All language subtitles for 2of4 The Explorers

(ominous ethereal music)

This is a vision of our future.

The fateful day in a far-flung corner of the universe,

when a probe from Earth initiates the first descent

onto an alien world.

Looking for proof of life beyond our solar system.

(haunting piano music)

There are no witnesses,

no cheering crowds in the control room.

A decade or more will pass before news finally reaches us

back across the dark oceans of space.

The seeds of this mission are already being sown today

by the first generation of scientists

bold enough to believe it could be possible.

When I look up in the sky,

and I see not stars, I see planetary systems.

We must understand

that the journey to exoplanets

is not limited by the laws of physics.

(water crashing)

They look to planets orbiting distant stars.

Searching for an answer to the oldest human question.

Are we alone?

Is there life on other worlds, and if now, why not?

And if so, how?

This is the first generation in human history

where we have the technological ability

to actually go and answer that great question.

This is the story of humanity

launched into the final frontier

by a new breed of adventurers.

The planet hunters, engineers, explorers, and dreamers,

taking the first steps on an interstellar journey

they know that they will not complete.

Zap!

The journey of a pioneering future spacecraft

to search for life on a second Earth.

That space craft must communicate,

it must navigate, it must have power,

it must have propulsion.

We will have to give it all the intelligence necessary

to make its own decisions.

What a challenge!

(drone motors whirring)

(intense music)

(electronic beeping)

(solemn piano music)

My name is Artemis.

My time has come.

I initiate launch sequence,

and maneuver for exit trajectory.

(ominous music)

My navigation systems target Mars' sphere of influence

for gravity assist.

And angular trim towards Jupiter.

I am ready to escape Earth orbit.

(engines blasting)

(tense music)

Total distance, 4.7 light years.

I commence acceleration phase for maximum velocity.

32 thousand miles per second.

It will take me 49.8 years to reach my destination.

The Earth-like exoplanet, Minerva B.

(haunting piano music)

My mission is simple, find life.

(classical piano music)

(files rustling)

It was only for graduate students

and I was an undergraduate,

and I nearly got thrown out of the class the first day.

And it got to be, I don't know,

three or four weeks into the semester,

I'm thinking I better start thinking about my term paper.

And there was this place then at the time

called the Mars Room,

and it was a place where

the pictures from Mars were stored.

I went in, and I thought I'll sit down

for 15 or 20 minutes and flip through some pictures

and see if I can come up with an idea for a term paper.

Like most scientists,

principal investigator of the Mars Rover missions,

Steve Squyres is a born explorer.

A seeker of truth amidst the great unknown.

I mean, ever since I was a kid,

I've been fascinated by maps.

I was fascinated by remote corners of Tibet,

or the deep ocean,

or the other side of the moon.

Just the idea there was a place we hadn't seen yet,

and then being able to go there

and see it for the first time.

That just had a huge appeal for me.

In 1977, images of the Viking mission

changed the course of Squyer's life.

You know it's not like today

where pictures come down from Mars,

and bang, they're on the internet an hour later.

There were only a few dozen people who'd seen these.

I didn't understand what I was looking at in the pictures,

nobody did, but then I would see in the pictures,

these little valleys that just looked like

they had to have been carved by liquid water.

And I was in that room for four hours,

and I walked out of there

knowing exactly what I wanted to do

with the rest of my life.

(intense music)

(man speaking on radio)

(all cheering)

In the early 2000s,

Squyres led NASA's Spirit and Opportunity

rover missions to Mars.

Holy smokes.

Successfully landing

the two robot geologists,

in a bid to uncover the hidden history of water

on the Red Planet.

(all clapping)

Amid these ground breaking triumphs,

an even greater frontier beckons.

The discovery of Earth-like worlds

outside our solar system

has transformed the way we see the universe

and presents and irresistible challenge.

Why not reach out even further,

and search for life on a planet among the stars?

The thing that has driven

the focus of exploration in this solar system

has been the search for other forms of life.

And so I think the motivation is gonna be the same thing.

I think the motivation when you go to other star systems

is going to be habitable worlds,

and possibly worlds with life.

That's the thing that's going to draw you

to a specific world.

But the scale of the challenge

is unlike anything humankind has attempted before.

The closet star that hosts an Earth-sized planet,

Proxima Centauri, is 4.3 light years away.

Over 170 thousand times further than Mars.

The quest to build a spacecraft

that can journey to the stars

will test the greatest explorers of our generation,

and demand of them the ultimate sacrifice.

To give all their craft and vision

for a dream they'll never realize.

You're asking people to devote their careers,

their lives to something they will never see to fruition.

Now that has happened,

that has happened a few times in human history.

Some of the great cathedrals of Europe

took longer than a human lifespan to build.

People felt guided by a higher power when they did that.

But it takes something extraordinary

to motivate people to do that kind of thing.

(dark ethereal music)

I enter the shadow of Mars.

The lights of Viking colony winking.

A final farewell from humankind.

My transceiver receives their message:

bon voyage!

I fly by the storm of Jupiter,

onward to Pluto and Charon,

and into the space between stars.

After three months of acceleration,

my speed is 12 miles per second.

I meet Voyager One, 170 years

and 45 billion miles from Earth.

No fuel to shift course, no power to call home.

(engine flames roaring)

I have now traveled further

than any spacecraft before me.

I retract my transceiver.

There will be no more calls.

(computer beeping)

And press on through the silence to Minerva.

(dark crashing music)

(peaceful music)

I get up each day with joy, you know why?

Because I know that day,

I'm going to learn something I didn't know before.

And that my picture, my overall tapestry

of who we are, who I am, what our species is,

and how we got to be that way will be lifted up.

NASA's chief engineer

of planetary flight systems, Gentry Lee,

is a pioneer of exploration.

At the age of 75, he's dedicated over 50 years of his life

to engineering robotic missions to other planets.

Someone asked me one time,

if I had to describe the excursions

above the threshold of joy in my life,

would there be a lot of them or just a few?

I said I can give you the two categories right away.

The birth of my children, and I now have eight,

and when a spacecraft that I had a major role in

achieved something successfully,

there's also been eight of those.

(dark electronic music)

Lee's first mission, Viking, in 1975,

(muffled chattering)

was humanity's opening shot

in our dream of exploring the solar system.

Designed to achieve what many thought impossible.

To make the first ever landing on another planet,

Mars.

We had lived through five years

of people telling, "It's not going to work,

you don't have everything under control."

And we were scared to death that it wouldn't work.

ACS is close to vertical.

Touchdown confirmed.

(crew cheering)

Fantastic-- (cheering intensifies)

The moment that first strip of picture came down

from planet Mars on July the 20th of 1976,

there were hundreds of us who immediately,

spontaneously, tears burst from our eyes.

It was at that moment that we knew that human beings,

who had always been a Category One species,

limited to their own Earth and its sphere of influence,

had reached out and become a Category Two species,

ready to explore the entire solar system.

Over the next five decades,

Lee oversaw successful missions to Jupiter, Pluto,

and to the comet, Temple One.

With Lee and other pioneers at the helm,

humanity's exploration of the solar system

has been so successful,

we have a permanent office in space,

the International Space Station.

But as the new dawn of interstellar exploration

lights the horizon,

even the old sea dogs know

it will be the greatest challenge

that humankind has ever faced.

It is hubris on our part to imagine

that we can sit today and define all the steps

that lead us to this plethora

of technologied advances that we need in the future

to build an interstellar spacecraft.

Rather, let us do the following thing,

that spacecraft must communicate,

it must navigate, it must have propulsion.

It must have the ability to take data.

It's as if Henry the Navigator,

as the King of Portugal had said,

"I don't even know yet,

what kind of ships I need to build,

or where they need to go.

Let me just start with an idea.

What floats?"

(smooth jazzy music)

And so the infinitely complex quest

to search for life amongst the stars

is reduced to just four problems.

Propulsion, navigation, communication, intelligence,

each one of them will demand a revolution.

(dark ethereal music)

I am nine years into my journey.

1.2 light years from Earth.

26% of my acceleration phase complete.

My speed is 8000 miles per second.

My fuel usage, 19%.

(computers beeping)

I jettison my spent fuel cells.

I am on course for arrival at Minerva in 31 years time.

Does life await me?

(light peaceful music)

When I was about 10 years old,

I had one of these department store telescopes.

Learned how to use it, took it out one night,

and focused it on what I was told

was the planet Saturn.

And when I lined up the viewfinder,

and held it still, I could see Saturn and its rings.

At that moment I felt a calling,

and that calling was to learn about how to get there.

T minus 10, nine, eight,

seven, six, five, four...

Les Johnson answered that calling,

becoming a world leading expert in advanced concepts

(water crashing)

at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.

In 1999, he led pioneering research

into interstellar propulsion.

(engines blasting off)

Nature is kind to us,

in regard to what options we're going to have

to get to the stars.

Nature has said, "You smart people,

you can figure this out, it's just gonna be really hard."

It was difficult enough to go to the moon,

we're sending probes to the different planets

in the solar system,

but to take that leap to go to the stars,

the distance is just so much further,

and requires so much more energy,

that it's just gonna take some time.

(haunting music)

The goal of engineering missions to the stars

confronts explorers with distances

they've never even contemplated before.

One light year is 5.8 trillion miles,

which makes our nearest star over 24 trillion miles away.

That's more than a billion round the world flights.

According to the masters of solar system exploration,

the greatest challenge is

how to propel a spacecraft fast enough

to travel light years within a lifetime.

In order to get humans to make

the enormous effort required to fly that kind of mission,

you need to have the period of time between

when you launch and when you actually get information back,

be no longer than a typical human life span.

Humanity has never launched

multi-generational voyages of exploration,

it's simply never been done.

(engines blasting)

The distances are just daunting,

and so it gonna have to be major, major breakthrough,

mostly in propulsion.

(sultry music)

Chemical fuel rockets like Saturn Five

have been the work horses of solar system exploration.

They got us to the moon in just three days.

But to reach a planet orbiting our nearest star

within a generation,

we'd need to travel at a speed

that covers the earth to moon distance

in just eight seconds.

That's 17% the speed of light.

Chemical rockets are great

for getting out of the gravity well.

You have the high thrust overcome Earth's gravity,

but they're terribly inefficient.

And in order to get to the stars

in a reasonable amount of time,

you're going to need to get up

to some pretty high speeds.

And it's not just the thrust,

it's how efficiently you do that.

Because if you're inefficient,

you have to have a lot more fuel

and you get to a point

where you can't carry enough fuel

to move your own weight.

(machines humming and buzzing)

The capability of any propulsion system

is governed by the rocket equation,

a trade off between thrust, efficiency, and weight.

The most powerful chemical rocket in operation,

Falcon Heavy, first launched in 2018,

weighed over three million pounds at take off,

and 95% of it was fuel.

It burned through all that fuel in just 10 minutes.

In order to create enough thrust

to deliver its unusual payload beyond Earth's gravity.

(inspired orchestral music)

Wherever Starman is going in his Tesla,

it isn't the stars.

(determined music)

Only one chemical powered space craft

has ever made the leap beyond our solar system.

In 2013, 36 years after its launch,

Voyager One entered interstellar space

at 10.5 miles per second.

Fast enough to travel New York to LA

in under five minutes.

But at less than 0.0001% the speed of light,

still painfully slow if you're aiming for the stars.

They're well beyond what's considered to be

the physical boundary of the solar system

and it's taken over 30 some years to get there.

At that speed, they'll take 70 thousand years

just to get to the nearest star.

No, chemical rockets aren't gonna do it.

As the push

for interstellar exploration gathers pace,

the work horses of the old space race

are put out to pasture.

Monuments to a bygone era.

But if not chemical rockets,

what will deliver the seemingly impossible thrust

and fuel efficiency required,

to journey to the stars within a lifetime.

Three potential propulsion solutions

are being explored today,

fusion, antimatter, and plasma.

Imagine we want to go to Proxima Centauri,

the closest star to our solar system

at 4.3 light years away,

and imagine we wanna get there in a few decades.

If we use a conventional rocket,

we can show that the amount of fuel we need

is greater than the mass of the known universe.

On the other hand, if we use a plasma thruster,

we would only need tens or hundreds of kilograms of fuel.

So then the mission becomes possible.

Physicist Stephane Mazouffre,

is working at the cutting edge of electric propulsion.

The whole plasma thruster.

We start with a fuel and gas form.

We will electrify it and these electric particles,

called ions, will be ejected

at very, very, very high speed.

It's the injection of this material

that will advance the spacecraft.

(speaking foreign language)

Since the 1970s,

plasma thrusters have been used in satellites

to make positioning adjustments while in orbit.

So it's coming up on 90 meters

and closing.

Range at 70 meters at great range, 0.34.

A principal advantage is efficiency.

Demanding just a tiny fraction

of the massive fuel required by chemical rockets.

(contemplative music)

Take the example of Voyager One,

which is currently traveling

at 61 thousand kilometers per hour.

With a conventional chemical rocket engine,

you can reach this speed in a few days,

but consuming 92 tons of fuel.

A plasma thruster, used today on satellites,

would take two years to achieve this speed,

but consuming only a few kilograms of fuel.

So if you put in a lot more fuel,

you can use the thruster for a lot longer,

and ultimately achieve a speed

much higher than Voyager One,

or even reach a fraction of the speed of light.

(pensive music)

Plasma engines offer hope

of achieving the speed required to reach the stars.

Still holding them back,

is how long it would take to achieve that speed.

Dragging the total trip time into thousands of years.

But in the shimmering upper atmosphere of our own planet,

lies the potential for a kind of propulsion

until now only dreamt of in the realm of science fiction.

(dark ethereal music)

I am the navigator.

My mind is full of stars,

and every planet, and every moon.

(computers beeping)

Every celestial body that is known, I know also.

But the dangers my creators did not know of,

I must discover for myself.

(computers beeping)

An asteroid field.

I turn to face it head on.

(tense music)

(asteroids whipping past)

My titanium shield absorbs the impacts.

But one stray penetrates my mind.

(explosion blasts)

(metal crumbling)

My emergency back up command system activates.

I am reborn.

I reengage, I journey on.

(tense contemplative music)

In 1995,

at the CERN particle collider in Switzerland,

for the first time in human history,

scientists succeeded in producing

the most efficient source of energy achievable

within the laws of physics,

antimatter.

As any good Star Trek fan will know, right?

On the Enterprise, that's what powered their warp drive.

Of course warp drive is science fiction drive,

but if you think about antimatter, it's real.

Just like normal matter is protons, electrons,

there are antiprotons and antielectrons,

when matter and antimatter

come in contact within each other,

they annihilate and it essentially is

the perfect E equals MC squared moment

as released as energy,

and therefore, it is the most efficient battery

we can ever build.

The most efficient battery

that nature will allow us to have.

Antimatter is created naturally in space

when cosmic rays collide with atoms

in the Earth's atmosphere.

Producing it at the CERN

was a phenomenal scientific and engineering breakthrough

that required accelerating particles to the speed of light,

and smashing them together.

(explosion blasts)

The challenge now is how to create enough of it

to propel a space craft.

This is where it gets tough,

if you look at the total amount

of antimatter produced globally today

it's on the order of nanograms.

You would need on the order of kilograms,

perhaps up to a ton of antimatter to drive a star ship.

That's not something I want to do on the earth,

because the amount of energy released

if that ton of antimatter met a ton of matter,

would be catastrophic,

and so you're going to have to build the ability to,

you're gonna have to make your antimatter in space,

far away from the Earth,

and use that for your star ship construction.

So again, it's not practical today,

but it's not impossible.

The stars themselves suggest

another possible solution to the propulsion problem.

The energy released from hydrogen atoms fused together,

is what lights the sky across the universe.

(triumphant music)

Since the 1950s, scientists have been developing

fusion reactors to harness it.

The sun does it by brute force, has all that mass,

squeezes all that hydrogen together to form helium,

releases energy, and that's how the sun shines.

It's the holy grail of energy production,

tame the power of the sun,

and furnish humanity with an infinite supply of energy.

But to get fusion going on Earth,

you need to generate the heat of the sun,

upwards of 180 million degrees Fahrenheit.

Well we've achieved fusion on the ground, it's been done.

Fusion happens when a hydrogen bomb is detonated,

which is not what we want.

(bomb exploding)

In the hydrogen bombs of the mid 20th century,

the atomic explosion of the radioactive isotope

was used to produce the heat required to achieve fusion.

But that explosion of energy was not contained

in a way that it could be harnessed.

What you wanna do is be able to capture

the energy source of the sun

in order to heat your propellant, or to use this propellant

to get your spacecraft going fast enough

to go to the stars.

(pensive music)

Modern reactors achieve fusion by other means,

by heating plasma.

The problem with this approach so far,

is that the energy required to reach that heat

has been greater than the energy produced by fusion.

No reactor on Earth yet has even reached break even.

But at Princeton Satellite Systems,

a team of engineers is on a mission

to solve that problem,

and to build a fusion reactor that can take us to the stars.

My brother will tell the story

that I'm the only person he knows that's actually doing

what they thought they wanted to do in high school.

I identified aerospace engineering,

I picked colleges for aerospace engineering,

I've been doing aerospace engineering ever since

because it's really fun and challenging.

Space is cool!

The exhaust velocity that we have

is only about a hundred kilometers per second.

And yet you can't get there fast

unless you got some meaningful thrust.

Aerospace engineer Stephanie Thomas

is principal investigator in a NASA funded program

to build the world's first direct fusion drive.

Essentially it's a straight line.

An integrated reactor

and propulsion system in one.

We want to reach a neighboring star

in the neighborhood of five light years distance,

we want to bring 10 thousand kilograms of payload,

that's 10 metric tons,

and we need to do it with an exhaust velocity

that we can actually achieve with an engine.

Thomas' first challenge

is to achieve a constant flow of plasma

to catalyze the reactor.

We're getting pulses,

so we're pulsing current through these antenna.

So every time we're running a five millisecond pulse,

we heat the plasma, we generate current,

and we see a flash.

But the reactor would be steady state.

So instead of flashing like this,

it would be bright all the time.

So that's the goal.

Rather than using

a heavy and hazardous fuel, like uranium,

the direct fusion drive runs

on a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen,

deuterium, found all over the Earth in water.

The drive unit is compact

at just three feet diameter and eleven yards long,

small enough to mount on a spacecraft.

We think that we can build the next generation machine

in maybe five years.

It will take at least another five years

to build a prototype that you could launch.

But definitely fifteen years at the outside,

we think we could have one and put it in space.

At some point we have to visit the stars.

We're never gonna just sit here and be content,

even when we're visiting the planets

because we wanna know what's out there.

Everybody wants to go to the stars someday.

In the timeline of propulsion technology,

that someday is getting closer.

The next challenge in our bid for the stars is navigation.

(dark ethreal music)

I discard my primary engine,

15 years out from my destination.

At 32 thousand miles per second,

my acceleration phase is now complete.

I deploy anterior thrusters

and engage reverse propulsion.

I set deceleration at minus 104 miles per second squared.

(engines roaring)

Total ship weight now 46 thousand tons,

and decreasing 170 pounds per second of propellant burnt.

I refine my trajectory and set course for Minerva.

(joyful ethereal music)

In the realm of space exploration,

the solar system is our neighborhood.

Since visiting the moon in '69,

we've dropped in on almost every body around the sun.

In 2015, the New Horizons probe completed the first fly-by

of our most distant neighbor, Pluto.

It took over nine years to get there,

but at every step of the way,

the unmanned space craft was guided remotely from Earth.

The way we navigate today when we send these probes out,

even the one that went to Pluto,

is we have a combination of data

taken by the flying spacecraft,

and our big computers here on the Earth

that are processing radio information

that comes from those spacecraft.

When we went by Pluto,

we were basically so accurate,

that we were hitting a golf ball into a hole

from Los Angeles to London.

That's how accurate that was done.

Sending directions to probes

works for solar system exploration.

But as we set our sights on the stars,

the distances are so enormous, a new question emerges.

How to navigate a journey of light years.

If we were ever to go explore,

a planet around another star,

the distance would be so great,

that the machine would have to

essentially operate on its own, we call that autonomy.

We're taking big steps in that direction.

With Curiosity we did a lot.

(thoughtful music)

Landed on Mars in 2012,

Curiosity was the first spacecraft equipped

with an autonomous navigation system.

Given coordinates by mission control,

the rover could image its surroundings

and compute a safe path across the Martian landscape.

But for an interstellar mission,

there will be no relaying instructions.

All the navigation would have to be on board,

all the algorithms, the computations of the orbit,

the computations of the maneuvers to get to the right place,

what stars to look at for this year,

what stars to look at for next year.

What we would have to do is extend our minds,

to imagine all the possibilities that they might run into,

and we would spend literally years

building this hierarchy of possibilities

into this artificial intelligent machine.

It would have to know at all times

how well all its critical systems were doing,

and how to fix them if they weren't working right,

and how to replace them if they couldn't be fixed.

What a challenge!

(dark ethereal music)

I enter the Minervan star system

49.6 years since my departure.

(triumphant orchestral music)

I reopen my transceiver,

and prepare to send the message home.

I have arrived.

(thoughtful music)

With any mission communication is paramount.

Most spacecraft do not return.

Instead, they send their data back to Earth.

When great distances and the speed of light get involved,

it becomes a very, very different sort of experience.

Simple words like now take on a kind of a different meaning.

I remember when we were landing on Mars,

from when you hit the top of the Martian atmosphere,

to when you're on the surface takes about six minutes.

At that time, what we call the one-way light time,

How long it takes the signal

to travel at the speed of light,

from Mars to Earth, was 10 minutes.

All systems are go.

We are currently six minutes away

from hitting the top of the Martian atmosphere.

So we're sitting there in the control room,

and we're watching the radio signal,

and we're watching the spacecraft begins to slow down

and curve down in the Martian atmosphere,

and it's just at the top of the atmosphere,

the reality is, out at Mars,

it's been on the surface for four minutes.

Moving at a speed

of 173 miles per hour--

And it may be a happy, healthy rover,

or it may be a smoking hole in the ground,

and I don't know.

But I'm watching this,

and I'm not seeing reality at that moment,

and magnify that, so instead of 10 minutes, it's 10 years.

(pensive music)

Communication with every craft

currently in space is conducted via the giant dishes

of the Deep Space Network.

Each powerful enough to track a signal from Pluto

no stronger than a CB radio.

All of our deep space communications

are run through the Deep Space Network.

That's and array of very large satellite dishes.

They're set up at three locations around the world.

One is in California at Goldstone,

one is in Australia in Canberra,

and one is in Spain, at Madrid.

We need a very large dish area

in order to collect all the energy

and be able to communicate all the way out

at places like Pluto where our spacecraft are going.

(pensive music)

In 2014, Matthew Abrahamson

was mission manager of a radical new form of communication

installed on the International Space Station,

designed to overcome the limitation

of traditional radio transmission.

The limitation is primarily the distance

that we're sending the transmission over.

When we send out that signal,

it spreads out over time and then over space,

and so as that spreads out it dilutes the signal power.

The further out you go,

the lower and lower your data rate is

where it gets out to the level of something,

like your dial up modems that we used to have

many years ago.

When the New Horizons probe

sent back pictures from Pluto via radio transmission,

the signal was so weak,

it took 15 months to down-link the images

from a 12 hour fly-by.

But with the technology Abrahamson launched

and tested in 2014,

that download time could be reduced to just one day.

By sending data back to Earth on beams of light.

(edgy guitar riff)

The idea is you take a focused laser beam

and send the signal, same signal, over that beam,

but it's much more efficient

because you have this focused signal

that's not spreading out as much over time.

(pensive string music)

Laser wavelengths

are packed much more densely than sound waves,

so they transmit more information per second,

and with a stronger signal.

The greater bandwidth allows spacecraft

to down-link multiple large packets of data simultaneously,

and in record time.

The reason for that is as we go

further out into the universe,

and we go to places like Mars and Jupiter,

currently today we're just getting back

single images of the science,

and in the future, if you do have a high bandwidth system,

like an optical system,

you can get back high definition video,

and I think getting high definition video back

would be a game changer for space exploration.

(dark ethereal music)

I fly by the gas giant exoplanet, Minerva C.

I use it's atmosphere to create drag,

and pull me in towards my target.

I trace an elliptical trajectory around the Minervan sun,

and emerge to take my first glimpse of my new home.

(computer beeping)

(tender orchestral music)

I decouple from my antenna.

My explorer module holds my mind.

I commence entry, landing, and descent sequence.

(wondrous orchestral music)

I enter orbit, so close now.

I deploy my satellites to map the surface,

and scout potential landing sites.

(wondrous orchestral music)

Is this new world ready to be known?

(wondrous orchestral music)

(computers beeping)

(computers beeping)

(intense orchestral music)

(ominous ethereal music)

The part of this that is thrilling to me

is that our best attributes, if done correctly,

exploration at its finest,

have been programed into an extension of our species.

It belongs to no single individual.

It is more than anything else,

a symbol of humanity working together

to create something whose only purpose

is to gather knowledge.

What a beautiful thought!

And after a long period of time,

finally the moment of truth is coming,

and more than likely,

the people that designed it originally are no longer alive.

Welcome to the Ops Lab, Francesco.

And they have passed on this thrill, this passion,

to their children and perhaps even to their grandchildren.

Okay.

We're gonna walk around on Mars, Francesco.

This one's cool over here.

Will it be that they found life?

Will it be that they found a planet

where we could someday exist?

Whatever it is, it will be a historical milestone

unlike any other.

That moment when something new is revealed,

that no one's ever seen before,

that's just glorious, that's exploration,

and it's gonna happen when we go to other worlds

around other stars in a very, very, very big way.

We'll be sitting back on Earth,

and that down-link will come,

and the video, or the pictures, or the specter,

or whatever it is, they're gonna come up on the screen,

and everybody's jaws are just gonna drop.

(solemn strings music)

(determined electronic music)

This could be the end.

I release my landing capsule, into the unknown.

If I touch down,

if I am welcome,

if I find life,

this could be the beginning.

(engine flames roaring)

(wondrous orchestral music)