The Universe (2007–…): Season 1, Episode 2 - Mars: The Red Planet - full transcript
Program recaps the basic knowledge about Mars normally covered in high school.
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.
Traduzione e synchfix: Supersimo,
Cochrane, Hipopo, donciccio, Zio Campori
Revisione: Supersimo
The Universe
1x02 - Mars, the red planet
::Italian Subs Addicted::
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.
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.
Traduzione e synchfix: Supersimo,
Cochrane, Hipopo, donciccio, Zio Campori
Revisione: Supersimo
The Universe
1x02 - Mars, the red planet
::Italian Subs Addicted::
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.