- [Narrator] Curiosity meet Perseverance.
(rover whooshes through space)
This NASA Rover just landed on Mars
more than 130 million miles from Earth.
Its task?
To continue the search for life on the red planet.
- [Mission Control Employee] Touchdown confirmed.
Perseverance, safely on the surface of Mars,
ready to begin picking the sands of past lives.
- So happy and so excited that things worked out today.
Anything that NASA does, I feel is for the knowledge
of, not only just our nation, but the world.
I not only want to share it with everybody far and wide,
but I specifically want to look back to my home community,
the place that I came from
and share with Indigenous communities,
share with the Navajo Nation
all the successes that are going on with NASA,
because I want them to feel part of it.
- [Narrator] The seven-month journey to Mars
for this Rover ended in a successful landing
in the Jezero Crater, a 3 billion-year-old Delta,
that scientists think might be home
to ancient microbial life,
back from when Mars was much wetter and warmer.
- If you want to set yourself up for success
for finding ancient life, that is a place to go.
- [Narrator] For two years, Perseverance will drill
into the Martian surface
in hopes of collecting fossilized microbes.
Here's how it'll work.
A sample tube is loaded inside a drill
at the end of the rover's arm.
- We had to come up with an entirely unique design
to drill into a lot of different rocks.
So it's actually a very sophisticated mechanism.
After we're done drilling the depth that we want to,
we do one final motion to extract the core
from the inside of the rock.
- [Narrator] Then the sample tube's prepared
for storage inside the Rover.
- We take the robotic arm with Martian sample inside of it,
and we dock it inside the belly of the Rover.
We want to inspect it.
We want to figure out how much volume we may have collected,
take some pictures of it,
and then we seal that tube
and then go put it back into our storage rack.
- [Narrator] Perseverance has no way of knowing
if it actually collected ancient microbes.
For that, the Martian samples
will have to return to Earth to be analyzed.
That'd be a first.
Current plans between NASA and the European Space Agency
involve sending another lander to Mars within the decade.
- Collecting samples on Mars
and bringing them back to Earth
is one of the most complex things
we've tried to do with one of our robots.
- [Narrator] But if we succeed
in bringing the samples back to study,
how do we know we won't accidentally find life
from Earth, microbes that hitched a ride on the spacecraft?
- We don't want to send an expensive vehicle,
like Perseverance, to Mars,
and then just detect ourselves
because we didn't work to make sure
that we kept the spacecraft and the instruments
and everything that it touches as clean as possible.
- You want to have a nice, pristine sample
without any Earth contamination.
So that's why we work really hard
to keep that spacecraft clean.
- [Narrator] To ensure there's no contamination,
researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
had to build an entirely new clean room.
- We take a normal clean room
and we start breaking everything down
to understand additional sources of contamination.
And how do we make that room even cleaner,
the gloves that they use,
how often they need to change gloves,
how often they have to change the gowns,
when we can reuse things,
even the computers that are used in there?
- [Narrator] Most importantly, the sample tubes
were designed to remain impeccably clean.
- The gold coating is a mixture of titanium and nitrogen
especially engineered in order to prevent organic compounds
from sticking to the surface.
These sample tubes are the cleanest things
that we've ever sent to another planet, by far.
In fact, these sample tubes
were probably the cleanest thing on Earth.
- [Narrator] But Perseverance isn't just collecting samples.
It's also testing technologies
that will take interplanetary exploration
to the next level.
A few months after landing,
Perseverance is dropping a tiny helicopter named Ingenuity.
Future explorers could use technology like this
to scout and survey the landscape.
The rover's also carrying a little gold box,
named Moxie, that'll run tests on turning small amounts
of the dangerous Martian atmosphere into breathable air.
These technologies might make it possible
for humans to inhabit Mars one day.
But before then, will we know
if life once existed on the red planet?
- Perseverance is playing a very critical role
in our understanding of our place in the universe.
And I think that's very noble.
- If life exists on Mars,
then almost certainly life has developed
all over the universe,
and the universe is teeming with life.
- Maybe we won't find anything,
and that will just tell us
that our one planet is so unique and miraculous.
- That question about life is the one that really perplexes
and, I think, really drives us.
Something about our desire to not be alone
keeps pushing us forward in the search for life.
- [Narrator] And the Perseverance Rover
now continues that search.
(inspirational orchestra music)