
Professor of Cosmo-Chemistry, William Boynton, | 0:38:45 | 0:38:47 | |
had lost precious equipment on two of the botched missions. | 0:38:47 | 0:38:51 | |
But he decided to try one more time. | 0:38:51 | 0:38:54 | |
This was really my third attempt to get to Mars. | 0:38:55 | 0:38:59 | |
Some of my colleagues said, "Bill, are you crazy? | 0:38:59 | 0:39:02 | |
"You're doing this a third time?" | 0:39:02 | 0:39:04 | |
"Why are you putting so much time in on this?" | 0:39:04 | 0:39:06 | |
And I just couldn't say no. | 0:39:06 | 0:39:08 | |
I think there was just a calling that I had to go back. | 0:39:08 | 0:39:12 | |
We have a device called a gamma ray spectrometer. | 0:39:15 | 0:39:18 | |
It's designed to determine what elements are present on Mars that make up the surface. | 0:39:18 | 0:39:25 | |
And probably the most important one of those is hydrogen, | 0:39:25 | 0:39:28 | |
because that's the main constituent element in water. | 0:39:28 | 0:39:31 | |
VOICEOVER: "We have ignition and lift-off | 0:39:34 | 0:39:37 | |
"of a Delta Two rocket carrying NASA on an odyssey back to Mars." | 0:39:37 | 0:39:41 | |
On 7th April 2001, NASA launched Odyssey, carrying Boynton's device. | 0:39:41 | 0:39:48 | |
This time, everything went according to plan. | 0:39:48 | 0:39:51 | |
One, two, set. | 0:39:56 | 0:39:58 | |
We are separating the stages. | 0:39:58 | 0:40:02 | |
Second-stage ignition. | 0:40:02 | 0:40:04 | |
Once in Mars' orbit, the instrument was deployed. | 0:40:11 | 0:40:16 | |
The gamma-ray detector could get to work. | 0:40:16 | 0:40:19 | |
The data was radioed back from Odyssey to NASA | 0:40:27 | 0:40:31 | |
to the University of Tucson and finally to Boynton's desk. | 0:40:31 | 0:40:36 | |
As the data came through, a picture started to build. | 0:40:39 | 0:40:42 | |
When I first saw the signal, I was looking through it and first trying to find the hydrogen signal. | 0:40:46 | 0:40:52 | |
When I saw it, it was so big I couldn't believe it. | 0:40:52 | 0:40:55 | |
I actually had to do some checks to see, could this be real or somehow did we mess things up? | 0:40:55 | 0:41:01 | |
It could only mean one thing - there is water ice on Mars today, and there is masses of it. | 0:41:14 | 0:41:20 | |
Boynton and his team had discovered a vast ocean | 0:41:23 | 0:41:26 | |
in the southern hemisphere, a frozen ocean over 5,000 kilometres wide. | 0:41:26 | 0:41:31 | |
What we found is, just in the surface, | 0:41:34 | 0:41:36 | |
if we melted that would be enough to fill Lake Michigan two times over. | 0:41:36 | 0:41:41 | |
There is probably a lot more, because we don't know how deep the ice goes. | 0:41:41 | 0:41:45 | |
That is just in the upper metre. | 0:41:45 | 0:41:47 | |
It could be 10 metres deep, it could be 100 metres deep. | 0:41:47 | 0:41:51 | |
There's a lot of ice there. | 0:41:51 | 0:41:53 | |
The ice they found is trapped in the ground, a permafrost, just like in Antarctica. | 0:41:53 | 0:41:59 | |
It was a smoking gun. | 0:42:01 | 0:42:03 | |
They'd found the one thing needed for life to evolve. | 0:42:03 | 0:42:06 | |
But the question of whether life was actually there remained unanswered. | 0:42:06 | 0:42:10 | |
In 2003, it was Britain's turn to join the race to find life on the Red Planet. | 0:42:20 | 0:42:25 | |
Beagle 2 was a lander, carrying scientific instruments designed | 0:42:25 | 0:42:29 | |
to search for carbon - something which exists in all living things. | 0:42:29 | 0:42:34 | |
It was also equipped with an ingenious device called a mole, | 0:42:34 | 0:42:38 | |
which could take samples under rocks around the landing site | 0:42:38 | 0:42:41 | |
in the previously inaccessible places scientists thought life most likely to survive. | 0:42:41 | 0:42:46 | |
After travelling 400 million kilometres, Mars Express, Europe's first Mars rocket, | 0:42:47 | 0:42:53 | |
arrived safely to the planet with Beagle 2 onboard. | 0:42:53 | 0:42:57 | |
On Christmas Day 2003, the lander began its hazardous | 0:42:59 | 0:43:02 | |
seven-minute journey through the atmosphere to the surface. | 0:43:02 | 0:43:06 | |
Mission scientists awaited news of Beagle's expected touchdown. | 0:43:06 | 0:43:10 | |
With national pride at stake, Britain took notice. | 0:43:10 | 0:43:14 | |
Good morning. Welcome to Breakfast from BBC News with Bill Turnbull. | 0:43:14 | 0:43:18 | |
No message from Mars - scientists fail to make contact with the Beagle 2 probe but say all is not yet lost. | 0:43:18 | 0:43:26 | |
That's our main story on Christmas Day, 25th December. | 0:43:26 | 0:43:29 | |
It was a long, tense wait through the night. | 0:43:29 | 0:43:33 | |
Would Britain's first mission to another planet actually make it? | 0:43:33 | 0:43:36 | |
Before dawn, the mastermind of the project, Colin Pillinger, was on the line to NASA, | 0:43:36 | 0:43:42 | |
in the hope that one of its spacecraft had picked up the first signal. It didn't. | 0:43:42 | 0:43:48 | |
I'm afraid it's a bit disappointing, but it's not the end of the world. | 0:43:48 | 0:43:53 | |
Please don't go away from here believing | 0:43:53 | 0:43:57 | |
that we've lost this spacecraft. | 0:43:57 | 0:43:59 | |
Over the next few days, the British public waited to hear from Beagle, | 0:43:59 | 0:44:04 | |
but, sadly, the news didn't improve. | 0:44:04 | 0:44:07 | |
British scientists behind the Beagle 2 mission to Mars | 0:44:07 | 0:44:10 | |
are refusing to give up hope, | 0:44:10 | 0:44:12 | |
despite no signal from the probe for more than 24 hours. | 0:44:12 | 0:44:15 | |
'This morning, the mood among the scientists involved was getting grimmer, | 0:44:15 | 0:44:19 | |
'but no talk yet of giving up.' | 0:44:19 | 0:44:21 | |
On this mission, our faith has been unshakeable that the mission would go ahead. | 0:44:21 | 0:44:25 | |
We've crossed lots of bridges to get this far. | 0:44:25 | 0:44:29 | |
We'll keep the unshakeable faith until the point comes | 0:44:29 | 0:44:33 | |
when we have to say that it's no longer worth thinking about. | 0:44:33 | 0:44:37 | |
British scientists have again failed to make contact | 0:44:37 | 0:44:40 | |
with the Beagle 2 spacecraft. | 0:44:40 | 0:44:41 | |
It was their fifth attempt to get in touch. | 0:44:41 | 0:44:43 | |
'Another frustrating day. | 0:44:43 | 0:44:46 | |
'Three more attempts to find Beagle overnight, and three more failures.' | 0:44:46 | 0:44:51 | |
And ten days later, they were forced to admit defeat. | 0:44:51 | 0:44:54 | |
It looks after all as if the Beagle may have crash-landed. | 0:44:54 | 0:44:57 | |
Scientists said today that their best chance yet | 0:44:57 | 0:45:00 | |
to make contact with the British spacecraft has failed. | 0:45:00 | 0:45:03 | |
'For Colin Pillinger, the man behind Beagle 2, | 0:45:03 | 0:45:07 | |
'the disappointment was clearly visible. | 0:45:07 | 0:45:09 | |
'But he remained upbeat about its achievements.' | 0:45:09 | 0:45:13 | |
Come on, guys, this isn't gonna be a great British failure. | 0:45:13 | 0:45:17 | |
We have learnt so much that we have to build on this, | 0:45:17 | 0:45:20 | |
and the lesson that we have to learn is to go forward and have another Beagle. | 0:45:20 | 0:45:26 | |
The same name is good enough for us. | 0:45:26 | 0:45:29 | |
It's got us this far. Let's take it on. | 0:45:29 | 0:45:31 | |
The Americans, meanwhile, were hopeful that they'd have more luck with rovers. | 0:45:38 | 0:45:43 | |
Rovers are robotic geologists that travel across the surface of a planet. | 0:45:43 | 0:45:47 | |
Being mobile means that if they see an interesting feature, they can go an investigate it. | 0:45:47 | 0:45:53 | |
Rovers in all shapes and sizes | 0:45:53 | 0:45:55 | |
are now being created to go to the Red Planet. | 0:45:55 | 0:45:58 | |
Horizon investigated their effectiveness. | 0:45:58 | 0:46:02 | |
'Many could be seen strutting their stuff | 0:46:02 | 0:46:04 | |
'at a conference of rover designers held on a Californian beach.' | 0:46:04 | 0:46:08 | |
There are so few rocks that are small, | 0:46:08 | 0:46:10 | |
that are seen in those two landing sites, | 0:46:10 | 0:46:13 | |
that in fact this rover, it turns out, can go between the big rocks... | 0:46:13 | 0:46:16 | |
'There were rovers from Europe, Russia and Japan.' | 0:46:16 | 0:46:20 | |
It is a big space company... | 0:46:20 | 0:46:22 | |
Amidst all the enthusiasm for robotic exploration, there was also one voice of caution. | 0:46:27 | 0:46:33 | |
..Primarily the difference between this Marsokhod | 0:46:33 | 0:46:36 | |
and the one that you just saw. | 0:46:36 | 0:46:38 | |
Carol Stoker is working on the robotic exploration of Mars at NASA's Ames Research Center. | 0:46:38 | 0:46:43 | |
She is an exobiologist, an expert on how to search for life on other worlds. | 0:46:43 | 0:46:49 | |
I think it is going to be extremely difficult to find fossil life on Mars. | 0:46:49 | 0:46:54 | |
It's a very tough problem to find it on Earth. | 0:46:54 | 0:46:57 | |
Any viewer would know from their own experience | 0:46:57 | 0:47:00 | |
that if they just walked out in their back yard - did they find a fossil there? | 0:47:00 | 0:47:05 | |
It's not an easy problem. | 0:47:05 | 0:47:06 | |
To test the effectiveness of robot exploration, | 0:47:06 | 0:47:11 | |
Carol Stoker has been working with a Russian Marsokhod rover | 0:47:11 | 0:47:14 | |
to see if it can discover life on Earth. | 0:47:14 | 0:47:17 | |
INDISTINCT | 0:47:17 | 0:47:18 | |
'My programme at NASA Ames did a field experiment | 0:47:18 | 0:47:23 | |
'where we took a science team, actually gave the science team exposure to data from a rover | 0:47:23 | 0:47:29 | |
'that was placed in a very fossil-rich field site.' | 0:47:29 | 0:47:33 | |
And how well did the science team do? | 0:47:33 | 0:47:37 | |
Perhaps they overlooked the odd microscopic fossil? | 0:47:37 | 0:47:40 | |
No, they were missing very obvious things! | 0:47:40 | 0:47:43 | |
They were missing dinosaur tracks the size of dinner plates. | 0:47:43 | 0:47:47 | |
It is an issue of, exactly where do you look? | 0:47:48 | 0:47:51 | |
'You can be six inches to the left of where the fossil is. | 0:47:51 | 0:47:54 | |
'If you are not looking right at it, you won't see it. That's the problem with a rover - | 0:47:54 | 0:47:59 | |
'it's only going to look where you tell it to look. | 0:47:59 | 0:48:03 | |
'Actually, I think that our best chances of finding evidence of life on Mars' | 0:48:04 | 0:48:09 | |
is to send human crews. There is no question | 0:48:09 | 0:48:11 | |
Human crews will do a better job than all the robotics technology we can develop in the next 30 years, | 0:48:11 | 0:48:16 | |
even if we spend the entire NASA budget on it. | 0:48:16 | 0:48:19 | |
After 40 years of exploration, evidence that life exists on Mars, | 0:48:19 | 0:48:23 | |
or has ever been present, seems tantalisingly close but frustratingly just out of reach. | 0:48:23 | 0:48:28 | |
If we are ever to find the answer to this fundamental question, | 0:48:28 | 0:48:32 | |
we are going to have to send people to the surface. | 0:48:32 | 0:48:34 | |
That is going to require tremendous human endeavour before we have even got off the ground. | 0:48:34 | 0:48:39 | |
When we do send people to Mars, | 0:48:46 | 0:48:49 | |
it will be one of the most challenging trips humanity has ever undertaken, | 0:48:49 | 0:48:53 | |
travelling more than 80 million kilometres across the Solar System. | 0:48:53 | 0:48:58 | |
Robots may have made the trip, | 0:49:02 | 0:49:04 | |
but sending humans will stretch technological expertise to the limit. | 0:49:04 | 0:49:09 | |
And it will stretch humans to the limit too. | 0:49:12 | 0:49:15 | |
Crew members aboard a Mars mission | 0:49:15 | 0:49:17 | |
will have to endure six months of isolation | 0:49:17 | 0:49:20 | |
before they even get to the Red Planet. | 0:49:20 | 0:49:22 | |
Horizon took a look at some of the issues involved. | 0:49:22 | 0:49:26 | |
'A few days into the flight, the lack of gravity itself will start to affect the crew. | 0:49:26 | 0:49:32 | |
'The journey to Mars will be a biological battle for survival. | 0:49:32 | 0:49:36 | |
'As well as all their experience in space, | 0:49:38 | 0:49:40 | |
'the Russians have a history of ground-based research | 0:49:40 | 0:49:43 | |
'into the long-term damage that space does to the body. | 0:49:43 | 0:49:47 | |
'This volunteer has been in bed for a year. | 0:49:47 | 0:49:52 | |
'Just as would happen in space, with no stress on his body, | 0:49:59 | 0:50:03 | |
'he is suffering bone loss, and his muscles have been wasting away. | 0:50:03 | 0:50:07 | |
'His heart capacity has shrunk. | 0:50:07 | 0:50:09 | |
'Even short bouts of exercise are now exhausting. | 0:50:09 | 0:50:12 | |
'Until Dr Valery Polyakov completed a world-record 14 months' space flight two years ago, | 0:50:15 | 0:50:21 | |
'no-one was sure humans could survive the complete return journey to Mars. | 0:50:21 | 0:50:27 | |
'The aim of this bed-rest research is to develop exercises | 0:50:27 | 0:50:33 | |
'to prevent bodies designed for life on Earth from slowly decaying in space. | 0:50:33 | 0:50:38 | |
'From the Russians' experience on Mir, | 0:50:40 | 0:50:43 | |
'life in space will be dominated by exercise - | 0:50:43 | 0:50:46 | |
'two hours a day, every day, doing a cosmic workout. | 0:50:46 | 0:50:51 | |
'Norm Thagard was the first American astronaut to try out the Russians' regime. | 0:51:04 | 0:51:10 | |
'As a practical matter, you cannot exercise enough | 0:51:10 | 0:51:13 | |
'to maintain the same fitness level that you would have had had you remained on Earth.' | 0:51:13 | 0:51:18 | |
Not everyone, even on that regimen, can stand up and walk immediately after returning to Earth. | 0:51:18 | 0:51:23 | |
Mars' gravity is lower than Earth's gravity, | 0:51:23 | 0:51:26 | |
so the amount of physical conditioning you would need would be less, | 0:51:26 | 0:51:30 | |
but you would still need some. | 0:51:30 | 0:51:32 | |
You wouldn't want to go off to Mars with no exercise at all | 0:51:32 | 0:51:35 | |
and then expect to be able to perform useful work after landing on the surface of the planet. | 0:51:35 | 0:51:40 | |
Then there's the small matter of food. | 0:51:43 | 0:51:46 | |
Anything any astronaut has ever eaten in space began its life on Earth. | 0:52:11 | 0:52:16 | |
But rather than carrying vast stores of pre-packaged food with them, | 0:52:17 | 0:52:22 | |
for the long trip to Mars, the crew might grow their own. | 0:52:22 | 0:52:26 | |
Ground experiments are going on to squeeze every ounce of matter | 0:52:27 | 0:52:31 | |
from the tiny greenhouse they'd have on the rocket. | 0:52:31 | 0:52:34 | |
Plants will grow without gravity, but keeping them alive is complicated. | 0:52:34 | 0:52:40 | |
On their space station Mir, the Russians have slowly been learning about horticulture in space. | 0:52:41 | 0:52:47 | |
Some plants flown up from Earth do very well, but starting from seeds is much harder. | 0:52:48 | 0:52:54 | |
Up on Mir now, astronaut Mike Foal is trying to grow rape seedlings. | 0:52:54 | 0:53:00 | |
They're confused. They don't know which way to grow, cos there's no gravity here, | 0:53:00 | 0:53:04 | |
so we've been using strong lights above, because they are attracted to the light. | 0:53:04 | 0:53:09 | |
They will grow up in a month. They'll flower in about two weeks. | 0:53:09 | 0:53:12 | |
I then have to take bee sticks - pieces of bees on sticks - | 0:53:12 | 0:53:15 | |
and I go around the flowers and pollinate them. | 0:53:15 | 0:53:18 | |
They will produce seeds in a month. I will harvest the seeds and keep planting them. | 0:53:18 | 0:53:23 | |
I'm gonna try and plant three generations of seeds, | 0:53:23 | 0:53:26 | |
starting with Earth seeds, going to space seeds. | 0:53:26 | 0:53:29 | |
We have never produced seeds in space that we could plant - never! | 0:53:29 | 0:53:33 | |
We're that far behind on just getting basic life support going in space. | 0:53:33 | 0:53:37 | |
We will need vegetables wherever we're going. | 0:53:37 | 0:53:40 | |
We will need these things, and animals and the rest, | 0:53:40 | 0:53:43 | |
and the micro-organisms that make up an ecological system. | 0:53:43 | 0:53:46 | |
When the Russians first tried rearing Japanese quail chicks on Mir, | 0:53:58 | 0:54:02 | |
the baby birds wouldn't grab hold of anything, so they couldn't feed. | 0:54:02 | 0:54:07 | |
The solution is to fit the birds with harnesses to anchor them down. | 0:54:13 | 0:54:17 | |
It seems they then develop normally. | 0:54:17 | 0:54:21 | |
And the Russians believe quail will make an excellent compact food source in zero gravity. | 0:54:21 | 0:54:26 | |
But so far, no-one has persuaded them to breed or lay eggs. | 0:54:26 | 0:54:31 | |
And when we reach Mars, there'll be no relief. | 0:54:35 | 0:54:38 | |
The average temperature is minus 50 degrees centigrade, | 0:54:38 | 0:54:41 | |
and it goes down from there to minus 225 degrees at the poles. | 0:54:41 | 0:54:45 | |
The atmosphere is extremely thin and it's almost all carbon dioxide, and there are frequent dust storms. | 0:54:48 | 0:54:54 | |
We won't be able to live under open skies. | 0:54:54 | 0:54:57 | |
We know that conditions on Mars today are not very good for life. | 0:54:57 | 0:55:01 | |
If you were to go out onto Mars without a spacesuit, | 0:55:01 | 0:55:04 | |
and I don't recommend it, but if you were, | 0:55:04 | 0:55:06 | |
your body fluids would literally start to boil, | 0:55:06 | 0:55:09 | |
because the vapour pressure on Mars is lower than the boiling point of water at body temperature. | 0:55:09 | 0:55:14 | |
So this would not be a good thing in terms of your ears, eyes, nose and throat. | 0:55:14 | 0:55:19 | |
You would quickly suffocate and essentially drown in your own bodily fluid. | 0:55:19 | 0:55:23 | |
We will have to live inside. | 0:55:26 | 0:55:28 | |
Ground-based experiments that simulate what a life would be like in a Mars colony | 0:55:30 | 0:55:35 | |
are currently being carried out by the European Space Agency. | 0:55:35 | 0:55:39 | |
This year, a crew of six were successfully sealed inside a habitat in Moscow for 105 days. | 0:55:39 | 0:55:45 | |
Now I am ready to go to bed. | 0:55:45 | 0:55:48 | |
And in 2010, a new mission will run, for 520 days, | 0:55:48 | 0:55:52 | |
the length of a return trip to Mars, | 0:55:52 | 0:55:55 | |
plus a 30-day stopover on the surface. | 0:55:55 | 0:55:58 | |
Despite the challenges we must overcome, | 0:55:59 | 0:56:02 | |
astronomers think it's inevitable that we will go and live on Mars. | 0:56:02 | 0:56:05 | |
It's the only planet out there where one can reasonably expect | 0:56:07 | 0:56:11 | |
that humans could go and establish themselves permanently, | 0:56:11 | 0:56:16 | |
for what ever reason. | 0:56:16 | 0:56:17 | |
People could go and live on Mars. | 0:56:17 | 0:56:19 | |
They can't go and live on Jupiter, but they can go and live on Mars. | 0:56:19 | 0:56:23 | |
I think just because it's available, | 0:56:23 | 0:56:26 | |
almost, we have the capacity to go there already, | 0:56:26 | 0:56:30 | |
that it's inevitable that we will go. | 0:56:30 | 0:56:32 | |
Mars was the first planet we flew by, orbited, landed on and roved upon. | 0:56:48 | 0:56:52 | |
It will be the first planet that humans step foot upon. | 0:56:52 | 0:56:55 | |
When that might happen, is anybody's guess. | 0:56:55 | 0:56:58 | |
As the United States pulls back from its commitments to reach that planet by 2050, | 0:56:58 | 0:57:03 | |
one of the greatest thinkers of our generation | 0:57:03 | 0:57:05 | |
believes the exploration of Mars and the space beyond should be a priority for humankind. | 0:57:05 | 0:57:10 | |
40 years ago, the best scientific minds believed Mars was similar enough to Earth, | 0:57:42 | 0:57:47 | |
that they would find life there. | 0:57:47 | 0:57:50 | |
Then all their hopes and dreams were dashed. | 0:57:50 | 0:57:54 | |
With each new mission to the Red Planet, | 0:57:54 | 0:57:56 | |
scientists are discovering reasons to keep looking, | 0:57:56 | 0:57:59 | |
all in the hope that, one day, we will finally find proof | 0:57:59 | 0:58:03 | |
that we are not alone in the universe. | 0:58:03 | 0:58:06 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:25 | 0:58:30 | |
E-mail [email protected] | 0:58:30 | 0:58:34 |