It takes its name from the Roman God of War,
a distant, rusty orb in the night sky,
a source of rampant speculations for centuries.
Could it be home to a rival civilization ?
Is there really a face on its surface ?
This intriguing planetary neighbor still captivates us.
And as both a potential base for future colonization.
And the keeper of 4 billion year old biological secrets.
Mars, the red planet
may hold the keys to both our future and our past.
The Universe 1x02 - Mars, the red planet
If human beings ever inhabited another world in our solar system,
this is the most likely candidate.
The red planet, Mars.
To a visitor from Earth, a tour of Mars
might be very reminiscent of places back home.
Places like Southern California's Mojavi Desert.
Geo- and astro-biologist Ken Nealson,
find this desert area, so much like Mars,
he comes here to try to better understand conditions on the red planet.
You travel around here in the doom baggy and you'll see
features that look just like the doom features on Mars.
If you go further and look in the background, and see all of this red hills,
full of iron oxydes that we see on Mars.
Mars is filled with iron,
and its oxidized iron, basically rust, turns into dust particles
and in addition to the beautiful dunes, you have this red atmosphere
sometime red all over the surface of the planet.
Huge dust storms.
They don't call it the red planet for nothing.
But while much of the martian terrain is similair to Earth,
some geological features dwarf,
any of there kind on our home planet,
a mountain named the Olympus Mons, latin for mount Olimpus,
is the tallest known peak in the solar system.
It's a know dormed volcano, that rises fifteen miles above the martian surface.
If you took a picture of Olympus mons,
an put it next to mount Everest, and
and the big island of Hawaii, even taken all the way down to the base of the ocean,
they look like molehills, compared with Olympus Mons on Mars.
That mount is so large you can be on its slopes
and you would not know that you're on a slope of a volcano
because the based is so huge, before you get to its sommit.
Yet, as inspiring as the martian surface appears,
it is a brutal, inhospitable zone for human beings.
Green board...
5... 4... 3... 2... 1...
Engine start and lift off of the delta 2 rocket
carrying the Spirit from Earth to planet Mars.
It's cold, it's dry, it's desolated,
there are dust storms, that can darken the skies for weeks, even months at a time.
It goes down to a hundred degrees below zero
at night, every night.
Compounding this cool conditions, is an atmosphere with no oxygen.
Martian air and even occasional clouds formations
are made up almost entirely of carbon dioxide.
So it's not a nice place, you wouldn't enjoy it, if you're right there.
Mars is small, relative to the Earth.
Only about half the size of our planet.
Its distance from us it's never less than 34 million miles.
It appears as nothing more than a tiny red orb in our night sky.
Even so, Mars has captivated human kind for centuries.
The planet takes its name from the Roman God of war.
The Romans associated this distant world with ostility and unrest,
because of its blood-like colour, and because of its distinctive movement in the sky.
Mars wonders. It doesn't do what the stars do.
The red planet occasionally appears to be moving backward across the sky.
A behavior that confounded observers for centuries.
But in 1514, close study of this planetary movement,
lead Polish astronomer Nicholas Copernicus
to a revolutionary understanding of the solar system.
For much of recording history, people thought that Earth was at the center of the Universe,
Along come Copernicus, and he says :
No, maybe the Earth isn't at the center of the Universe.
Maybe the explanation for all this is that, things are going around the Sun.
And if all the planets are going around the Sun, then we can explain why
as Earth passes Mars in the orbit,
Mars begins to wonder in our sky.
Looks like it's going this way and then the source goes this way.
By the time of Copernicus'observations,
Mars and the Earth had been passing each other and their respective orbit,
for some 4.5 billion years.
Time enough for the two planets to evolved into very different worlds.
One warm, wet and oxygen rich.
The other cold, dry and oxygen depleted.
Yet it's now believed that the differences weren't always so stark.
Scientists today think that Mars was once warm enough
for large amounts of liquid water to flow across its surface.
When we look at Mars today, in our best satellite images,
they tell us the same message we heard from the first mission to Mars,
and that there is no liquid water on the planet today
but there's virtually incontrovertible evidence
that there was water there in the past.
Everybody knows that when water flows to any sort of dirt,
there are caratteristic structures,
there are other functions of that water running through,
and when we look at the pictures of Mars, of satellites images,
we see very similar structures
leading us to the absolute conclusion
that Mars was once far warmer and wetter than it is now.
Mars of course is a harsh desert today,
so what could have happened ?
What cosmic process could have brought about such a dramatic transformation
of the fourth planet from the Sun.
The story begins with the origin of the solar system.
Somewhere in the range of 4.5 billions years ago,
our solar system sprang from a supernova.
A stellar explosion emitting a swirling mass
of molecular particles and gasses.
This swirling mass or "nebula" began to cool
and, as it did, it condensed and separated into rings of particles.
These particles began to accrete or gradually
come together to form planets.
The accretion process creates heat
and heavier particles sink to the center of the accumulating mass.
So Mars eventually formed a molten iron core.
This churning molten core generated a powerful magnetic field.
The field projected outwards surrounding Mars like a protective shield,
blocking harmful emissions from the Sun.
You have this constant pressure from the Sun which we call the solar wind.
The solar wind is made of protons, electrons, cosmic rays,
all of these kinds of charged particles
that could ionize the atmosphere,
as we call, sputter it away.
But eventually Mars lost its protective shield
and most of its atmosphere.
The moment the accretion process ended the planet began to cool.
The iron core was no longer able to generate this magnetic field
and then the solar wind started pounding the surface of Mars.
That's a scenario that a lot of people believe.
The loss of atmosphere stripped the martian surface of warmth and pressure
and since water needs both warmth and pressure to remain in liquid form,
water is no longer stable on the martian surface.
If we put a pan of water out there on Mars it's gonna
evaporate very fast and try to freeze at the same time.
One or the other will win out, but you won't have a nice liquid pan of water.
That's not to say however that there's no water on the planet at all.
While liquid water is no longer stable on Mars,
frozen water, ice, is a different story.
And evidence suggests that still today
tons of water ice might lie just below the martian polar caps.
Locked within that ice might just be
the Holy Grail of space exploration.
They're visible through simple telescopes on Earth
and they are inquestionably the first planetary features noticeable
during an approach to Mars through space,
the martian polar caps.
Mysterious snowy white ice worlds,
sheathing the top and bottom of the red planet.
Actually what we call dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide
the atmosphere is very thin and it's nearly all carbon dioxide,
so when it gets very cold what condenses out
is carbon dioxide snow, carbon dioxide ice.
But while the white caps are certainly a colorful planetary feature,
it's not the frozen concentrations of CO2 themselves
that are of most interest to scientists.
It's what's thought to be hidden beneath the polar caps
that could have massive significance.
Lurking just below the top soil,
may be millions of tons of frozen water.
Water ice hidden from view
appears to radiate out hundreds of miles in all directions from the poles
and leading scientists think it could be the residue
of once vast oceans.
Likely the water's now frozen, in a kind of permafrost beneath the surface,
but maybe there are pressures and temperatures in various areas of Mars
that have liquified the ice and created perhaps
aqua forms.
We can see craters in an impact. This up an asteroid that's hit Mars
blown up a lot of stuff, it doesn't blow out
dry powder like on the Moon and make rays and rubble,
it turns out kind of a muddy slurry of stuff.
So the conclusion is that you're actually impacting into ice
like northern Canada permafrost layers, a tundra kind of stuff.
Orbiting spacecrafts have picked up strong indicators
for the existence of water ice at the martian poles.
Remote measurements of soil composition have detected high levels of hydrogen.
Water of course is one part oxygen and two parts hydrogen,
so the possibility of ice hiding below the surface in those areas is overwhelming.
But while strong evidence of ice at the martian poles may be relatively new
speculation that water existed there became common more than a century ago,
and its implication that intelligent life could also exist on the red planet,
elicited wide spread anxiety on Earth
for much of the first half of the twentieth century.
Astronomers pointed the first telescope towards Mars in 1610.
As spyglass technology steadily improved,
a blurred image of the red planet
drew ever closer to the eyes of earthly observers.
By 1877 telescopes could enlarge the image of the distant planet,
so that it appeared roughly the size of a dime held at harm's length.
Certainly not impressive by modern standards,
but it was enough for the director of the Milano observatory,
Giovanni Schiaparelli,
to attempt to sketch the martian surface and name its geological features.
Schiaparelli peered at the hazy shifty visage
night after night for months.
And he sees what he thinks are criss-cross lines on the surface of Mars.
It turns out later, what he saw isn't exactly
what's up there, but still through his crude telescope that's what he could see.
Respected italian astronomers sketched these lines
and gave them a name.
Schiaparelli interpreted these lines as
channels of some sort, he didn't really know.
Well, the italian word that he applied to them was "canali",
that word, translated to english should have been translated as "channels",
but instead it got mistranslated as "canals".
Since straight lines do not normally appear in nature,
Schiaparelli sketches gave birth to the idea
that some form of intelligent life must exist on Mars.
It was an arresting notion,
widely debated among the astronomers of the day.
Later in 1894,
a wealthy Bostonian named Percival Lowell
was so intrigued by this possibility
that he paid to have a large telescope constructed on a mountain side
in Flagstaff, Arizona.
He spent the next two decades observing, sketching
and speculating about the red planet.
He convinced himself that he was seeing networks of straight lines on Mars,
which he thought were canals,
what was the big news at the day with the Panama canal,
that's what great planetary civilisations do, they build canals.
So this was canals to bring the water down from the polar ice caps on Mars,
which are cold and far from the Sun and dry,
so he knew that and so he thought,
well, they have to move the water to live on Mars.
That idea just electrified everybody, that there was a civilisation on Mars.
Against this backdrop on Halloween night 1938
A young actor named Orson Wells
broadcasted a dramatisazion of War of the Worlds
A novella by british author H. G. Wells
In which sinister martians land on Earth and wreak havoc
We now return you to Carl Phillips at Grovers Mill.
ladies and gentlemen, here I am wait a minute, something's happening
There's a plane springing from that mirror and it leaps right at the advancing men
Good Lord, they're turning into flame!
Thousands of citizens believed the invasion was real.
I'm deeply shocked and deeply regret for,
The misunderstanding was short lived.
But even so the broadcast only served to fuel public speculation
about potential intelligent life on Mars.
Mars: it has intrigued human kind for thousands of years.
And in mid 20th century
humans finally got a closer look at the mysterious planet.
In 1964 the National Aeronautic and Space Admininstration, NASA,
launched the small exploration spacecraft toward the red planet
Its name was Mariner 4, it had a television camera
and its mission was to fly past Mars and send back pictures.
It could only make one pass.
Scientists were filled with anxious excitement
at the prospect of what they might see.
Well it is gonna see cities, is it gonna see canals, is it gonna see forests?
But all of what it saw it was craters.
It sent back pictures which just were very fuzzy and showed craters like on the moon.
It was a huge let down.
The Mariner 4 images revealed a dry cratered desert like
and seemingly dead planet.
Sort of like the moon with a little air to blow the dust around.
But the enthusiasm for exploring Mars was only tempered.
And 6 years later, in 1971,
NASA sent another spacecraft to the red planet: Mariner 9.
But this time, rather than just making a single pass by Mars
Mariner 9 was engineered to orbit the planet for weeks
and do a complete mapping.
The effort paid off.
After waiting out a planet wide dust storm,
Mariner 9 started returning spectacular images.
It discovered the Tharsis bulge,
The source of potbelly of the planet, near the equator.
The bulge is a result of concentrated and massive volcanic activity.
The dominant feature of the Tharsis bulge
is the monster volcano: Olympus mons.
Olympus mons is about the size of Missouri. If you put it in the middle of the US,
it would dominate that picture.
If it had a major eruption, a volcano of that size
would probably full up one state on every side of Missouri
so, uh, my home town in Iowa would be under lava.
Interestingly it's composed of we think three separate volcanos
or at least it's erupted in three different ways, if you...
fly over the top you see three separate calderas.
So it isn't just three times larger, this is a monster geological event.
When infact if you're on the edge, the slope is so gradual
and the peak is more than a hundred miles away
and that you wouldn't know that it was a volcano. And it's that massive.
And Olympus mons is not alone.
A few hundreds miles South-East of the mountains
stands a diagonal row of three other, evenly spaced enormous volcanos.
Each larger than any of its type on Earth.
Yet as magnificent as it is,
The Tharsis region isn't the only spectacular
geological feature discovered by Mariner 9.
At the Eastern edge of the bulge is a colossal
tear in the crust of the red planet.
It's called "Valles Marineris", Mariner Valleys,
in honour of the Mariner 9 orbiter itself.
You look at this thing, it's like the width of the United States.
It's this cleaved valley
You know the Grand Canyon in the United States?
Pump it up, put it on steroids, make it the size of the United States itself
and you got Mariner Valleys.
The geological mechanism that causes this immense rupture in the martian surface
is yet a mistery. Scientists can only speculate.
One mechanism which I like
is that there's a place called Tharsis bulge not far away.
And it's so much lava and other things have accumulated,
that it's filled and could put a giant torque on the surface of Mars.
And pulled this apart like a zip.
Well, who knows if that's true...
but one needs a mechanism dfferent from many things we know
to explain the existence of that.
With the stunning success of Mariner 9
the next logical step for NASA
was to land a spacecraft on the actual surface of Mars.
Scientists were eager to test rock and soil samples for sign of life.
In 1976 the Viking mission reached the planet to do just that.
It had both an orbiter and a landing component.
equipped with robotic test instruments.
And we get right down on the surface and scoop up some soil and...
we don't find a thing.
Mars looks like a cold, dry, dead place.
But while the Viking lander toiled the way underground failing to make headlines,
high above the martian surface
the Viking orbiter managed to capture a mystifying image.
While flying over a region of Mars called Cydonia,
the orbiter snapped an image of a land formation under cross lighting.
Startingly the formation resembled a human face.
As a joke NASA scientists showed the photos to the press
remarking about the face they'd found on Mars.
Under more even lighting conditions, of course
the martian terrain feature doesn't look like a face at all
Just a jumble of hills.
But in certain circles the story of the face on Mars
and its NASA cover up persisted for several years.
True Mars enthusiasts on the other hand face a more sober reality
following the Viking mission.
With no definitive evidence of biology resulting from the Viking experiments,
interest in returning to the red planed quieted for several years.
Then, in 1984,
a young scientist on an expedition in Antarctica,
made a discovery that ultimately infused new energy
and hope into the quest to uncover life on Mars.
In December 1984
NASA geologist, on a meteorite gathering expedition in Antarctica,
found an odd specimen.
A meteorite with an unusual colour.
A sort of green hue.
Most are grey or brown.
Back at NASA's Johnsons space center in Houston,
where such rocks are stored,
it was labeled ALH84001.
Despite its odd colour,
the scientists assumed that it was a piece of an asteroid.
So the rock was pigeonholed into a group of meteorites,
and it stayed there for six or eight years.
Misclassified.
Then, in the early 1990s,
an analyst, researching asteroids,
placed a piece of ALH84001,
under an electron microscope.
He soon realized that he was not looking at a normal meteorite.
He was looking at a piece of Mars.
The rock had characteristics that matched another Martian meteorite found in 1979.
More scientist began studying that sample,
and they were astonished,
when they eventually found,
what looked like carbon globules.
Carbon, at least on Earth,
is the primary building block of life.
Senior scientist David McKay,
headed up the research group.
My imagination was signated by the carbonates.
And I said : "Hey, these carbonates are a really strange welkin.
How do they form ? Let's look at those !"
Closures groups near the rock sample,
brought even more sterling discoveries.
The kind of chemistry that went on in those globules,
is associated with life on Earth.
At least one, scanning electron microscope image,
revealed the structure that looked suspiciously organic.
Almost like a worm.
Could it be a trace of primitive Martian biology ?
I think that worm is... Is... biologic.
Whether is a complete fossil of bacterium is problematical,
it could be a part of that bacterium,
it could be a section of one,
but it's biologic in my view.
"I'd like to welcome everybody here today.
It's an unbelievable day.
It's very very exciting for me".
Finally in 1996, after more than two years of study,
in which they have built four independent lines of evidence,
the team was ready.
They announced their hypothesis.
ALH84001 contain possible evidence of passed life on Mars.
"We conclude that...
This is evidence for early life on Mars".
NASA held a major press conference,
but not everyone was convinced.
Labs across the globe requested samples of the rock
to conduct their own analysis.
In the end, after months of at times acrimonius debate,
the consensus was...
That there was no consensus.
Papers were published in support of the claim
but many more were published ebunking the idea.
"If I could have the first slide please ?
The features that you see,
may be any number of things, for example, they could..."
Many researchers are conviced that the formations in the rock,
that appeared to be signs of Martian life,
were actually caused by mineral activity.
The majority of people would say that
there's no really biogenic activity
from this meteorite from Mars.
Those initial hypothesis was incorrect.
I would say at this point that...
That's too simple hypothesis to take.
I don't think the work is being completed to
a satisfactory end point.
To say either way.
Work on the meteorite is continuing.
But even if researchers never confirmed that the rock contains signs of Martian life,
the ALH84001 episode has already completely reinvigorated interest
in the quest for life on the red planet.
Ironically, the new push to find life on Mars,
has often led scientists yet again to the continent of Antarctica.
Conditions, in this part of the world, are analogues in many ways to conditions on Mars.
Seeking out life forms that managed to thrive
an extreme circumstances here, might shed light
on how and where primitive life could have once taken hold on the red planet.
What environment astrobiologist, Dale Andersen, focuses on,
is that the bottom of lakes,
covered year-around, with thick layers of ice.
Most people said that because of the ticks ice covers :
"You would find nothing but rocks !"
There'll be very little to nothing on the bottom.
The ice layer sealing off many of these lakes,
is up to 15 feet thick.
But rather than trying to blast or drill through it,
and disturbing the ecosystem below,
Andersen and team have found a much less damaging approach.
They let a massive coil of copper tubing make an opening.
Then you just pass a hot liquid through it,
throw it down on the ice and it'll melt its way down.
It takes about 24 hours to melt through the ice
and then makes this very nice clean hole to dive through.
Divers enter the water wearing full-body drysuits.
And what they find at the bottom of nearly every Antarctical lake pad,
is a testament to the stubborn ternacity of life.
Mats of microbial organisms
are thriving in frigid enviroments that receive virtually no sunlight.
Most people thought that, if you have less than about 1% of the surface light,
you won't have any photosynthesis taking place, down on the bottom.
They won't be old to use enough light to live.
It's turned out that they can photosynthesis with light levels down to 1/10 to 1%.
For Andersen and his team
the pristine mats are truly a window to the past.
There no air organism, no fish, no insects,
no animals creeping through it, so these microbial communities
have the opportunity to grow
by themselves without interference, no matter animal or plants.
And that gives them the opportunity to grow in very special ways.
Is it possible that a similar form of microbial life
could still reside somewhere beneath the frozen surface of Mars ?
Especially at the hydrogen-rich poles ?
Andersen and scientists like it. Believe it is worth investigating.
T-Minus 10... 9... 8... 7... 6...
5... 4... 3... 2...
And lifted off the Delta-2 rocket with the Mars exploration robot.
In the Summer of 2003,
NASA's jet propulsion laboratory, delivered two exploration spacecrafts,
to the surface of Mars.
Missions to the red planet are only feasible once every two years,
during a specific short window of time.
The launch must be timed,
so that the spacecraft and Mars arrive at a specific point in the planet's orbit
at the same time.
The journey across the 34 million mile distance can take up to seven months.
And the trajectory must be perfect.
The accuracy required to go from Earth to Mars
and to hit the spot you want to be at on Mars
is equivalent to shoot in a basketball from Los Angeles to New York.
And have it go trough without hitting the rib. Nothing but that.
All systems are go for entering the step landing.
We are currently 6 minutes from landing
at the Gusev crater of solar hemisphere of Mars.
Point lock at 1.356 miles per hour.
Expecting parachute deploy in 5 seconds.
Parachute detected.
Expecting reach ***********.
The spacecrafts were actually rovers.
Robotic vehicles capable of travelling across the martian surface
and poking around.
The rovers are robot geologist.
Their job is to be our eyes, our feet, our hands on the Martian surface.
We experience Mars through them.
They can reach out. They can touch rocks.
There's this device called the Rat.
R.A.T. the Rock Abrasion Tool wich is a diamond-tip grinding tool that we can use
to grind into the interior of a rock,
and so we can actually get a window inside the rock.
They have sensors on the end of that arm like there's a microscope,
for telling us in detail what they look like.
So we've got a whole bunch of tools, similar to what the geologists would want,
if they were actually phisically there on the scene.
The rovers were named Spirit and Opportunity
and they are still exploring regions of Mars today,
at locations on the planet hundreds of miles from eachother.
Spirit landed in an area dubbed Gusev crater.
The crater is believed to be a dried up lake bed.
So if the water it once held contains biology,
Spirit might uncover signs of it.
Opportunity touched down in a region called Meridiani Planum.
The area is a triggy, because it contains an ancient layer of hematite
an iron oxyd that on Earth usually formes in a spot that held liquid water.
So far neither rovers has found signs of life.
But both Spirit and Opportunity have uncovered helpful proof
that liquid water was once plentiful on the surface of the Red Planet.
We've seen places where water soaked the rocks beneath the surface,
we've seen places where water came to surface and flowed, over the martian
surface creating little ripples that are still preserved in the rocks
billions of years later.
But neither rovers is close enough to the tundra-like martian Poles
to uncover actual frozen H2O.
That is the primary goal of a new mission to Mars, launched in the summer of 2007.
This mission is dubbed Phoenix, and its plan is to place a stationary lander
in the reaching of the martian North Pole.
The lander has a sturdy robotic arm, equipped with a scoop.
Phoenix will excavate the polar soil.
Doctor Peter Smith of the University of Arizona heads up the project.
Our entire scientific mission is about
understanding the properties of the soil, and its inner action with the ice,
and the properties of the ice and the ice inner action with the atmosphere.
We have only one way to study it, and that's by using our robotic arm
that's our back-o if you like. That's gonna dig a little trench,
and provide samples of both soil and hopefully wet soil if we can find it,
and ice and we will analyze those samples
with instruments on the deck of our spacecraft.
The lander will beam signals back from the martian surface
reporting the result of the remote soil and ice analysis.
But before Phoenix has even had a chance to make it off the launch pad,
a new wrinkle in the saga of "Water on Mars" has revealed itself.
Images beamed back from a spacecraft currently orbiting the red planet,
show evidence of a very unexpected event.
It appears that a liquid flow of some sort has accurred within the last few years,
in a small gully at the edge of a deep martian ravine,
In 2001 the orbiter took photos of the exact same spot,
but nothing of interest showed up in those shots.
The new photos on the other hand, showed a white residue in the gully.
A residue simingly left behind by a flow of liquid.
possibly where water spurted from the ground
and flowed for several hundred yards,
before transforming into vapor and vanishing.
Scientists do not yet understand what might have caused such a flow,
but many suspect that it's a result of some form of internal heat
the planet must still contain.
Clearly, it's a plain that it's been vulcanically active,
and all of us are very hopefully that some places on Mars we could find hydro-thermovets.
Not just beacause we want liquid water, but because liquid water implies that
this might be an environment that life could developed and be maintained.
It is, of course, all about the search for life.
When all is said and done
the engine driving all of the astonishing scientific afford
to explore the red planet is the burning desire of human kind
to know if life exists elsewhere in the vast reaches of space.
I think humans have, since the dawn of consciousness,
wondered why they're here and wondered what's up there
and wondered if there's more.
And... answering that question will sort of put us in some kind of prospective
it'll tell us what our places in the universe, to some extent.
Finding life on Mars could also help us understand the origins of life
on our own planet.
And that could actually be in the case of Mars and Earth
a significant connection.
Mars developed life itself and maybe the conditions were right on Mars
but they weren't right on Earth.
And yet Mars seeded our planet.
Perhaps through meteoritic collisions, pieces of Mars arrived on Earth.
We're cells of life and that actually grew here. Maybe we could all be martians.
Or perhaps it was the reverse, you know, perhaps life originated on this planet,
and moved to Mars.
If we find evidence for life on Mars and we know there's life on Earth, of course
than there's probably life all over the place.
The universe is probably teeming with life. And if it didn't,
then it makes us feeling like we are a little bit more special.