Narrator: This red dirt will be the most
expensive substance known to mankind –
if we can bring it back from Mars.
It will take three missions to collect and retrieve
less than 1 kilogram, or a little over 2 pounds.
One mission will examine and collect samples.
It launched from Earth in July 2020.
A second mission will gather the sample tubes
and launch them into Mars' orbit.
A third mission will bring the samples
back to Earth, and the total cost
will top $9 billion.
So what makes samples of the dirt on Mars
so important that NASA needs to bring them back?
Will they help us finally answer the question
of whether or not we are alone in the universe?
Mission Control: Heat shield sep.
Mission Control: Current speed is about
30 meters per second, altitude of about 300 meters
off the surface of Mars.
Narrator: The Perseverance rover landed on Mars
on February 18, 2021.
Mission Control: Touchdown confirmed.
Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars
ready to begin seeking the signs of past life.
Narrator: Percy, as the rover is nicknamed,
arrived after years of meticulous planning
and a seven-month voyage
through 300 million miles of space.
It's a feat, considering only 40%
of missions to Mars have been successful.
Scott Hubbard: And because it's all autonomous,
it has to work the first time.
Or for baseball fans out there,
space is a "one strike and you're out" business.
Narrator: Percy will spend two years
carrying out experiments and collecting samples
of Martian rock.
The mission costs NASA
$2.7 billion.
The rover is a mobile laboratory looking for signs
of life and answers to some of mankind's biggest questions.
If there was life on Mars,
exactly when?
What was it a billion years ago?
Was it 4 billion years ago?
Did it predate or
postdate life on Earth?
You might want to know that
because you might want to know, for example
where life originated first and maybe it's even possible.
Some people have suggested
that life could have gone from one planet to another.
Narrator: The rover is painstakingly searching for
and identifying rocks in Jezero crater,
the site of an ancient Martian lake bed.
Tanja Bosak: Even from space,
we can see that there was a lake
in this crater.
That lake has not been present for billions of years.
And so we need to reconstruct this history
and to tell a history of the place.
Narrator: NASA picked this lake bed
because it offers the best chance
of finding evidence of life.
It will be one of the
greatest discoveries
in human thought.
I mean, forget just science.
Narrator: Perseverance is the size of a small car,
built to analyze the Martian surface with cameras,
radar, X-rays, and spectrometers,
then collect samples with drills and even lasers.
But despite the cutting-edge technology,
the instruments are nothing compared to the much larger
and more capable instruments and labs found on Earth.
And to see microbes and fossils in rocks,
one needs to cut rocks, to look through them,
make three thin slices, and then use those microscopes.
And none of that is possible
with the current rover technology.
Narrator: A lot of the work before launch
focused on guaranteeing that evidence of life
gathered by Percy is in fact Martian life.
When we're sending
spacecraft to Mars,
we have to make sure that it's
clean enough so that we don't
contaminate the environment
that we are trying to explore.
Narrator: At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
in Southern California,
engineers and scientists cleaned and tested the spacecraft
to levels far beyond the most sterile operating room.
Moo: We've taken over 16,000 samples of the spacecraft.
We clean, we trust, but we always verify.
And we're also extra paranoid
about making sure it's clean.
So that's why it turned into 16,000, over 16,000 samples.
Narrator: When Neil Armstrong
returned with moon rocks,
they were stored in triple-sealed aluminum boxes
designed to protect their contents for about 10 days.
For this mission to Mars, engineers designed a system
to protect samples for up to 10 years.
With more than 3,000 moving parts,
NASA calls it the most intricate
and technologically advanced system sent to space.
There are 43 titanium tubes that hold a core sample
about the size of a piece of chalk.
Moo: The tubes are the cleanest thing
that we have built at JPL.
It's ridiculously pristine.
Narrator: There are clean rooms at JPL,
and clean rooms within clean rooms.
In a hyper-clean room,
scientists blasted the tubes with air,
used deionized water on them,
and dipped them in baths of acetone and other chemicals
to be ultrasonically cleaned.
Then they were cooked.
All of those tubes went through 150-degree-Celsius
bake-out for 29 hours.
Narrator: Each tube can only be filled once,
so choosing samples is the job of an entire team.
And the tools they use
are some of the costliest parts of Perseverance.
Tanja is on the team choosing those samples
Tanja: There's an instrument,
it can shoot laser beams at rocks and evaporate
and make plasma, and then analyze that plasma
to see what elements are present in rocks,
which can tell us a lot about the rock composition.
Narrator: But before Percy shoots space lasers,
it has to see where it's going and where to aim.
Jim Bell: Just like our eyes, Mastcam-Z
is a left eye and a right eye.
And the Z stands for zoom.
So these are zoom cameras.
They're the first zoom cameras
sent to another planet.
And they can go from wide angle all the way to telephoto,
very high resolution, with this matched view
to produce great stereo images.
Narrator: That's the most advanced of
23 on-board cameras
and takes nearly every picture or video
you will see from Mars for the next few years.
It's about $20 million for two cameras going to Mars,
plus its electronics.
Narrator: Like everything else on Percy,
it's built to withstand the extremes of Mars.
Jim: Every day on Mars it gets down to
almost minus 200 degrees Fahrenheit.
Maybe up to 20 or 30 degrees Fahrenheit.
Narrator: Sample collection will finish in 2023.
Almost a decade later, around 2031,
the samples will be picked up from Mars
and brought back to Earth.
NASA and the European Space Agency
are paying for the next two missions.
The European share is $1.8 billion,
while NASA's costs will likely be much higher.
First, a fetch rover will be sent to the Martian surface.
Scott: Its only job will be to go out,
grab the tubes, and bring them back.
Narrator: The fetch rover will then
transfer the collected tubes
into a rocket that lands with it.
Its purpose, another first,
blasting off from another planet.
Rocket fuel is explosive and heavy,
so NASA is developing a way to make fuel on Mars.
But Mars' atmosphere lacks oxygen,
a component of rocket fuel.
And that's where this gold square box
being lowered into Percy comes in.
MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen In-Situ
Resource Utilization Experiment,
converts the Mars atmosphere into oxygen.
If it works, the second lander mission
will carry a bigger MOXIE to create fuel.
Scott: So imagine that you have to build a rocket
that will launch from Earth, travel seven months,
land on Mars.
Then when the samples are put into the nose cone,
point to a certain place in the sky,
and with 99.999% reliability,
fire and then dock with a waiting spacecraft.
Big, tall order.
Narrator: That waiting spacecraft will launch from Earth
at about the same time the fetch rover does.
Once it arrives, it'll grab the basketball-sized case
containing samples.
Scott: And then that spacecraft,
using electric propulsion, is going to turn around
and fly back to Earth.
And once it gets close,
it will drop off the Earth entry vehicle.
And the Earth entry vehicle is basically a heat shield
with the samples inside.
And that Earth entry vehicle will then land
somewhere in Utah.
Narrator: NASA's independent review board
projected the total Mars Sample Return mission
at nearly $9 billion.
But that only gets us to a landing in the desert,
not studying the samples,
which will likely push costs into the double-digit billions.
The Apollo moon rocks came back to Earth more than
50 years ago and remain important to science today.
If this little amount of Martian dirt makes it back to Earth,
we will have a final cost.
But in the end, the value may be priceless.
So really we are doing this for the scientific community
in the decades, perhaps even centuries to come.