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Mars, Earth's cosmic neighbor.

More than 40 spacecraft have been launched to the red planet, seeking to

unlock its secrets.

Now, NASA's new Perseverance rover is on a quest to crack the planet's biggest

mystery.

Was there ever life on Mars?

Ever since the very first mission to land on Mars, we've been looking for

signs of life. We've seen tantalizing clues.

This could be the mission that finally answers the question.

How will Perseverance succeed where others have failed?

Could this mission discover that living things exist today on the red planet?

If the Perseverance rover finds life on Mars, that will change science and

philosophy forever.

And how will Perseverance lay the groundwork for humanity's next giant

leap in space exploration?

Someday there will be humans who no longer identify themselves as

Earthlings, but they will call themselves Martians. To find out, we

will venture to the Red Planet, voyage beneath its mysterious dusty surface,

and explore its alien underworld to reveal...

The secrets of this pioneering mission to Mars.

Mars.

From orbit the planet looks barren.

Temperatures here plummet to minus 140 degrees Celsius.

Its thin atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide.

Cosmic radiation, over 30,000 times stronger than on Earth, blasts the

surface.

Probes and rovers sent to Mars confirm that it appears to be a lifeless desert

world. When you look at the images the rovers and landers have sent back from

Mars, it looks dry, dead.

But that's Mars now.

What was it like a long time ago? Well, the evidence for that shows a very

different world.

Many space scientists believe that life could have once thrived on the red

planet.

Mars just squeaks in on the edge of what we like to call the habitable zone.

Now that means the region in a solar system where liquid water could form and

could exist for long periods of time. We know that water is the source of life on

Earth, and it might have been the case on Mars.

NASA has sent four rover missions to explore Mars since 1996.

NASA's fifth rover mission, called Mars 2020,

is the first task to seek out evidence of life on Mars.

This is Perseverance.

It is a six-wheeled robotic vehicle about the size of an SUV.

Perseverance is the most ambitious rover we've ever flown into space and that has

ever gone to Mars.

Perseverance carries a suite of super sensitive instruments.

ground penetrating radar onboard chemical analysis

and x-ray detectors to sniff out the signs of ancient

life every single inch of the rover has been carefully thought

through and designed all of this effort is in support of a chance to really ask

the question Has life ever existed beyond Earth?

Mars is an alien world.

Perseverance operates in an environment that is harsher and more challenging

than anything found on Earth.

There is nothing easy about exploring Mars.

When you think about the environment there, it's very different from Earth.

You have extremes in temperature that a robot has to be able to deal with. There

are high radiation levels.

There are dust storms that actually cover the entire planet.

This is not like, you know, sending your rover out on safari where you could stop

and fix an axle or something. There is no such thing on Mars. It's got to be

built to last with no help.

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory step up to build Perseverance

strong enough to survive.

They construct the rover from super-tough, lightweight materials that

can withstand the freezing temperatures on Mars.

They fit a plutonium generator to power the rover 24-7.

The unit will deliver electricity to Perseverance for at least 14 years.

And it will keep the rover running through the night and during Martian

dust storms.

Our prime mission is one Mars year, which is roughly two Earth years.

Of course, the rover is built very well, and we hope it's capable of lasting

quite a bit longer than that, if resources allow and the rover stays

healthy. But Mars is a very challenging place.

Launching a rover into space and traveling the more than 200 million

kilometers to Mars is the easy part of this mission.

The bigger challenge is how to land a one-ton rover on the Martian surface.

Sending an object from Earth and then going to Mars and landing on the

specific spot that you want to is way more complicated than it sounds.

NASA engineers borrow the multi-stage system used to land the Curiosity rover

in 2012.

It's a proven platform for getting robotic vehicles from space onto the

surface of Mars.

The heat shield comes into the top of the atmosphere.

That starts to slow us down a bit, but not nearly enough.

We have to release the parachute, but the Mars atmosphere is thin, so the

parachute is not good enough on its own. It doesn't slow us down enough to get to

the surface safely.

Now falling at 300 kilometers per hour, Perseverance is ready to make a control

touchdown.

We come down on retro rockets, hover,

lower the rover down on the sky crane, and then once it touches the surface and

releases that tension on the bridle, pyro's fire, cutting those cables,

the descent stage flies away to a safe distance and crashes, and

the rover is just there, ready to go.

It's tremendously exciting and nerve-wracking.

With Perseverance now landed safely on the Martian surface, the rover's mission

begins.

Mars is just over half the size of Earth.

Where within this huge area should Perseverance look for life?

If you're looking for life on Mars, finding evidence of this life or past

life isn't going to be equal in all places.

For example, if you land in the Sahara on Earth versus the Amazon, you're going

to have a very different outcome.

The planet is big. The rover is small.

So it's key that you put the rover in the right spot.

The key to finding traces of ancient life on Mars is finding signs of water.

Liquid water is a super solvent.

It allows lifeless chemicals to mix and transform into biological systems.

If there's one thing that Earth teaches us about life, it's follow the water.

Where you find water, we found life on Earth.

There are no obvious signs of liquid water on Mars today.

How can scientists locate where liquid water on Mars once used to be?

In 2004, the twin Mars rovers Opportunity and Spirit.

beam back to Earth images that could unlock the answer.

The cameras on board both rovers photograph these strange Martian

objects.

Each one is roughly half a centimeter across.

The minute Spirit and Opportunity landed, they looked down and they saw

these tiny little BB-like things.

They were sort of blue-green and metallic looking.

NASA scientists call these objects blueberries.

because of their shape and color in these photographs.

Analysis reveals that these blueberries are made from iron oxide.

And one theory claims there's only one way that these rusty balls can form.

Blueberries start life as tiny specks of crystals that exist inside waterlogged

rocks.

Iron oxides from the rocks wrap around the crystal spheres like rust, turning

them into small iron balls, blueberries.

Thousands of these can form near each other.

But to grow, they need huge amounts of water to flush more minerals onto them.

Over millennia, strong winds erode the soft stone around the hard blueberries.

releasing them onto the surface.

The blueberries are evidence that Mars once had rivers and lakes.

It's even possible that the red planet had oceans of liquid water four billion

years ago.

Mars today does not look very much like Earth because it is so cold and so dry

and has such a thin atmosphere.

But billions of years ago, it may have looked a lot like Earth.

With all this evidence and all this data over all these years, the story is

clear. Mars had rivers and river channels.

This means that the probability that Mars harbored life is very high.

NASA research finds evidence that water covered one-fifth of Mars for over a

billion years.

That's an area almost 40 times the size of Texas.

Too large for one small rover to explore in detail for signs of ancient life

Where on Mars should perseverance focus

its search?

When you're trying to find the perfect spot on Mars to look for the evidence of

life One of the things you need is standing water for a long period of time

Something that wasn't just wet for a few days and then dried up

A clue to where to search for ancient life lies in photographs taken from 300

kilometers above Mars.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO, is a satellite that orbits the Red Planet.

Its camera captures images of the Martian surface in stunning detail.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is essentially a spy satellite in orbit,

but instead of spying on the planet, it's mapping it so that we can better

understand it. Its images are so incredibly sharp that it's even imaged

Martian rovers on the surface, including the tracks left behind by their wheels.

NASA scientists search the MRO's photographs for the traces that ancient

rivers and lakes leave behind.

They find an intriguing feature in Jezero crater, a deep depression close

to the Martian equator.

It's likely that Mars has lakes and rivers four billion years ago.

An asteroid or comet strike explodes a mega crater 45 kilometers across.

Over time, two rivers break through its rim.

They create a deep body of water the size of Lake Tahoe.

On its shore, the rivers form fan-shaped deltas that are still visible today.

After the water the lake held for millennia dried up,

So in Jezero Crater, we find not one, but two beautiful river deltas. Now,

deltas are formed over a long period of time as a river enters a larger area,

like a lake, slows down and drops its sediment.

We know this had to be wet for perhaps millions of years, a perfect place to

look for life.

NASA scientists use a powerful camera on the MRO to analyze the rocks in Jezero

Crater in more detail.

Images from the camera reveal that the rim of the crater is made from different

types of carbonate rock.

Carbonates on Earth form when the shells and bones of microscopic animals build

up in layers on the floors of lakes and oceans.

These photographs point a giant marker at where the Perseverance rover should

concentrate its search for Martian life.

In addition to being filled with water at one time, Jezero Crater is also ideal

because it has this carbonate rock lining the inside rim of the crater. And

these carbonates on Earth create fossils.

If Perseverance is able to study these carbonates, then that gives us the

opportunity to maybe find fossilized life.

We're extremely excited.

about Jezero Crater. We have an incredible landing site that's the

result of many years of scientific debate and really gives us everything

we're looking for in a landing site for Mars.

So we are all systems go for Jezero Crater.

The Perseverance rover has its target.

What will Martian life look like?

And how will Perseverance find it?

The Perseverance rover and all of its subsystems, everything about it is

really this concentrated effort in support of exploration and discovery,

scientific discovery, a chance to really ask the question, has life ever existed

beyond Earth?

But what should Perseverance search for?

What will the remains of Martian life look like?

The only place in the universe that we know for sure life exists is Earth.

So we can only use Earth as our best possible guide in the search for life.

The best way to search for past evidence of life on Mars is to assume that it

evolved in a way similar to that on the Earth.

Around 3.8 billion years ago, oceans of liquid water start forming on Earth,

triggering the beginning of life on our planet.

In the warm seas, simple chemicals combine into complex biomolecules and

the first single-celled organisms.

Some of these organisms develop photosynthesis and for over 2 billion

years they fill Earth's atmosphere with oxygen.

Only in the last 600 million years Does life evolve into a vast array of complex

animals and plants?

When we look at Mars, clearly there aren't giraffes walking around, right?

There are no alligators. So I doubt that there are large life forms on Mars.

The highest probability is that it's microbial life.

Bacteria and other microbes are single-celled organisms.

Most of them measure less than thousandths of a millimeter across.

How can Perseverance find evidence of life this small on Mars?

Ancient shorelines in Jezero crater could hold the answer.

These shallow waters may have been an ideal place for life to flourish.

On Earth, microbes can group together on lake beds to form patches of sticky

microbial mats.

In time, these turn to stone, and new layers of microbes grow over the top.

After many thousands of years, they grow into layered pillars called

microbialites.

Finding remains of such structures on Mars

could be evidence that life once thrived here.

Billions of years ago, Mars was warmer and wetter, much like Earth is now.

Well, life on Earth arose billions of years ago, and we find evidence of that.

So by investigating that, we're learning about ways we can look for that same

sort of life that may have existed once on Mars.

A clue can be found in the Pilbara region of Western Australia,

This is one of the most ancient landscapes on Earth.

Here, NASA scientists investigate fossilized microbialites that are 3.4

billion years old.

It's in these rocks that we find these first clear traces of microbial life

fossilized in the geologic record.

And the traces are clear.

There are some shapes.

that are complex enough that we find it impossible to imagine a mechanism other

than biology that could build them. It's possible that we could observe something

similar on Mars.

The high-resolution cameras onboard Perseverance could photograph the

fossilized remains of microbialites on Mars.

If the mass cam turns around and takes a picture and sends it down to Earth, you

know, my heart would leap for joy.

The implications are so large that we really would need to confirm it with

follow-up observations.

If Perseverance were to actually take an image of a fossil on Mars, and if we

could verify that that fossil is actually evidence of past life on the

planet, that would be one of the greatest discoveries in human history.

A picture of that.

will change all of science forever.

It'll probably change humanity too.

Finding fossils of tiny microbes on a world hundreds of millions of kilometers

away is a long shot.

The conditions on the surface of Mars make it unlikely that intact

microbialites exist.

Millennia of exposure to harsh radiation breaks down biological remains and turns

them to dust.

There's a good chance all obvious traces of organic life have been destroyed.

So how can Perseverance identify the remains of long dead life amongst the

dust and stones on the surface of Mars?

The solution lies in detecting the ancient chemical traces that living

things leave behind in the rock.

You're looking for a chemical signature that life was once there, that life

somehow processed the material around it. And the word that we use for this is

biosignature, that the chemistry was changed in a way that we can say it must

have been life that did this.

NASA scientists pioneer a technique to identify the biosignatures that ancient

living things leave behind in their environment.

X-ray fluorescence zaps rock samples with radiation to unlock evidence of the

organic fingerprint hidden inside stone.

The technology is an ingenious way to find life on Mars.

Fitting an entire X-ray fluorescence laboratory into the chassis of

Perseverance is a big challenge.

So NASA scientists develop a special scaled-down version for the rover to use

on Mars.

It's called PIXL, the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithography.

On the end of the rover's 2-meter long robotic arm, the instrument focuses an X

-ray beam onto a tiny spot of Martian rock.

The rock releases a radiation signature, that reveals its chemical composition.

By mapping the chemistry of the Martian rocks to sub-millimeter accuracy,

PIXL can identify the chemical fingerprints that living things leave

behind.

The search for ancient life on another planet is not really a smoking gun type

of situation.

We don't expect to find one piece of evidence that's so striking, make one

observation that's so incredible that we just all agree and pack up and go home

and say, yeah, there's life on other planets.

You have to collect many different observations, many different pieces of

evidence, and they all need to point in one direction.

We built the payload to give us the best chance we absolutely can of answering

that question.

Pixel promises to unlock the hiding places of long-dead Martian life.

But is it possible that living things thrive today on the Red Planet?

If so, how do they survive?

And where could we find them?

The surface of Mars today is extremely inhospitable. It's hard for us to

imagine any life as we know it surviving for any...

real amount of time on the surface of Mars.

As far as we know, all life on Earth needs water to survive.

So if we want to look for life on Mars, it makes sense to go with what you know,

and we want to look for the water there.

The problem is, Mars is incredibly dry.

If we want to look for life, we're going to have to find the water.

The planet's polar ice caps are the only obvious signs of water on Mars today.

They contain the same volume of frozen water as the Greenland ice sheet on

Earth.

Photographs taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal the traces of ancient

rivers, lakes and possibly oceans etched into the surface of the red planet.

But the liquid water that once filled these features is long gone.

Why did it disappear?

Billions of years ago, Mars was warm and wet, very Earth-like. In fact, it looked

more like Earth does today than Earth did back then.

But today, Mars is dry and cold, and the paths of these two planets moved in two

very different directions.

If Mars was habitable in the past and is in the current condition it is today,

then something big and something bad must have happened to it.

Planetary scientists believe that's something.

was Mars losing its protection against the Sun.

The churning molten core inside the young Mars generates a powerful magnetic

field.

This magnetic field deflects away the Sun's harmful radiation.

It protects the fragile atmosphere of Mars and preserves its liquid water.

Around 4 billion years ago, The core cools and solidifies.

The magnetic field turns off and Mars loses its protection.

Radiation from the Sun strips away the Martian atmosphere.

The atmospheric pressure plummets.

The planet's water evaporates into space.

The blue planet turns into the red desert world that we see today.

At the surface, Mars has the air pressure of about 1% of the Earth's

atmosphere. And that's almost like being in a vacuum chamber.

What that means is that if you poured out a bottle of liquid water on Mars, it

would immediately boil away and become vapor.

The low atmospheric pressure on Mars means it's very unlikely for water to

exist as a liquid on its surface.

But that doesn't mean it's impossible.

NASA's Phoenix lander makes a discovery that reveals how it is possible for

liquid water to exist on Mars.

Phoenix beams back to Earth images of strange beads of liquid attached to the

legs of the lander.

What stops this water from fizzing away in the low atmospheric pressure on Mars?

Phoenix discovers a clue in a soil sample.

It contains perchlorate.

A type of salt.

What do you do when your sidewalk is frozen?

Well, you throw salt on it. When you mix salt and water, it lowers the freezing

point of water so that it can exist as a liquid, even though technically it's

below the freezing point of water.

So it's possible that if water is salty enough on Mars, that it could be in a

liquid state there.

Martian water, if it exists, will be a lot saltier than the oceans on Earth.

But that doesn't mean... It cannot sustain life.

These are the hot springs at Yellowstone National Park.

The temperature of the water in these pools is close to boiling.

The pools are as acidic as lemon juice.

But microbial life thrives here despite the hostile conditions.

There are locations on Earth that we found life, but we didn't expect to find

life. And these are extreme locations where we call the life forms that live

there extremophiles.

Some scientists believe that if life exists on Mars today, it will likely

share characteristics with extremophiles that live in Yellowstone.

Perseverance will collect and store samples taken from the surface of Mars.

Future missions will return them to Earth.

Scientists will test the samples for evidence of Martian life.

But where are the hidden bodies of salty liquid water in which living things

could exist now?

In 2011, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter makes a discovery that could

unlock the mystery.

These images show dark streaks on the slopes of Martian craters facing the

Sun.

The streaks grow in spring, widen in late summer, and then fade away in

autumn.

Scientists struggle to explain these mysterious features.

Is it possible these streaks are evidence of large reservoirs of liquid

water locked away inside the Martian crust?

And if they are,

What mysterious process drives them to the surface?

A clue lies here in Death Valley, California.

This is the driest spot in the USA, almost as dry as Mars.

If you want to look for life on Mars, it helps to look for places on Earth that

are very much like Mars. And one place like that is Death Valley in California.

It's very, very dry there.

And so you can go there and look around and get a feel for what it would be like

to be on Mars.

But even with virtually no rainfall, life still thrives in this inhospitable

environment.

Death Valley is one of the hottest and driest places on the Earth.

And yet, as you drive around, there are still places where you see little clumps

of vegetation.

There are even some oases that have water on the surface.

Some scientists believe that the unique geology of Death Valley not only unlocks

the mystery of how this arid desert supports life, but also offers a clue

to how on Mars liquid water could seep from below the ground up onto the

surface.

Death Valley sits on a branch of the infamous San Andreas Fault, called the

Garlock Fault.

As the rocks here crunch past each other at up to one meter every century, they

fracture, creating fissures deep beneath the valley floor.

Groundwater can collect in the voids, building up pressure that can force

water through cracks to the surface.

That's how water hidden deep underground

can turn even the hottest place on Earth into a green oasis.

NASA's InSight spacecraft discovers that Mars likely has fewer and less active

tectonic plates than Earth.

Scientists think that these plates don't grind together as frequently, so the

crust of Mars is less fractured than that on Earth.

But there is another way to create a subterranean pipeline that will allow

water to escape to the surface of Mars.

Over its multi-billion year life, Mars has been pelted continually by asteroids

and meteorite impacts.

So as these asteroids impacted the surface of Mars, they crushed and

fractured the crust of the planet beneath it.

And these could create channels or conduits for salty water to travel up to

the surface.

The water is trapped inside the structure of the rock itself in tiny

little bits.

But now what can happen is if a crack finds its way down into that rock, all

of that rock is underground under a lot of pressure, so the water is pressurized

too. That means it can burst up all the way to the surface.

Mars is a frozen desert.

But the rocks beneath its surface are so salty that they could melt the ice and

form pockets of liquid water.

Some scientists believe that in summer, high pressure forces water up through

cracks in the rock.

The water seeps across the Martian soil, causing dark streaks visible from space.

In winter, the cracks freeze shut and the streaks disappear.

The Perseverance rover carries technology that can reveal hidden

sources of Martian water.

Onboard Perseverance is a special type of ground-penetrating radar called

RIMFAX.

Underneath the rover, An antenna probes the ground with radar waves.

They can detect ice, water, or salty brine 10 meters beneath the Martian

surface.

Where there's water, there could be life.

It is possible that deep in the subsurface of Mars, where liquid water

is stable for long periods of time, there could be life today, and there

could be habitats that are refuges of these ancient habitable environments

that were once in the surface, where microbial organisms survived and

thrived, and then as the planet globally dried out, these organisms retreated

along with the water into the subsurface, and it's possible, it's

exciting to think about, that they could survive today.

Advanced radar on board Perseverance promises to unlock the secrets of the

geology of Mars.

The rover could even find evidence of living things in the Martian soil.

But is it possible for life from Earth to survive long term on the Red Planet?

NASA plans to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s.

Private companies have ambitions to visit even sooner.

The long-term goal is to make the dream of living on Mars a reality.

As you watch this program, starships are being built in South Texas at this very

moment for going to Mars, for taking humans to Mars.

It's getting real, really real.

I don't think I've ever met anyone.

who hasn't been inspired by the idea. So it's a very human desire to explore and

go beyond, go over the next hill.

The world was inspired by landing on the moon, and the world is inspired by the

possibility of humans landing on Mars.

But establishing a Martian base is a huge engineering challenge.

Up to 400 million kilometers separates Earth from the Red Planet.

A spacecraft carrying humans to Mars doesn't have enough room on board to

carry fuel for a return journey.

The thing about rockets is that most of the rocket is fuel, and the people and

the payload, the instruments, that's at the very tippy top.

You can't bring enough fuel to go to Mars to also come back.

So if you go the way things stand right now, it's a one way trip.

How can astronauts make fuel on Mars for their journey back to Earth?

Perseverance carries technology that could unlock the answer.

The atmosphere of Mars is 100 times thinner than the atmosphere of Earth.

What gas does exist here?

is almost all carbon dioxide.

It is possible to break down carbon dioxide to manufacture oxygen from the

Martian atmosphere.

And oxygen is essential for burning rocket fuel.

NASA engineers fit inside the Perseverance rover an instrument that

promises to unlock the oxygen reserves on Mars.

It's called MOXIE.

It zaps carbon dioxide with electricity to extract oxygen from the Martian

atmosphere.

What MOXIE will do is live inside the rover and act as a small chemical plant,

pumping in carbon dioxide and split that into carbon monoxide and oxygen.

In our case, we'll just get rid of the oxygen. We're just trying to demonstrate

that chemical process in the dusty surface environment of Mars.

MOXIE activates soon after the Perseverance rover touches down on Mars.

NASA scientists plan to run the experiment at different times during the

two-year mission.

The results from MOXIE could spawn future technologies that turn thin

Martian air into the critical component of rocket fuel.

Imagine you land a much larger version of MOXIE and it sits there on the

surface of Mars and pumps away and pumps away, pulling in CO2, generating oxygen,

filling up a big tank of oxygen.

Now this oxygen can obviously be used by the astronauts to breathe, but of course

it could be very important as an oxidizer for their rocket to oxidize the

fuel to get them back off the surface and home safe.

Oxygen generators will form the heart of any colony on Mars.

A community of 1,000 people will need about 40 generators, each the size of a

shipping container.

The generators will produce around 1 kilogram of oxygen an hour from the

carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere.

Huge storage tanks will hold liquid oxygen to supply the base with air to

breathe.

and for refueling rockets for their return flights to Earth.

Engineers face another big challenge establishing a base on Mars.

Rovers like Perseverance rely on electricity for power.

Humans need food.

A human in space requires up to 2,500 calories a day to survive.

That's equivalent to the amount of energy inside around 20 potatoes.

The same human also needs almost 4 litres of fresh water a day to stay

healthy.

Powerful radiation from the Sun ravages Mars.

Crops cannot grow on the surface of the red planet.

So how can the human astronauts living in a Martian base get the food and water

they need?

Even a small scientific base on Mars is not going to be easy to put together. If

you go there, you have to make water, you have to grow your own food, and all

of this has to be done by the time people get there, or else they have to

bring it all with them.

Scientists on Earth are testing greenhouses like this one.

to see if they can supply future astronauts with the nutrients they need

to survive on another world.

The plants inside the closed system of the greenhouse provide nutrient-dense

food and also recycle the waste the astronauts create.

NASA has built an inflatable greenhouse system.

that could deploy ahead of human astronauts arriving on Mars.

The plants grow in racks and their roots float in a liquid with nutrients

extracted from the astronauts urine.

To protect the greenhouses from lethal radiation, they'll be buried under the

Martian soil.

But solar collectors will channel sunlight underground, and LEDs bathe

plants in light of the precise wavelength to boost their growth.

Next-generation biodomes hold the key to astronauts living self-sufficiently on

another world.

This future could be just around the corner, thanks to the pioneering

technologies aboard the Perseverance rover.

I think it's possible, very possible, that humans could be on their way to

Mars in my lifetime and I'm extremely excited about that and I just so badly

want to hear those stories of what that trip is like and what it looked like and

what it felt like to stand on another planet.

Perseverance rover is part of NASA's most ambitious mission to Mars.

It carries a suite of instruments designed to sniff out the traces of

ancient life that died out billions of years ago, as well as detect where life

on Mars might exist today.

Finding life anywhere outside the Earth, I think, would change how we all view

ourselves in a very basic way.

In the past, we've been this impossible thing, this rare thing.

And if we find life on Mars...

It means we truly are not alone.

Perseverance will also lay the groundwork for the next stage of the

human exploration of space.

Testing the technologies that will make a permanent settlement on Mars possible.

Once upon a time, humans were confined to one continent and they spread out.

They discovered new lands and new worlds here on planet Earth this is another new

land and a new opportunity and Who knows where that could end up?

We've seen the vision of science fiction, but now it's becoming science

reality