We went into this, honestly, with big ambitions.
We went in this to try to transform our understanding of Mars and that's hard to do in 90 days,
but it turns out that if you have 10 years you can come pretty close.
It's been a decade long string of 'can we make it to the next crater?'
That first 90 days in Eagle crater was basically taking all of this information that had suggested
that Mars may have been warmer and wetter earlier on to 'there's the rocks, and there's
no alternative to there has been water on the surface and near surface at the time those
rocks formed and that's a huge moment in Mars science because now you've got the rocks,
you've got the proof.
I was an undergraduate, and I was actually working in Marshall Space Flight Center when
Pathfinder landed, working that summer as an intern.
I actually was aware of the Pathfinder landing and I was so surprised, I had no idea anybody
did anything like that.
You know, these people sent a probe to Mars and it had a rover and they drove it around,
this is the coolest thing I have ever seen.
How much fun must their job be?
At that time, I would never have ever dreamed that I could be part of the team working on
the very next rover that we landed on Mars.
Operating a rover on Mars is tricky even when the rover is working correctly, but when the
rover starts having problems, it takes the ingenuity of our entire team to try and figure
out how to solve it.
A heater stuck in the 'on' position.
The robotic arm didn't want to unstop.
Got stuck in a dune.
And elevated current in the right front wheel.
A massive dust storm.
We had to learn to drive with broken steering.
The gears were becoming worn on one side.
We had to get very creative very quickly.
Difficult terrain, navigating at high slopes, or having to survive for the winter by finding
places that are safe for the rover to park and hibernate over the winter.
I think to this day, you say 'dust storm' and it strikes a little needle of terror into
all of our hearts.
It's been a real fun challenge to have problems and try to work out solutions, discover what
we can do and think about ways we can solve them.
Do diagnostics.
Brainstorming.
Workaround.
Workarounds.
We're coming up with new workarounds to allow this hardware that is still functioning on
the surface of Mars to continue to function and return excellent science to the science
team.
So the next step was to go to endurance.
We saw really a rather narrow section of rocks in Eagle, and now we got a bigger section
of rocks in Endurance and it gave us a much richer story about how the evolution of this
environment occurred.
We got to Victoria we spent 2 years exploring it.
We went down into it, came back out, walked along the edge of it, peered over the edge
of the cliff... and we could see the dune forms that existed and which way they were
blowing the sediment, and a much clearer idea of the changes that occurred within the rocks
when they were buried.
Being a new student out of college coming to work on this mission, I was very optimistic.
I always believed it was going to work, against all odds we were gonna make it work and at
times it hits me, it makes me very emotional.
You can see me in some of the landing footage, I think I'm hyperventilating on screen when
we first saw the images come down from Mars.
It was so monumental to see the vastness of what we were doing.
This has been one heck of an adventure and its like a really good dream.
I never thought I'd be doing it but I wouldn't trade it for anything.
It took 3 years of driving.
Endeavor has this rim that sticks up real high and as soon as we pulled up to the rim
of that crater, everything changed.
It was like a new mission, a new landing site, it's like it started all over again.
We went from what had been a dominantly acid rich environment and now we see minerals and
materials at the surface that indicate everything that you perhaps needed to support life existed.
We have got fabulous science ahead of us and I don't really know what to expect, but from
orbit, we see compelling evidence that this is a place where there are clay minerals in
concentrations far greater than anything we have seen before.
If Mars was wet, could there have been life there too?
Are we an accident of the highest order?
Or will life form anywhere that liquid water is present?
To have the ability to answer questions of almost theological significance...
are we alone in the universe in a scientific manner, by having a presence on another planet.
I can't think of any better way for our civilization to go forward.
Every day we're shocked that it's still going, yet as engineers we're going to fight really
hard to make sure that it keeps going and going and going.
The most valuable thing we've learned from these rovers lasting so long is that if something
breaks, you can find, usually, something that will allow you to continue the mission even
though one item on the rover has stopped working.
We can even make changes on a rover that's hundreds of millions of miles away.
We can make the changes on Earth, test them out here, make sure they're gonna be good,
and then send them up to Mars.
A piece of equipment that has not ben serviced by human hands in over 10 years is still working.
I don't think your car works that good.
We're going to keep pushing the rover like we meant to ever since we landed and see what
we can see, see what's over the next hill or what's at the next crater.
Stay tuned, there's more to come from opportunity.