Science is a way of answering questions about the universe.
Was there ever life on Mars?
What do comets look like, close up?
Where did we come from... where are we going?
For centuries humans have speculated.
Now we have ways to find out.
In this video, how ideas about the red planet have developed from fiction... to fact.
Why it takes all kinds of people... as well as high tech engineering... to make space missions successful...
...and the latest bold ideas and brave attempts to tackle some of humanity's biggest questions...
SCiC titles
Today we know Mars in some detail.
There are polar caps of water ice and frozen carbon dioxide, which grow and shrink over the seasons.
There are giant volcanoes, like this one, Olympus Mons, 3 times higher than Mount Everest, the largest volcano in the solar system…
But many smaller features are perhaps even are important.
Some researchers think these gullies are places where liquid water may have gushed out, relatively recently, from underground reservoirs.
Temperatures on Mars today are below freezing, and the atmosphere's so thin that liquid water should vanish instantly... so what's going on remains a mystery.
Water, Mars and mysteries have gone together for a long, long time...
The Greeks and Romans named the planet Mars for their god of war, because of its blood red color.
In the 19th century, an Italian astronomer saw thin, dark lines across its surface. He called them "canali", or channels.
The American astronomer, Percival Lowell, built this telescope specifically to study Mars.
He thought he saw a complex network of canals bringing water from the poles, to help a dying civilization survive on a desert planet.
This dream of life on Mars, however, turned out to be science fiction...
In 1969, the American spacecraft, mariner 9, went into orbit.
At first, a giant dust storm blanketed the planet.
Then... out of the clouds... emerged the tops of several giant volcanoes.
Mars must have been a geologically active world.
In 1976, twin "Viking" spacecraft orbited Mars...
As Viking orbited, it also saw long channels... not canals, but looking very much like river beds on earth, another clue that mars could once have been warmer and wetter.
For the first time, landers touched down safely on the planet.
But though they carried instruments to search for the molecules of life, the results were ambiguous.
Most scientists considered Mars, at least on the surface, life-less.
But the Vikings were stuck where they landed.
The next step was to send a rover.
But it was 20 years before the innovative "Pathfinder" spacecraft arrived, on July 4th, 1997.
To save weight and cut costs it used airbags to bounce down on the surface... a bold experiment, but it worked.
Soon the diminutive "sojourner" rover-about the size of a laser printer-rolled down its ramp.
It found some rocks which seemed to contain smooth pebbles, perhaps rounded by being tumbled in ancient streams and rivers!
A few months after "Pathfinder" landed, "Mars Global Surveyor" made it safely into orbit.
Its high resolution camera sent back nearly 100,000 close-ups... some of gullies... other of regions with layers of sediment that might be ancient lakebeds or shorelines...
But none of the cameras on board "MGS" or any previous mission could determine, with 100% accuracy, what Mars was made of.
That's where "2001 Mars Odyssey" comes in.
Named for the classic science fiction film, it began its science mission in early 2002.
"Odyssey" researchers were soon beaming about their results.
For the first time there was clear proof, at the level of atoms and elements, of the existence of large amounts of water ice, just a few meters below the Martian surface... frozen today... but what about long ago?
(rock and roll music)
It's time for the next generation of Mars explorers...
Launch controller:
5-4-3-2-1...
After a spring 2003 launch two nearly identical rockets take off, carrying twin rovers safely stowed in their nosecones.
They take six and a half months to get to Mars.
Then they have to slow down from 28,000 miles per hour to almost motionless in less than 2 minutes.
They use a parachute...
Then airbags inflate...
Retro-rockets fire...
The rover bounces down the last 10 meters.
It all looks pretty slick... but let's see how hard humans have been working, behind the scenes, to make the mission successful.
Launching from earth means matching the mass of the spacecraft to the force of the rocket.
For "MER" that meant what the project called "mass tribal councils."
Every few weeks engineers like Shonte Wright, in charge of thermal systems, were called in to report on the exact weight, to the gram, of their part of the spacecraft.
Shonte Wright:
We're showing 200 grams per REM on the RHS...
Then Grace Wang tallies up this week's weight.
...and managers like Barry Goldstein decide if something has to go or be cut in weight.
That's what it takes to make sure this mission is a... survivor.
Yells...
One year before launch... a pizza party to celebrate how much had been accomplished... and to build morale for the long road ahead.
Rock and roll...
The moment of truth comes when the spacecraft reaches mars.
Landing safely, somewhere interesting, requires the airbags to perform as promised.
Test Controller:
Starting countdown... 5...4...3...2... 1...
The only way to prepare is to test, test, test...
But sometimes results show there's lots more work to do.
Wayne Lee:
Four layers of 200 denier fabric... and as you can see here... a half meter sized rock just punched right through.
Solving those problems meant modifying the airbag design.
To keep the precious hardware safe takes a so-called "soft goods" company, that also makes gloves for the astronauts.
At first, these skilled seamstresses may not look like "spacecraft engineers," but without their dedication, the '03 rovers just won't make it.
Later tests went well, so it's on to Mars.
Once successfully landed, the rovers will roll up to an interesting rock.
To discover what's inside they need to get below the rust-red dust that covers everything on the planet.
That takes a "RAT", or "rock abrasion tool."
...and the "RAT" was made not in a NASA lab., But in a workshop in downtown New York that some say was designed by Thomas Edison.
At "honeybee robotics", it's mornings of meetings and telecons...
Noontime strolls through the neighborhood for sandwiches...
Afternoons of assembling equipment, and tests... tests... and more tests.
A Mission to Mars was coming together just blocks from ground zero, site of the former World Trade Center.
The project needs hardware and software, of course...
But more important than either are the men and women who build and test, and then operate the mission once on Mars.
Guys in rover test area: (pointing to photo montage on rover petal.)
Hey, there he is!
Randel Lindeman:
And the people here very often take themselves to their, to their limits. Sort of like an extreme mountain climber, an extreme athlete. This is a different kind of extreme personal motivation.
Jennifer Trosper:
A group of us who have no other intention than to launch two very capable vehicles to the surface of Mars, land them there, operate them for 90 plus sols, and be sittin' there 20 years from now, watching the videos of it all going, "oh I remember when I thought that might not be possible."
Steve Squyres:
Absolutely the adventure of a lifetime. That's the best phrase I can think of to describe it.
We've seen that comets used to inspire fear in humans when they approached earth.
But now we humans have plans to travel out to a comet, and to study, close up, what it's made of.
Launched in 2002 is the "Contour" mission, the "Comet Nucleus Tour."
After several weeks in a parking orbit, its rockets fire to take it out into a long, elliptical journey towards its first planned encounter, with Comet Encke.
Then, in 2006, a close encounter with Comet Schwassman-Wachman 3.
Protected by its dust shield, "Contour" will pass within 100 kilometers, 60 miles!
Its cameras will take high resolution images-far better than any previous ones...
Analyze the composition of the nucleus...
And determine the comet's precise orbit.
Both comets should be at the peak of their activity as they come closest to the sun.
That's when the ices of what's been called a "dirty snowball" are most volatile.
In 1996, astronomers saw this comet had broken into several large pieces. So they hope that "Contour" will be studying relatively unaltered material that may date back more than 4 billion years to the very formation of our solar system.
But that's not the end of Contour's mission.
If all goes well there's the opportunity to target the spacecraft at some new comet, not yet discovered.
It's an open-ended mission of exploration, with new opportunities and challenges throughout.
That's also just what happened with earth's most powerful orbiting telescope.
March 2002...
Astronauts:
Ok, here we go John...
This was the 4th time astronauts have gotten their hands on the Hubble Space Telescope.
It took 5 spacewalks over 5 days to add new solar panels...
To refurbish Hubble's Near-Infrared Camera with a state-of-the-art cooling system...
And to install an instrument called the "Advanced Camera for Surveys."
Astronauts trained around the clock to handle precise engineering and construction tasks while dressed in bulky spacesuits.
Controllers rehearsed every step of every servicing mission...
Technicians at NASA centers and in private industry built the new instruments...
Launch Controller:
...one, and liftoff of the space shuttle...
Then, in the ultimate test of teamwork, it all came together in a mission lasting 10 days, 22 hours and ten minutes, taking the astronauts on a journey of almost 4 million miles.
By the end of April the first results were in... and they were stunning.
This is a collision between 2 spiral galaxies, dubbed "the mice."
It's just one still frame from a process that's been going on over millions of years...
And this is another colliding galaxy known as "the tadpole."
Other images showed us places where stars... and perhaps new solar systems... are being born.
Hubble has now delivered more than a decade's worth of awesome images that have awakened millions to the beauty of our universe.
But that's nothing compared to the odyssey that today's descendants of Lowell and Goddard are making possible for everyone with open minds...
All of us can travel with them to Mars... to search for life...
And participate in cometary encounters of the closest kind.
We can study the birth of stars...
And the death of galaxies.
We can even see to the edge of the universe... and close to the beginning of time.
Now finding answers to some of those timeless questions... is up to you...
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