Mars...
Ever since we've looked up into the night sky,
that wandering point of light
has captured our imaginations.
Over the centuries, we've dreamt of finding life there.
And to find it,
we've sent more probes there to study it than to anywhere else.
We've even hoped that one day we might be able to travel
and live there ourselves.
MAN: Liftoff!
I think that it's inevitable
that we will go.
More than anywhere else, Mars represents a deep human desire
to study worlds beyond our own.
MAN: Touchdown, we have touchdown.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Really, I can't think about the science right now.
It's mind-boggling what has happened.
And we've certainly made more television about it
than any other planet in the solar system.
PATRICK MOORE: And just look at that -
craters on Mars, very similar to those of the moon.
Since The Sky At Night started, back in 1957, there have been over
50 episodes devoted to Mars...
..and over ten episodes of Horizon.
All these programmes have recorded
not only our shifting perceptions of Mars...
..but also the changes in how television presents
the story of the Red Planet.
We're doing something completely novel
and hanging it way out there!
So, tonight, we're looking back over more than 50 years
of the BBC's coverage of Mars.
BOTH: Welcome to The Sky At Night.
Good evening.
This is an extended and rather special Sky At Night,
because we've got a particularly interesting subject to talk about -
the Red Planet, Mars.
Now, this is a particularly good moment to look at Mars,
because it's as close to us as it can ever get,
only about 35 million miles away -
roughly 150 times as far away as the moon.
MUSIC: Mars, The Bringer Of War
by Gustav Holst
For the imaginations of men, Mars has been pretty stimulating,
long personified as the god of war.
It's a place we people with strange, hostile beings.
But the most imaginative story of Mars
has come not from literature,
but from the curiosity of men of science.
Astronomy was one of the first of the sciences.
Long before the Earth was charted, men had mapped the skies.
Amongst the stars, they noticed some that wandered strangely.
Calculations showed that one of them came very close to the Earth.
It was a near neighbour.
So, was it a world like ours?
Percival Lowell.
He was a wealthy American businessman, and no mean astronomer.
He discovered the planet Pluto, but he turned to Mars in the 1890s
after seeing drawings by an Italian, Giovanni Schiaparelli,
who had found faint linear features on the Martian surface.
He called them channels.
By 1900, Lowell had produced his own maps of Mars.
He said Schiaparelli's "canali" really were canals,
and the geometric and planet-wide construction
implied the work of rare intelligence.
That Mars is inhabited by beings of some sort or other,
we may consider as certain as it is uncertain
what those beings may be.
The canals themselves were never photographed.
They appeared to fleetingly, it was said, to be recorded
through the haze of Earth's atmosphere.
The first stage in the exploration of Mars, according to the Russians,
is going to be a flight over the planet's surface,
taking various measurements and photographs.
A few years after the orbiting trip,
an unmanned probe would be sent to the planet.
This would land on the Martian surface, and it's very similar
to the probes which have been sent to the moon.
The instrument package has a number of different experiments.
Here you see a sample of Mars dust being sucked up and then analysed
by examining its effect upon various chemicals.
This should establish whether or not there are any bacteria
in the Martian soil.
All the results, of course, will be radioed back to Earth.
What is Mars really like?
Before the probe era, we didn't really know.
But then, in 1965, came the probes,
and the first probe was Mariner 4.
This, the Mars Mariner unmanned spacecraft,
is designed to fly close to the planet Mars,
to take meaningful scientific measurements
and to relay to Earth its findings.
MAN: Spacecraft to internal power.
RADIO CHATTER
Liftoff!
HUBBUB OF CONVERSATION
The spacecraft is flying toward Mars,
about to pass within 6,000 miles of its surface and then out into space.
One pass - a single chance for everything to work.
At a range of 10,500 miles,
Mariner 4 began to take its pictures.
There were 22 in all.
The picture data were stored on magnetic tape.
For eight hours and 35 minutes,
the figures cascade to the Earth from the spacecraft.
240,000 bits of binary code,
representing the shading of 40,000 dots
that will finally make up the first pictures.
Converted to shades of grey,
this is what the first picture looked like,
a revelation comparable to Galileo's first view of the moon
through a telescope.
A beautiful picture.
HE LAUGHS
The pictures and data recorded by Mariner 4 revealed Mars
to be a cold, barren planet.
The atmosphere contains little or no oxygen,
and appears to be composed largely of carbon dioxide.
There were no obvious traces of the canals.
No evidence of life forms.
But the pictures cover only 1% of the Martian surface.
And the exploration of Mars, begun by Mariner,
will continue in the years ahead.
Now, you'll sometimes hear it said
that there may be plant life on Mars.
But just to show you the fate of higher plants,
I brought along tonight two cacti.
This cactus has been quite healthily growing under Earth conditions.
This one here has spent one night under Martian conditions,
and I think you can see, without any doubt,
that it's got a distinctly "morning after" appearance.
In 1969, they tried again,
sending two spacecraft with more powerful cameras.
Good evening.
We've just had some amazing photographs sent back
by the American probe to Mars, Mariner 6.
Beginning with Mars, as seen by Mariner,
from a distance of more than 700,000 miles.
You can see there some of the dark areas, which may be vegetation.
Let's go in now to 463,000 miles.
And at the top we can see the polar snows of the northern hemisphere.
But when Mariner went past Mars at only about 2,000 miles,
we got the really spectacular pictures.
And just look at that -
craters on Mars very similar to those of the moon.
And the largest crater on that picture is about 160 miles across.
And remember, when Mariner took that picture, it was only about
as far from the surface of Mars as we are from Moscow.
Are they due to things hitting Mars, or are they volcanic?
I believe myself that most of them are likely to be volcanic,
but I remain to be proved wrong.
That's beautiful. That's beautiful.
Look at those little craters.
Mariner 9, yet another spacecraft,
only this one was to go into orbit around Mars
and eventually map the whole planet.
The prime tools of planetary exploration
are precision television cameras.
Sculptors carving from solid lumps of metal,
the cameras are on their last test before being fitted
to the spacecraft.
I don't expect you to believe it, but Mariner uses the equivalent
of the power of a 20-watt light bulb to send those incredible pictures
60 million miles from Mars back to Earth.
It's been computed that when the signal from that transmitter
actually arrives here, its strength is a billionth of a billionth
of a trillionth of a watt, or more easily expressed, perhaps,
less than the power of a smouldering cigarette.
It arrived in 1971 and saw nothing.
The entire planet was in the grip of a duststorm.
Through the dust appeared four dark spots,
and as the atmosphere cleared,
they were revealed as the summits of four enormous volcanoes.
They were giants, up to 20 miles high and 300 miles wide.
But more shocks were to come.
A scar on the equator
that the cameras revealed as a canyon of giant dimensions.
Geological models based on the photographs
showed it to be an earthlike rift, but on an unearthlike scale -
3,000 miles long, 50 miles wide and almost three miles deep.
Then, on Mariner 9's 331st revolution of Mars,
it sent back this...
..a picture 300 miles wide
of what looked like a dried-up river.
This is one of hundreds of little channels.
This is actually not so little,
this is a few hundred miles long.
Channels, which look for all the world,
as if they've been cut by running water.
The presence of the channels
meant that the old theories of the dead planet,
without enough atmosphere to have water, were gone.
It meant that this ugly theory was killed by the beautiful fact
of water being there and the chance for life being there.
Many people had in their fancy hope that the fact that Mars has polar
caps and an atmosphere, and seasons like the Earth, would indicate
that some day we would find the little green men and communicate
in brotherly fashion with them,
or fight them, or do whatever is appropriate.
But it's becoming more and more apparent that any kind of life
on Mars either is quite different
from the kind of life on Earth,
or must be quite rudimentary in its form.
On Mars, deadly ultraviolet radiation from the sun
penetrates to the surface.
Life forms on Mars may have silica shells to protect them
against this radiation.
We know that Mars is very dry.
Life forms on Mars may have developed special ways
of preserving their water content.
There may be a kind of plant,
an ice-eater with fine root-like probes,
searching not for liquid water, but searching the permafrost,
reaching down to get at that ice.
Well, I think that exploring space is a cultural activity.
It's much more than just science for science's sake.
When the Mariners photographed Mars,
it was grasped away from science fiction
and put into the role of science,
and it was a real place, although very strange.
As a consequence, in this last decade, really, the volume of space
that exists in the mind of men all over the world -
millions and millions of men - has expanded.
Good evening.
1976 could be the year of Mars,
the year in which we solve one of the most dramatic problems
in the whole of science -
is there life on Mars?
Now, this could happen,
because at the moment two American Viking rockets
are approaching Mars
and they're scheduled to make gentle landings there next summer
and send us back information direct from the surface,
and this could be the answer...
First of all, there are two eyes, and the eyes are even better
than those eyes, which a human being has.
They can see not only in colour, but also in stereo
and in the infrared part of the spectrum.
It has a sense of touch.
The meteorology boom tells it the temperature - whether or not
it's hot, whether or not it's cold - the relative humidity
and how much the wind is blowing.
It has an arm so that it can
extend out into the area around it
and pick up sand and bring it back to the other laboratories
which are on board the lander.
But by far the most important feature of the lander is its brain.
This particular brain, of course, is a computer.
It sits down inside the lander.
It's roughly the size of a suitcase, weighs 52 pounds
and has a vocabulary of 18,000 words.
This brain not only controls the lander in response
to the specific commands that we give it from the Earth,
but it makes decisions on its own.
And because it has this automatic intelligence,
it has really earned its name of "robot".
Gary, what do you think are the chances
of finding any life at all on Mars?
We're only looking at a couple of small stations,
so I would have thought the chances are probably quite slim
at this moment in time.
MAN: Descent confirmed. 1,200 feet. 140 feet per second.
But we can't tell and it could happen?
Oh, it could do, yes. That'd be... Firstly, delighted if it does.
I think we all will.
Nav is green for touchdown.
ACS is green, 1.5 degrees per second max. 0.2 Gs.
Three feet per second. Touchdown, we have touchdown.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
We have touchdown.
Camera one's on... We're looking good.
And there is the first piece
of information coming in. Here it comes.
Oh! Oh!
Say something, Peter.
Yeah, I'm supposed to say something at this point.
THOMAS LAUGHS
I'm just... I just... I just don't feel like talking! Uh...
Well, there are rocks. There are rocks, yes.
There's rocks, and...
There's... It's just...
Oh, it's just incredible to see that the...Mars, you know,
is really there.
And really, I can't think about the science right now.
Uh... My heart's beating fast.
And I had tears in my eyes this morning for the first time,
I guess, since I got married.
LAUGHTER
And...
It is... It's really an emotional experience.
I'm just... It's mind-boggling what has happened.
This is Mars, incredible pictures sent back from Viking,
showing a red, rock-strewn landscape under a pink sky.
And these pictures would've seemed science fiction
not so very many years ago.
Let me now show you the very first picture ever received
from the Martian surface itself.
There we can see the landing pad.
It's working, it's sending back information at this moment.
By the morning of the eighth day,
the arm had taken its first soil sample.
There was a clear trench on the surface
and the biological laboratories returned their analyses.
Across 200 million miles of space came the message
that was hoped to end three centuries of speculation.
It came appropriately, not in the language of men or Martians,
but in the chatter of a robot talking to a lifeless machine.
Viking did NOT detect life on Mars.
In particular, Viking could detect no organic compounds in the soil.
It's not that easy, uh, unless you're looking at an elephant,
to say that, uh, that something is alive or not.
It's not that easy.
The search for life on an alien planet
was always looked upon, even by the most passionate advocates,
as a long shot.
So, the fact that the tests that were flown have not yield
confidently positive results,
and that to most people, I think, including myself, the implications
is that the kind of life they were looking for is not there.
We did not find alien life forms.
There were no microbes.
Nothing could live in Martian soil.
Viking's mission was over,
and it had taken all our dreams of life on Mars with it.
After a decade of exploration,
it seemed that the dream of finding life on Mars died.
For the next 20 years, Nasa looked elsewhere.
There were other planets to explore
and the space shuttle programme grabbed the headlines.
But here on Earth, the dream endured.
There is slightly more realistic expectations.
And then, in 1996, came a remarkable announcement -
the possibility that Martian life had been discovered, here on Earth.
Today, rock 84001 speaks to us across all those billions of years
and millions of miles.
If this discovery is confirmed,
it will surely be one of the most stunning insights
into our universe that science has ever uncovered.
AIRCRAFT ENGINE HUMS
Each summer, a US expedition
heads south to hunt for meteorites.
WIND HOWLS
What a beautiful day!
WOMAN: Oh, it's just... It's fun, it's beautiful.
It's quiet, it's lonely.
In 1984, Robbie Score went to the Allan Hills region of Antarctica
to look for meteorites.
WIND GUSTS
When you find a meteorite, it's just really exciting.
A neat chondrite. Yeah, another one. And some size.
OK!
We ran into the rock.
Uh, I remember, it was bigger than other rocks
that we had been collecting, and because of the brightness
of the area and the colour of the snow and ice, and the dark glasses,
it had a very green tint to me.
One evening, we came across a region
that appeared to be a little different
from what we had normally seen.
And we kept scanning in and scanning in at a higher magnification,
and...and we saw something that caught our eye.
And we said, "What is that?".
We found this structure.
It had 10 to 12 segments in it and appeared to have a head
and appeared to have a tail.
And, uh, we looked at each other and kind of looked, with this look,
that says, "This can't be".
I went home and that night I had difficulty sleeping.
I was saying, "Could we have a microfossil here from Mars?"
If it can be established that life has arisen on Mars
quite independently of Earth, then, in my view,
that would be a discovery more profound
than the work of Copernicus and Darwin and Einstein put together.
It would truly be the most amazing scientific discovery of all time.
Let's move to today's exciting story, a detective story.
The scientists will lay out for you how an ancient rock
found its way from Mars and it got to Earth.
The sample which we're reporting on here today is a very unique sample.
It is four-and-a-half billion years old.
We have a number of forms, which it is very tempting for us
to interpret as Martian microfossils.
I don't agree with the Nasa team.
I think what we've seen are individual strands of evidence
and they take the individual strands and they plait them together
to make a rope, to make a story.
And I don't think that we are ready to go that far.
We believe we've found the remains of bacteria-like organisms.
These wiggly, worm-like growths
may be, may be the remains of organisms which once
wiggled around in the Martian oceans.
I must say, I'm highly sceptical, but who knows?
And we may know a great deal more after next Friday,
when the first Mars probe - Pathfinder - actually gets to Mars.
MAN 1: Five, four, three, two, one...
And we have liftoff,
as America begins its journey back to the Red Planet.
MAN 2: ..good symmetrical burn on all...
Pathfinder is just the first of a dozen missions
that will explore the Red Planet over the next decade.
These missions have been given unexpected importance
by the meteorite, ALH84001, which is believed to come from Mars.
Pathfinder, and the spacecraft that follow it,
will find out whether Nasa is right,
whether there really is life on Mars.
Here we have the lander,
with the rover sitting on one of its pedals.
And what happens is that Pathfinder is going to enter the atmosphere
and then some rockets on the backshell fire.
ROCKETS FIRING
ONLOOKERS: Whoa! Whoo!
And then before we hit the surface, it gets very exciting.
Some great, big air bags - twice the size,
twice as tall as this room - pop out,
surrounding the lander and protecting it,
and bounce as high as a five-storey building, and roll and tumble
across the Martian landscape.
When they finally stop bouncing, then we deflate the air bags
and they're tucked in under the pedals here, as you can see,
so that they won't flop over the solar panels.
And then out came the little Sojourner rover
and started sending back information about the Martian rocks.
At this stage, I'm delighted to welcome back
our Mars expert, Dr Peter Cattermole.
Welcome back, Peter. Thanks.
Well, what do you think about Pathfinder?
Oh, absolutely amazing.
It's exceeded most people's wild expectations.
It's extremely exciting.
There are two parts of this mission -
we mustn't forget the other part.
The Sojourner is, perhaps, to many people,
the most exciting part... Yes.
..but, of course, there is the probe itself,
which has the panoramic camera.
The first view of the landing site
sent back by the cameras on Pathfinder
revealed a rock-strewn plain, just like the boulder fields
left by catastrophic floods on Earth.
We saw perched rocks that were kind of sitting on a very small little...
..as if it had been deposited by this flood and actually scoured
as water had run past it.
So, a whole suite of things like that, observational evidence,
which very, very strongly argues that this site is exactly
what we thought it would be from orbit.
Pathfinder confirmed that the vast Martian channels had been carved
by enormous floods.
So what does this mean for the chances of finding life?
Some of these floods seem to be quite recent.
So did Mars remain warm and wet for billions of years?
For a planet to support life,
there is one vital ingredient it must have,
one special substance which any alien anywhere will need.
The search for life is the search for water.
Life involves complex chemical reactions, and as far as we know,
complex chemistry needs water.
Liquid water is the absolute key, fundamental, one and only,
must-have-it requirement for life.
No liquid water, no life.
It's just as simple as that.
But many scientists just wouldn't accept that rivers had once
flowed on Mars.
The Viking images still weren't good enough to settle the argument.
Then, in 1998, Mars Global Surveyor arrived, equipped with the latest
high-resolution electronic cameras.
Peter, various probes are on their way to Mars.
Yes, Patrick, it's an exciting time.
It's... It's about 20 years since the last spacecraft, Viking,
landed on Mars.
And we have liftoff of Nasa's Mars Global Surveyor,
as America begins its journey back to the Red Planet.
It's going to arrive on September 11.
It's only an orbiting probe
and it's going to do some more mapping for us.
RADIO CHATTER
And they're getting superb pictures from MGS - Mars Global Surveyor,
now going round the planet.
Look at this picture of Martian weather, which is quite amazing.
Can you summarise what MGS has told us?
Simple question, Patrick. Difficult to answer.
The problem being that it's told us so much
that Mars is really a completely different world
from the one we thought it was a couple of years ago.
Sections of the valleys were revealed in fantastic detail.
But these amazing pictures were still no use.
These valleys had all been eroded and filled in with sand.
It was impossible to say how they'd been formed.
Then after they'd searched through thousands of images,
they struck gold - a winding valley, two kilometres wide,
and at a bend in the canyon, a tiny channel,
the unmistakable trace of an ancient river.
So, Mars must once have been warm and wet, like the Earth.
It had rain and flowing rivers.
Then, at some point, the atmosphere must have thinned
and the planet cooled.
The flowing rivers iced over and froze.
But when did the rivers stop flowing?
Was there time enough for life to emerge before the last traces
of liquid water vanished from Mars?
Our whole attitude towards life and a planet is different now
than it was back in 1976.
We have gone through a revolution in thinking.
We're looking at what could be a Mars that had life,
but doesn't have life any more.
With the successes of Pathfinder and Global Surveyor,
a new age of Martian exploration could begin.
But these successes hit a stark truth -
getting to Mars is hard, landing on Mars is harder.
Over half of all missions have failed.
And for the Russians in particular,
Mars has always proved a step too far.
They got close, but the problem is
it doesn't take much to get it wrong.
LOUD EXPLOSION
Despite a string of triumphs at the moon and Venus,
the Russians have been appallingly unlucky at Mars.
None of the 14 missions they've sent there has fully succeeded.
In the spring of 1971,
two new Soviet missions thundered off to Mars.
Mars 2 and Mars 3 would orbit the planet
and attempt a landing on the surface.
Viktor Kerzhanovich was at Mission Control for the landing of Mars 3.
It was exciting when you got this data,
when it started transmitting,
and great disappointment when it stopped transmitting in 40 seconds,
and you could not do anything else.
LOUD EXPLOSION
The Soviet Union has launched its second unmanned spacecraft
in five days.
It's on a mission to Mars
and its tiny moon, Phobos.
I'm afraid I have got to begin with some rather unfortunate news.
The Russians launched two space probes to the neighbourhood
of the planet Mars.
Well, sadly, one of those probes has now ceased to function.
LOUD EXPLOSION
The Great Galactic Ghoul is the monster that lives
in the vicinity of Mars and gobbles up spacecraft.
Surely you knew that?!
The Ghoul patrols the perimeter of Mars
and has chomped on Russian spacecraft, and, uh...
..and now here's the first bite out of a US spacecraft.
Now, it's a mistake many of us have made,
but then most of us aren't in charge of missions into space.
Scientists at Nasa couldn't work out why the Mars Orbiter -
worth a small £78 million -
got lost in space until someone pointed out
that they'd planned everything in feet and inches,
rather than metres and centimetres.
Eight days ago, as it approached the Red Planet,
contact with the craft was lost.
This was the moment when Nasa scientists realised something
had gone horribly wrong.
The American space agency, Nasa,
is on the verge of having to admit to another embarrassing failure.
The Mars Polar Lander would be the second spacecraft
that it's lost in just two months.
And there's still no convincing explanation for what might
have gone wrong.
Three days on, and still no sign of their lost lander.
Nasa engineers had thought it was just a case
of a misdirected communications antenna.
Now it looks likely that the spacecraft
could be seriously damaged.
We now know there are no Martians, no little green men,
but there may be primitive life and we hope Beagle 2 will tell us.
What do you think are the chances of success,
and what do you really think is going to come out of it
compared with previous probes?
Well, there's a sort of about a 50% chance of success
with Martian probes.
We like to think that we have thought
as hard about this problem as we can,
and if we don't succeed,
it won't be because people haven't tried hard enough.
We've tried our utmost.
Well, I think it will succeed.
It is a British project, and many congratulations, Colin.
If this works - and I think it will -
going to have the most exciting thing,
well, in human history probably.
The full discovery of possible life on another world.
I'll come back and tell you about it, Patrick. Please do.
It was a long, tense wait through the night.
Would Britain's first mission to another planet actually make it?
Before dawn, the mastermind of the Beagle 2 project, Colin Pillinger,
was on the line to Nasa.
The hope? That one of its spacecraft had picked up the first signal.
I'm afraid it's a bit disappointing, but it's not the end of the world.
Please don't go away from here
believing that we've lost this spacecraft.
British scientists have again failed to make contact
with the Beagle 2 spacecraft.
It was their fifth attempt to get in touch.
We may never know what happened.
And it'll join the many landers that have disappeared
on the Martian surface.
For the time being, the mother craft, Mars Express,
will carry on flying over Beagle's landing site.
Its powerful cameras will try to spot the lander's parachutes.
By contrast, Nasa's Spirit rover, ironically carrying
less-sophisticated scientific equipment, landed safely,
and is sending back superb images of Mars.
Is Mars a world that has fossils?
Nasa has committed itself to finding out.
It has embarked on a series of missions to scour the planet
for signs of ancient life.
Nasa sent rovers that arrived on Mars in 2004,
equipped with drills and microscopes
to help them search the planet's surface.
Steven Squyres is the mission designer.
This is totally different from Viking.
The objective in Viking was to test the idea
that there are, today, on Mars, microbes living in the soil.
That's not what this is about.
What we are trying to do is we're trying to study
what the environment was like long ago, whether or not there was life
there back then, that today would be present only in fossils,
you know, in some kind of remnant form.
Suppose we find on Mars
evidence that life actually did come into being.
There's a chance that the record of that process, the process of life
coming into being from non-living material, that record is still there
to be read in the Martian geologic record.
So, it may be that by going to Mars, we can actually understand better
where we came from.
The rovers were designed to look for clues that would tell us
what the environment was like.
When we went into this, I never liked...
..I never liked taking the attitude,
"We're going there to try to find evidence of water".
That's the wrong attitude to take. That's not science.
Well, you know, Mars is what Mars is.
I mean, our job was to go there and find out what Mars was like.
And if it turned out that Mars had never had water at these two sites,
well, so be it.
Spirit landed successfully, got off the lander just fine,
and everything worked, but we landed on lava.
So, we came looking for evidence of water
and all we were finding was volcanic rocks.
Opportunity, on the other hand, um, rolled to a stop
inside a little, tiny 20-metre diameter impact crater.
And we opened our eyes and we looked,
and the very first thing that we saw, seven metres away in the wall
of that crater, was the spectacular outcrop of layered bedrock.
And within just weeks,
we found out that it was largely made of sulphate salts,
we found the ripples, evidence for water, all of that,
and, I mean, it just all happened in six weeks.
It was remarkable.
By 2010, we knew that vast quantities of water had once flowed
on the Martian surface.
It seems that life really could have existed there.
So, the next challenge was to find fossils, or evidence that liquid
water was around long enough for life to take hold.
But many dreamt not of ancient Martian life,
but of human footprints in the red sand.
But the first problem in realising that dream is simply getting there.
By the year 2020,
the first astronauts could be blasting off for Mars.
They will be embarking on an epic voyage.
But Mars is a very different proposition to the moon.
Lying 56 million kilometres from Earth,
Mars is over 140 times further away.
With current technology, a return journey would take around
three years, and require a team of four to eight astronauts.
Anyone who thinks this is Apollo with bigger rockets
needs to think again.
For now, this is Nasa's best vision of what a rocket bound for Mars
would look like.
MAN: ..eight, seven, six, five, four... We've gone...
But if you're going all the way to Mars,
a single rocket of this size is not enough.
Nasa estimates that they will need at least seven launches
to get all the equipment they need up into space.
The fuel, the food, the Mars lander, all will need to be launched
into Earth's orbit and then assembled in space,
much as the space station has been.
Only then will it be ready to leave Earth's orbit.
As well as all their experience in space,
the Russians have a history of ground-based research
into the long-term damage that space does to the body.
The best Earth simulation of weightlessness
is lying down with your head slightly lower than your body.
This volunteer has been in bed for a year.
MACHINE BEEPS
Just as would happen in space,
with no stress on his body, he's suffering bone loss
and his muscles have been wasting away.
His heart capacity has shrunk.
Even short bouts of exercise are now exhausting.
Until Dr Valeri Polyakov
completed a world record 14 months' space flight two years ago,
no-one was sure humans could survive
the complete return journey to Mars.
Far from the protection of the Earth's magnetic field,
the crew are exposed to the dangers of space - solar flares.
MACHINE BEEPS
The full dose of radiation from a solar flare
will kill within hours.
ERRATIC BEEPING
With only a few minutes' warning
to clamber into their radiation chamber,
the crew might have to spend a week sitting out the cosmic storm.
Even so, anyone signing up for Mars
will have to accept a heavy dose of radiation.
Uh, I think when someone sees planet Earth about the size of Venus,
that they're going to... it's really going to set in
that they may never return to that planet.
It's like a voluntary death, in a way, in which you say goodbye
to family and friends, and humanity.
You say goodbye to the entire thing,
even though you are picking up a life, a new life out there.
It is not going to be a sightseeing tour.
I think a large part of the journey is just going to be something folks
have to get through till they reach their goal.
It's the only planet out there where one can reasonably expect
that humans could go and establish themselves permanently,
for whatever reason.
You can... People could go and live on Mars.
They can't go and live on Jupiter, but they can go and live on Mars.
And I think just because it's-it's available,
almost we have the capacity to go there already,
that it's inevitable that we will go.
Sooner or later, there'll be a manned colony on Mars,
and here you see the domes which will provide the conditions
necessary for life.
The Russians think there'll also have to be huge water towers,
possibly pumping water up
from far below the surface.
It all looks fascinating, but I wonder what life
in a Martian colony is really going to be like.
WIND HOWLS
The Russians know more about survival in space
than any other nation.
In Siberia, for years they worked in secret on space colonies.
At Krasnoyarsk, in the Biophysics Research Institute,
three crew members spent six months sealed into Bios-3.
All their water was recycled.
Their urine, the humidity from their sweat and breath,
were used by humans and plants alike.
Normally, it would take acres of open field
to support a human being.
In Bios-3, the crew grew wheat, threshed it and finally
baked their own unleavened bread.
The carbon in these grains
had been eaten and breathed out several times.
Now they were to eat it again.
FOREBODING MUSIC
I've finally discovered the source of the terrific power Ming controls.
The power is derived from a strong beam of light
reflected from pure Thorlinium,
a new element which gives the light great properties
and permits it to be transformed into other forms of energy.
Where'd the light come from?
Where all light and power originates - the sun.
MAN SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN
Capturing sunlight from space is no longer science fiction.
Last week, the Russians made a first trial orbit of a small mirror
to reflect sunlight back to Earth.
They hope eventually to orbit much larger mirrors
to lighten the Siberian twilight.
But warming a whole planet would call for gargantuan engineering.
The mirror would need to be about a third the area of Mars itself.
Terraforming proponents in the British Interplanetary Society
have done some calculations of the kind of mirror required.
Possibly the simplest arrangement for such a mirror is an annulus
around Mars at a distance of perhaps 25,000 kilometres
and maybe a strip some 300 kilometres wide.
The mirror, as a whole, is in orbit about Mars.
The pressure of light from the sun blows the mirror away from Mars,
but the planet's gravity pulls it back.
These forces balance.
It wouldn't be a rigid structure.
Very thin, it would float in orbit.
At this stage, this is all purely theoretical.
This is a very simple crude structure, which, although large,
should be quite easy to construct.
So far as putting men on Mars to explore it, like we're doing
with the moon, is that going to be more difficult or easier
than in the case of the moon?
It would clearly be more difficult simply because of the distance
and time factors involved.
I think the question to ask is, is it sensible?
What are the functions of men in space?
Are they simply to go and make footprints and plant flags,
or are they to do something useful?
In the case of man to Mars, it seems to me that we must exploit
the possibilities of unmanned spacecraft there,
far more than we have so far,
before we would even think of sending...
..or even having to send a man there.
It isn't that we shouldn't because he would be unsafe,
it's simply that there's no need to because we can do so much more
without man and at so much less expensive.
The very first rover to land on Mars
was this little thing.
This is Sojourner
that landed in the mid-90s,
but things have moved on since then, of course.
We've got Spirit and Opportunity.
Opportunity is still going strong,
reaching Endeavour Crater not so long ago.
And then come over here. Look at this big beast.
This is a full-scale replica of Curiosity,
the next rover to land on Mars,
and it's going to change everything we know about how to do science
on the Red Planet.
RADIO CHATTER
It's so ambitious, it's so audacious, it's so unconventional.
We're doing something completely novel
and hanging it way out there!
Um...
You feel exposed.
As chief architect of Curiosity's landing sequence,
Adam Steltzner has gone through each part of it
over and over in his head.
But for now, it only exists in his imagination,
and in this Nasa animation...
We show up at this near six-kilometre-a-second speed,
we burn a hole in the sky of Mars for about 100 kilometres long.
We are not slowing down very much
because there's not enough atmosphere to help us out.
So, eventually, we have to pop a parachute.
It takes us down to about 100 metres a second -
200 miles an hour almost.
Uh, you don't want to hit the surface of Mars like that.
So, about a couple of kilometres from the surface,
we take this great leap of faith...
..and cut ourselves free, light our rockets
and start our descent to the surface.
We slow ourselves all the way down,
and then 20 metres above the surface we do this...
..kind of crazy thing...
..called the "sky crane manoeuvre".
Buzz-zzzz...
The average person on the street... thinks it's crazy.
Even the team that's working it... sometimes we think it's crazy.
The strange part is it's actually the result
of reasoned engineering thought.
MAN: Received on Mars.
ALL WHOOP AND CHEER
RADIO CHATTER
CHEERING ECHOES, LAUGHTER
COLLEAGUE: Say something profound.
LAUGHTER
I am terribly humbled by this experience.
There is a new picture of a new place on Mars.
And for me, at least, that's the big payoff.
CHEERING
So, Curiosity's first goal is actually the goal of habitability.
Were there conditions on ancient Mars that were suitable for life
to have formed in, existed in and been preserved in?
These are sedimentary layers,
and what these are recording is basically progressive
build-up of sediment on the Martian surface.
OK, so something's depositing regular layers of sediment.
OK, well, let's have a look.
We can add the next image. There we go.
It's coming. Coming up!
That's a big image. It's a big image. OK.
The rock is actually a mudstone, it's a very, very fine-grained rock.
And we interpret these layers
to have actually formed in an ancient lake.
So, long-lived is important, right?
Cos that tells us that not only was there water on Mars,
there was water on Mars that persisted for quite some time.
That's right. We've got hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years
of sedimentation in a long-lived lake.
A big result from Curiosity is that we have these long-lived lakes
that provided the conditions that were suitable for life,
if it had ever arisen.
Mars...
..the Red Planet.
A world similar to ours in so many ways, yet also totally alien.
A world waiting to be explored.
Many scientists believe that the first person to set foot
on its surface is alive today.
Someone, somewhere,
looking up into the night sky and glimpsing the small, rusty planet
may one day make the journey there.
They may even discover the first alien life.
Perhaps it's someone watching this film.
Perhaps it's you.
From the very beginning, our exploration of Mars
has been a search for life, but to date, we haven't found any.
So, this could be a story of crushing disappointment.
But it isn't, because we HAVE discovered that all the conditions
we think life needs to spark into existence were present,
and so we just have to keep on looking.
You may never find evidence of life on Mars, but that doesn't matter.
Mars isn't just a place,
it's a continuing story of exploration, of scientific
and technological achievement.
And it's that story that we've tried to bring to your screens,
at least that was Patrick's hope way back in 1967.
When you're trying to keep people abreast of what's happening,
though, there is a certain difficulty,
because you've got to try and hit the right level.
If I made these programmes
too technical, well, then,
people who are not used to astronomy would get...
..would be simply lost, and that would be no good at all.
If, on the other hand, I kept them too elementary,
the result would be simply boring.
What one's got to try and do is to hit a middle course,
so to speak.
Whether I succeeded in doing that, I don't know,
but at least I've done my best.
Goodnight.