we first told you about the tiny helicopter ingenuity and the one-ton rover perseverance
nearly a year ago before they left earth but they've come a very long way
since then in february they landed in a hazardous and previously unexplored part of mars called the
jezreel crater where perseverance will be looking for signs of ancient life
last month ingenuity disconnected from perseverance's belly and made history
performing the first flights ever in the atmosphere of another planet
it's hard to imagine but worth remembering as you watch what we're about to show you
that this all happened millions of miles away in outer space the story will continue in a moment
last month in this desolate martian crater 170 million miles from earth perseverance posed for
a selfie with ingenuity the little helicopter it had just dropped off two weeks later the rover's
cameras recorded ingenuity's historic first flight hovering 10 feet off the ground for 30 seconds
it may not look like much but for those who'd worked so long to make it happen it was a reason
to rejoice project manager mimi ong led the team at nasa's jet propulsion laboratory in california
that's been working on ingenuity for six years how hard is it to fly helicopter in mars
very very very hard we really uh truly started with the question of is it possible a lot of
people thought it could not be done because it's really counterintuitive i mean you need atmosphere
for the blaze to push atmosphere to get lived the atmosphere on mars is completely different
than the world the atmosphere at mars is so thin i mean the room we're in right it's compared to that
it was one percent of the atmospheric density over there so the question of really can you
generate enough lift you know to really build to lift up anything that was a fundamental question
in subsequent flights ingenuity has gone longer and farther traveling for about two minutes and
nearly the length of three football fields it is a triumph not only for nasa but for its
partners in the private sector who help make various parts of the helicopter don't let it
go don't freak out matt keenan has a history of making unusual things that can fly he's an
engineer at a company called aerovironment which produces drones for military and civilian use
i mean that's incredible ten years ago for a military research project keenan and his
team created this robotic hummingbird which has a tiny camera on board whoa
there it is oh my god that's amazing keenan and engineer ben pipenberg led the
aerovironment team that created ingenuities rotors motors and landing gear why was this
so challenging because it has to be a spacecraft as well as an aircraft and and flying it as
an aircraft on mars is pretty challenging because of the density of the air that's similar to about
earth at 100 000 feet how do you go about it well so building everything extremely lightweight is
really really critical the helicopter's blades for example are made of a styrofoam
like material coated with carbon fiber yeah looks like they're stiff and strong
get a sense of how lightweight and stiff that is i mean it's nothing yeah it weighs nothing
but incredibly light here we go taking off this is the first time they've shown an outsider
this version of ingenuity which they plan to use for education and research they call it
terry a lift off here on earth terry's blades are spinning at about 400 revolutions per minute
on mars in the thin atmosphere they'd have to spin six times faster to generate the same lift
ingenuity costs 85 million dollars to build and operate terry a lot less but it's still
nerve-wracking to be handed its controls all right go ahead you've got it slide it right you can push
it all the way to the right if you want slide left wow i'll bring it up a little bit now stop
the joysticks we use to fly terry are of no use on mars radio signals take too long to get there
all right let me take over now i've switched you out and we'll go back to the even someone
is good at flying drones and hummingbirds as matt keenan couldn't fly a helicopter on mars here's
what happened in 2014 in a test chamber that replicated the atmosphere on mars when keenan
tried to use a joystick to fly an early version of ingenuity surprise wow all right so much for
that vehicle so this very quick demonstration as it should you a human being can't respond quickly
enough to control it exactly so engineers at the jet propulsion laboratory equipped ingenuity
with a computerized system that allows it to stabilize itself and navigate on its own
in 2016 the new system aced the chamber test the blades are being commanded you know four or five
hundred times per second they proved it could fly but ingenuity still had to weigh under four pounds
and fit in the belly of perseverance five four engine ignition two one and it had to be tough
enough to survive the journey to mars and liftoff on july 30th 2020 perseverance and ingenuity
took off from cape canaveral nearly seven months later as this simulation shows the spacecraft's
heat shield hit the martian atmosphere going 12 000 miles per hour perseverance ready to execute
entry descent and landing on her own as he sat in the control room al chen the leader of the landing
team had absolutely no control radio signals would take about 11 minutes to travel from earth to mars
the spacecraft was pre-programmed to descend maneuver and pick a landing site on its own
all the work his colleagues hoped to do on mars would be impossible if his part of the
mission failed how long have you been working on this mission coming up on nine years or so
really that's a lot of work for seven minutes nine years of work seven minutes of terror
it's done if the parachute doesn't work that's right you know no one wants to be that
the guy that drops the baton no landing by a spacecraft has ever been recorded as well
as this one there were six cameras capturing it all from different angles the parachute deployed
then the heat shield fell away like a lens cap and perseverance got its first look at the ground
this is not a simulation this is what it looks like to parachute onto mars
how fast is it moving at this point yeah we're still going about 350 miles an hour and still
slowing down so it looks gentle here but in fact it's falling at more than 300 miles an hour that's
right we're heading straight down at near race car speeds below lay a series of safe landing
spots but the wind was blowing the spacecraft towards more treacherous territory to the east
and perseverance sent a message to earth saying the thrusters it needed to slow down
might not be working properly so you get a reading saying the jets that are going to help it slow
down and control the landing that they're not working so what do you do there's nothing you can
do right everything's already happened that's the mind-bending part of this right you are sweating
now yeah exactly i'm right back there again so yeah altitude of about 300 meters to alchem's
relief perseverance's computerized landing system did what it was designed to do it found a suitable
landing spot even in rocky terrain and despite the warning the thrusters worked you can see
them kicking up dust as they fire to slow the spacecraft down skyteam maneuver has started
the descent stage known as the sky crane lowered perseverance to the ground it hovered for a moment
then flew off to crash a safe distance away and there goes the descent touchdown confirmed
on the surface so at that point big sigh of relief you know i almost collapsed over this console
ever since perseverance landed on the red planet a team of engineers programmers and
scientists here on earth have been living on mars time it's their job to monitor the
rover's health and tell it where to go and how to search for signs of life while perseverance
sleeps to conserve energy during the freezing martian nights the team on earth analyzes the
photographs and instrument readings it's sent back they then prepare a list of things for it to do
the following morning when it wakes up and so it's just after midnight on mars the vehicle is asleep
project manager matt wallace explained that a day on mars is 40 minutes longer than on earth
the team's schedule is constantly changing so all the people here are mars night shift workers
yeah that's a good way to think of it yeah but i mean working night shift is tough enough but
this is a night shift that's constantly constantly moving that's right yeah on perseverance's fourth
day on mars it swiveled the powerful camera on its mask and took a look around a space enthusiast
named sean doran put the images together set them to music and posted the movie on youtube even one
of the top scientists on the project was moved when he saw it you know i went and got a beer and
watched this thing scroll by and and that moment that was the moment when i felt like i was there
ken furley leads the science team that will direct perseverance through the jezreel crater
it's an area that scientists have long wanted to search for signs of ancient life that may be
hidden in the rocks the oldest evidence of life on earth is about three and a half billion years old
those rocks were deposited in a shallow sea this crater that you see here was a lake three and a
half billion years ago so we are looking at the same environment in the same time period on two
different planets and if it's determined however long in the future that no there was not ever
life what does that mean the place where perseverance landed here in jezreel crater
is the most habitable time period on mars and the most habitable environment that we know about this
is this is as good as it gets at least with our current understanding of what mars has to offer
and if we don't find life here it does make us worry that perhaps it doesn't exist anywhere
perseverance hasn't strayed far from its landing site yet but its telescopic camera has already
spotted a large number of boulders that ken farley says he didn't expect to see in the middle of an
ancient lake so this has surprised you absolutely yeah so what did those boulders tell you
the most reasonable interpretation is a flood you don't have fast flowing water out in the
middle of the lake you get fast flowing water in a river and so what that's telling us is
there was a river that was capable of transporting boulders that were this big so what the lake would
have gone down perhaps and then later on there was a flood yeah exactly perseverance
was supposed to leave ingenuity behind after a 30-day demonstration of its flying ability
the nasa officials recently said they'll keep the duo together for another month
to explore how rovers and helicopters might work together in the future fastest the perseverance
was designed to travel is a tenth of a mile per hour ingenuity has already gone 80 times faster
according to project manager mimi ong adding an aerial vehicle a flying vehicle for space
exploration will be game changing it frees you in a way absolutely yes so a flying vehicle
a rotorcraft would allow us to get to places we simply can't access today like slice of
steep clips you know inside deep crevices after perseverance explores the floor of jezreel crater
it'll head towards what's believed to be the remnant of an ancient river delta where billions
of years ago conditions should have been right for microorganisms to exist as this simulation shows
the rover's robotic arm can collect about 40 core samples of rock that'll be sealed in special tubes
and left on the planet's surface nasa plans to send another mission to mars to retrieve the tubes
and bring them back to earth in about 10 years ken farley says scientists examining those samples may
be confronted with a new and perplexing question how do you look for life that may not be life as
you know it we've never had to do that before we've never had to actually ask the question is
there a form of life that we can't even conceive of yeah we're gonna have to conceive of it i think
that's the whole point of this we're going to have to start conceiving of life as we don't know it
if all goes according to plan perseverance will be making tracks on mars for years to come
since its carrying the first working audio microphones on the red planet will leave you with
what it sounds like as the one ton rover slowly moves across the vast lonely expanses of mars
explore the martian surface this is something that we've never done before
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