Original subtitles

(wheel squeaks)

(rocket whines)

(dramatic music)

All stations on the Marinette,

this is flight director.

The ATC25 command has been sent.

My job was chief engineer for Mariner 4.

We're sending a spacecraft from Earth to Mars

on a journey that's gonna last nine months.

Half the distance to the sun, almost.

You're plowing new ground.

All stations stand by for

status reports and--

The launch was a little bit scary

because maybe half the launches blew up on the pad,

and there was a lot of other failures.

They have affirmed.

Spacecraft--

The reason people come down to watch a launch

is they're hoping to see an explosion.

That's usually the period of time

where things, if they're gonna go wrong, do go wrong.

Six, five, four, three.

(rocket engine rumbles)

Two, one, zero.

This thing could fail.

Ignition.

(rocket engine rumbles)

(dramatic music)

Lift off, roger, 0.3 seconds.

We're on our way, roger.

(dramatic music)

I think for Mariner 4,

there's a great sense of hope.

(dramatic music)

Mars has a sense of romance about it because it's a place.

It's a planet; it's another world.

All stations, this is Ace 1.

It's as close as we can see in the solar system

to something being Earth-like.

We'd like to report the spacecraft is sun acquired.

You're doing something for the first time.

The prospects and possibilities are really enticing.

Are we alone?

What story does Mars have for Earth?

It's the stuff of dreams.

(dramatic music)

I think Mars has held the fascination of the public

because we've had these visions,

thanks to science and science fiction,

that it was this place where there

was a thriving alien civilization.

(dramatic music)

Percival Lowell wrote several books on Mars

and its past civilizations.

He talked of canals being built to transport water.

Aliens and Mars have been hooked together

ever since those early days.

I remember hearing when I was in grade school

that there might even be intelligent life up there.

Might even be more intelligent than on Earth.

It was a just a total, total unknown.

People didn't know.

Welcome, Number One.

(dramatic music)

(title rumbles)

This is Mariner Control Center at JPL.

Mariner is 134.217 million miles from Earth,

and 50,142 miles from Mars.

So it's July of 1965,

and we're about to have this encounter with Mars.

2815.

We received a signal that means

the spacecraft had detected the planet.

0.74 degrees from where we wanna be.

Yeah, I noticed that.

We'd all gathered together.

Lot of people had their fingers crossed.

Other people are smoking cigarettes.

About 12 minutes from now,

we should be able to determine that the recorder is running.

Although we will not be able to determine definitely

whether pictures are actually being recorded on the tape

until they are played back.

(dramatic music)

The flyby itself takes a matter of hours.

(gentle music)

The spacecraft automatically took

a set of about 22 pictures.

(dramatic music)

Picture will cover an area of approximately

176 miles square on the sunlit rim of the planet.

(dramatic music)

There's some cheering,

but mainly it's just relief that yeah, we did it.

(dramatic music)

What are we gonna do when we see H-E-L-P

stamped out in the snow?

(man laughs)

The scientific instruments

are sending back data, and that's of interest,

but of course what we're waiting for are the pictures.

(dramatic music)

The pictures were everything.

But--

The picture-taking sequence

was not precisely as predicted.

There were some anomalies in the telemetry.

The last I heard, there was some funny business

in the first 10 picture recordings.

There were extra stop record signals.

So there was speculation that the tape recorder

had started and then stopped early.

The mission operators and our bosses,

they thought the worst.

The TV system, which should have turned

the tape recorder on and off, may have failed.

(dramatic music)

The next morning, we were wanting to handle the issue

of proving to the bosses that the tape recorder was working.

There was a artist's shop on the way to work.

So they bought these crayons called pastels,

then took them back up to JPL.

(machine whines)

This data's coming back out of a teletype machine.

It's going tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk.

And then you had to take scissors and cut them up

into strips and then mount those up on a board on the wall.

The numbers represented the intensity

of light at one pixel.

Each one of those numbers, he assigned a color.

And in that way, you assemble a paint-by-number picture.

(dramatic music)

The picture was about 40,000 numbers.

The word spread.

Other people started joining in,

cutting tape, and coloring.

(dramatic music)

And it took eight hours to finish the picture.

When we saw the final image,

we had accidentally created a piece of art.

(dramatic music)

And then, a TV crew arrived and broadcast the picture.

And it represented the first image of Mars taken

from any place but the surface of the Earth.

And it was really a stunning thing to see.

The colors were vivid.

It was very saturated and beautiful.

(dramatic music)

It was really striking.

So when you finally saw the real photographs--

Face down, right?

Yeah, face down.

(dramatic music)

It was this horrid-looking, gray, dead world.

(dramatic music)

When the Mariner's pictures came back,

all it showed was craters just like the moon.

It was kind of a big disappointment.

(dramatic music)

It didn't show any indications of canals

and past civilizations.

It was a letdown.

(dramatic music)

For the public, who had grown up with this idea

of Mars as a place that could be thought of

as another Earth, that whole Martian empire

was just smashed to red dust in an instant.

This planet died.

Mars died.

(dramatic music)

Mariner 6 and 7 come along.

(dramatic music)

Mariner 6 sent back 75 images.

Mariner 7 sent back 125.

They're still very limited.

It's just a flyby, right?

(rocket engine rumbles)

So Mariner 9 comes along in 1971.

Public interest is starting to wane.

There's a certain ennui about

we've been there, we've done that.

What's the big deal?

(rocket engine rumbles)

Unfortunately, as we approached the planet,

we realize that there's this huge dust storm

that was pretty well masking everything on the surface.

(dramatic music)

Mariner 9 was reprogrammed by NASA to hold back.

(dramatic music)

We had no idea how long the storm was going to last,

and this is critical because we were using up resources

on the spacecraft and we're getting a little concerned.

(dramatic music)

The dust storm lasted about three months.

Fortunately, the planet started to clear.

(dramatic music)

And it revealed all these incredible geologic features.

(dramatic music)

It was a geologic wonderland.

(dramatic music)

There are channels.

(dramatic music)

There are canyons.

(dramatic music)

There's this huge canyon that was

as long as the United States is wide.

(dramatic music)

There were things that really shook our foundation.

(dramatic music)

And Olympus Mons is that object.

(dramatic music)

If you stuck in on the United States,

you would cover the state of Missouri.

(dramatic music)

The top is almost poking out of the atmosphere of Mars.

Mars is just an incredibly different planet

from what we had expected.

(dramatic music)

You could see waning channels and teardrop-shaped ions.

Everything you could tell had been molded by some flow.

The only reasonable expectation was that

these were eroded by large water floods.

(dramatic music)

You see deltas, like the end of the Nile delta

that flowed into a low area which must have been

the ancient ocean of Mars.

Of course, I mean it was beyond anybody's expectation,

even the canal builders (laughs).

Mars was a blue planet in its past.

The question now is was that enough to start life?

We need to go to Mars with a life mission.

(dramatic music)

The next mission to Mars was gonna be the Viking mission.

Now, this was the most ambitious mission

that had ever been launched to Mars.

It had not one, but two orbiters.

More than that, for the first time ever,

NASA was gonna attempt to land a craft on Mars.

These were two separate landers,

each of which had high-tech

stereo cameras, a robotic arm.

Perhaps most importantly though,

they had the science experiments that

they hoped would detect life.

Nothing like this had been tried before.

(dramatic music)

People had to invent everything:

heat shields, parachutes, throttable engines to land.

We had to invent it all as we went.

(dramatic music)

T minus 10, nine, eight, seven.

This is like the first cathedral,

the first Renaissance voyage over the oceans.

Two, one.

But it's to another planet.

(rocket engine roars)

Ignition.

That's big stuff.

Liftoff, liftoff 39.

This was the culmination of years and years of work,

so it was a lot of this as we watched it go up,

but it went up just beautifully.

(dramatic music)

Well, between the launch and arrival at Mars

was about nine months.

(dramatic music)

We had no idea what to expect,

even some very basic things

like what was the footing like (laughs).

Were we gonna sink into a meter of dust?

Good roll, attitude roll.

Give me post quarter back, firmware fired.

There's no question whatsoever

that landing on Mars was one of the most

difficult technological jobs

that the human species has ever tried.

ACS confirms coordinate transformation change.

We released the lander.

You have flight.

We have jet minus 105.1.

Three is in sync.

And at that point, it is going thousands of miles an hour

as it hits the Martian atmosphere.

59,000 feet coming up on--

So the air shell slows you down,

you're still going faster than the speed of sound.

Burn, lander confirmed, parachute deployed.

We have one, we have two.

Then the supersonic parachute is deployed.

Link deployed.

At one mile in altitude, the parachute was jettisoned.

The parachute separation okay.

So then we have to fire the engines

all the way to the ground.

43, 46 RTV 188 feet per second.

We were holding our breath each and every moment.

(dramatic music)

It had never been done before.

Feet per second. Come on.

ACS is close to vertical.

Feet first time.

ACS is green, 1.5 feet per second max.

(dramatic music)

Touchdown, we have.

(men cheer)

Fantastic, 16 kilobits.

(men cheer)

Hold it, hold it.

Yes, we have a touchdown time of 12 hours,

12 minutes, 07 decimal one second.

What we knew when it landed on the surface

was only that a signal was being transmitted.

We knew nothing else.

We had to wait 40 minutes.

Waiting for the data to start coming up.

The landing camera, it basically scanned like this.

There's a rare piece of information coming in.

Strips of the picture became available,

little by little by little.

All right, a few rocks.

Oh, that's beautiful.

May not look like much, but it's lovely.

(man laughs)

Started seeing some dirt,

then we started seeing some rocks.

Then we started seeing more rocks.

It's just incredible

to see that Mars is really there.

Then we started seeing the footpad.

(group applauds)

(dramatic music)

Seeing that first picture back was just thrilling.

It was revolutionary.

(cork pops)

I felt this was a more thrilling moment than Apollo 11.

(dramatic music)

Some hours later, the first image of the horizon comes in.

And that did elicit gasps.

(dramatic music)

Well, the first pictures from each

of the two Viking landers

were each moments in human history to be remembered.

(dramatic music)

They were geological snapshots

into the workings of another world.

It was a world with climate.

We saw frost condesates form on Mars.

We saw the sunset; we took early morning sunrise.

(dramatic music)

We watched dust storms over the period

of hundreds of sols.

It's not easily forgotten.

(dramatic music)

We are the only generation that will ever explore

the solar system for the first time.

When we landed successfully on Mars,

humanity had for the first time

become a category two species.

A category one species is one whose sphere

of influence is only its planet and its moons.

A category two species reaches out

and discovers what's in its solar system.

(dramatic music)

We still knew there was everything ahead of us.

We were just sort of dying to get our hands

into the soil, so to speak.

(dramatic music)

We wanted to find out if there was life on Mars.

Well, how do you do that back in that day?

I understand that when proposals were

submitted to send experiments to Mars

that one guy had submitted a proposal

of just putting a little pan of food out there (laughs).

(calm gentle music)

The life science experiments for Viking

were fairly basic in design, but very ingenious.

We humans, we breathe in oxygen, but we exhale CO2.

Plants breathe in CO2 and they release oxygen.

In other words, metabolism.

The biology experiment on Viking

had three separate investigations

and each one was testing for a different type of metabolism.

When NASA accepted my experiment,

we called it Gulliver because it was going

to a far-off place looking for tiny little beings.

But NASA changed it to a much more serious name,

the Labeled Release Experiment.

I hated it; I really did.

Such a dumb name.

(dramatic music)

(clock ticks)

It took 12 days after Viking landed

before we conducted the first experiment.

(dramatic music)

The Viking arm extends out

about 10 or 12 feet from the spacecraft.

(dramatic music)

It then is dragged back in, collecting its sample,

which it puts into a sample distribution box.

(dramatic music)

Samples are then distributed to the individual experiments.

(clock ticks)

The experiment ran for seven days.

(dramatic music)

To say that there's life on Mars

would be an astronomical discovery,

probably the a greatest discovery ever ever.

(dramatic music)

It was 10 days before the first data

came in from the Labeled Release experiment.

(clock ticks)

I was surrounded by several members of the team,

including Gil, and I hit the print button and we all waited.

(clock ticks)

Then all of a sudden, in a flash.

(dramatic music)

There were the data points, and it was a positive response.

I was stunned; "My God, it's positive," I said.

That's life, I know it, I know it when I see it.

It was clearly a positive response.

No questions about it.

It appeared that there really was life there.

(dramatic music)

I sent out for cigars and champagne.

I had all 10 or 11 people sign that first graph

that came down on which I wrote,

"Tonight, it all began tonight, it all began tonight."

(dramatic music)

Suddenly, everybody on the Viking

mission became a biologist,

and nobody was willing to say that that was life.

They all had alternative explanations for it.

My best guess at this point would be--

The general interpretation was well,

there must have been something geologic

or some property of the soil on Mars

that gave this positive result.

Exotic things like super oxides.

I didn't even know what a super oxide was.

Maybe it had something to do

with the presence of perchlorates

which are a particular type of salt

and they can cause some funky things to happen in soil.

That could have had some affect on the results.

(dramatic music)

The second factor was that another experiment,

which was Norm Horowitz, did not see important responses

to what they did to the soil.

At least there are no data that it's because--

Norm Horowitz was far more skeptical,

and he was absolutely convinced there

wasn't any life on Mars.

They're made out of carbonaceous material.

We don't know--

Norm Horowitz's position was very strange.

There's no evidence there there is a --

He said not only is there no life on Mars,

but we now know why there's no life on Mars.

It has no liquid water.

I feel he was not objective (laughs).

Scientists has to keep an open mind.

The concept of saying, okay, we found life

was all about each of these experiments

were going to be able to say

I found life, I found life, I found life.

So you had a positive indication for each one of those.

The other two life detection tests were negative.

(dramatic music)

Skepticism mounted, except in the case of.

NASA didn't entertain

that the error may have been

with the instrument looking for organic matter.

We don't know that yet.

We have not definitely proved that Viking

did not find life.

Unfortunately, the people who were the

highest-ranking scientists had their say

and drowned out the people who were saying,

"But, but, but, but."

(dramatic music)

(loud chatter)

Zilch, there was nothing.

(dramatic music)

So Norman Horowitz concludes at the end of this process,

"It is now virtually certain that the Earth

"is the only life-bearing planet

"in our region of the galaxy.

"We have waked from a dream.

"We are alone."

(dramatic music)

Well, how does he know (laughs)?

(dramatic music)

I sent him a letter trying to convince him,

and he sent me a letter back saying,

"Gil, what you said is all nonsense,

"and there's no reason for us to communicate any further."

That broke my heart.

Yeah.

(dramatic music)

Blast off.

(dramatic music)

The Viking results certainly caused

a hiatus in Mars exploration

and even longer hiatus in looking for life.

Picture will cover an area

of approximately 176 miles.

We lost the Mars program for a whole 20 years.

What are we gonna do if we see H-E-L-P

stamped in the sand?

(dramatic music)

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon.

Welcome to NASA Headquarters

and what promises to be a very exciting

and controversial news conference today.

(dramatic music)

So if I can introduce the team,

first, Everett Gibson from the Johnson Space Center.

He's a geochemist with over 20 years

of investigations in lunar sample work.

In 1984, scientists were in the ice fields of Antarctica.

(dramatic music)

They found a rock that had a slightly unusual color to it.

(dramatic music)

And it was picked up and brought back.

And then the scientists at NASA

was able to analyze this rock,

and he realized the gases that were trapped in this rock

matched exactly the gases that the Viking

spacecraft has measured on the surface of Mars.

(dramatic music)

He had a smoking gun.

We had a rock from Mars.

What I would like to do this afternoon

is lead you through our story,

which is a bit of a detective story.

We had a rock from Mars that in an area

it has these carbonate globules.

So what we then did is take some of the carbonate globules,

gave them false names, sent them to Stanford University.

They did the analysis.

A spectrum appeared, organic matter in our samples.

I'd like to welcome everybody here today.

It's an unbelievable day.

It's very, very exciting for me.

Not just one sample, multiple samples.

The dedication, knowledge, and painstaking research.

We worked on it for four years.

Have brought us to a day that may well

go down in history for American science,

for the American people, and indeed, humanity.

One evening, we were looking around,

scanning and looking, and suddenly we

starting finding these segmented structures.

And that caught our attention.

These segmented structures looked

like a desiccated worm.

If I could have the next slide.

If you had a segmented worm,

and you took all the water out of it,

he would shrink and he'd leave

this morphology that was left.

The simplest explanation to us is that they

are the remains of Martian life.

This was a major discovery.

I can honestly say that it's undoubtedly

the most exciting time I've done

in my 27 years as a scientist.

And so we put our data out there,

and let the people shoot at it.

Questions, please?

Jim.

If this is correct, if you have found life

once existed on Mars--

Additional work needs to be done.

I think it's science consensus built slowly.

If you could characterize a smoking gun.

Who is to say that we are not all Martians?

David Chandler from the Boston Globe.

One of the investigators of the Viking life detection tests

has maintained the Labeled Release experiment did,

in fact, produce evidence of current life on Mars.

Do you think there will be a reexamination

of the result of that experiment?

I think I'll handle that one.

This result that you heard about today

has only something to say about the possibility

of life early in the planet's history,

but not really about--

Good afternoon.

Presidents don't tend to make big speeches about space,

so it took over the media.

If this discovery is confirmed,

it will surely be one of the most stunning insights

into our universe that science has ever uncovered.

But then when it started becoming more and more

scrutinized by other scientists taking a look at it,

it became more and more generally accepted by the community

that these were actually features that were left behind

by a geological process and not by life.

I am determined that the American space program

will put its full intellectual power

and technological prowess behind the search

for further evidence of life on Mars.

Liftoff with the Mars observer

and America's return to the Red Planet.

Even though that conclusion is still under

a large amount of debate and question,

it did revitalize the interest in Mars.

We're good symmetrical burn on all six outlets.

This story didn't have to be true

for people to get inspired.

Just the idea that there might be life on Mars

was probably enough to get a bunch of people inspired.

Those findings stimulated a lot of attention to Mars,

and that was beneficial.

(dramatic music)

The question was asked,

do we go to the surface with some new thing?

Do we put outriggers on a lander to make it tougher?

Or do we move?

They said, "Okay, what would science want?"

And science said, "We want to be mobile and go."

And so we went for it.

(dramatic music)

Two Rovers, two landing sites, two payloads.

(dramatic music)

Spirit and Opportunity were two solar-powered robots

that would have the ability to rove around

and analyze rocks and soil on Mars.

And liftoff of the Delta 2 rocket

carrying the Spirit from Earth to planet Mars.

Now in the post-Viking era,

the mission shied away from explicitly searching for life,

and instead went for the next best thing.

T plus 20 seconds.

Spirit and Opportunity never started

out with the mantra of let's go find life.

We're approaching Mach 1.

But if you were to ask the astrobiologists,

"Give me a definition of life,

"so that I could go out and find it in the solar system,

"the key ingredient is water."

Positions look good.

So Spirit and Opportunity were

looking for water-modified rocks.

Jettisoned all six solid.

We've ignited the other three.

The whole concept was let's follow the water.

(dramatic music)

T plus 20 seconds.

And a good evening from the flight deck.

At this time, we are approximately

five minutes 53 seconds from equator of Mars.

Weather today at the landing site

is expected to be fairly mild,

with temperatures averaging about minus 15 degrees C.

And there is no chance of rain today.

At this time, we invite you to sit back,

enjoy the landing.

It's gonna be ride.

Three, two, one.

(dramatic music)

Vehicles have now hit the top

of the Martian atmosphere.

We are moving at a speed of 12,187 miles per hour.

Entry plus 30, altitude 60 miles.

(dramatic music)

Parachutes deployed and ejected.

(group cheers)

We have a positive indication of parachute deployed.

Heat shield separation self detected.

(group applauds)

We have confirmation from the spacecraft

that the flight has attempted to jettison.

Yes, it has fired.

We have confirmation.

(group cheers)

The rockets have ignited.

We are now awaiting confirmation

of positive signals found on the rim.

Getting a bouncing signal.

(group cheers)

Getting bounce signal.

We are getting a bounce signal.

Getting confirmation from spacecraft.

Bouncing and alive on Mars,

however this bouncing--

Stop, hold on.

We have a momentary loss of the signal.

As the spacecraft is bouncing on the surface,

it is difficult to maintain lock.

We need to reacquire the signal

to have positive confirmation of a safe landing.

We're seeing it on the LCT.

(group cheers)

We're on Mars, everybody.

(group cheers)

(group applauds)

(dramatic music)

Spirit landed in a region called Gusev Crater.

During the landing site selection process,

we used a camera that was on the Mars global surveyor.

And it trained and took pictures of the ground.

Gusev crater has a drainage channel

that extends for thousands of kilometers

through the ancient highlands,

and looks like it filled that crater up with a lake.

This was a location where sedimentary rocks

that could tell us about the environment,

when it was active, would be.

(dramatic music)

We got images pretty quickly.

(camera whines)

(dramatic music)

We thought it might be landing

in the middle of an old lake.

Unfortunately, we got there,

and we all we could see, basically, was volcanic stuff.

(dramatic music)

Gusev was basically a basaltic plain, which is lava flow.

(camera whines)

So if the lake had ever been there,

it had been covered by volcanic materials.

(dramatic music)

We were crestfallen that none of our predictions

about what materials would be there, we were wrong.

(dramatic music)

Opportunity was completely different.

Opportunity really hit the bullseye

because it landed in a place called Isil Crater

in which Mother Nature's done you a big favor.

At some point, she slammed a meteorite

into the surface of the planet,

excavating this big hole and basically

gave you this archeological dig, if you will.

You land in the middle of it,

and all you gotta do is look around,

and here's the history of Mars.

For geologists, outcrops are currency.

And we saw sedimentary rocks.

(dramatic music)

When geologists go out in the field here on Earth,

they wanna look for layers of sediment

that have accumulated over time.

(dramatic music)

This is literally the historical pages

of the book of the Earth.

This level was where the dinosaurs were,

and at this level, they died,

and at this level, new life became.

You can just read that book of history.

That's what we found on Mars.

Because they had the robotic arm

and they had instruments on the arm,

you can find out exactly what they're composed of.

There was this treasure trove of information

that just came flooding back.

There were not igneous rocks.

These were sedimentary rocks that would have been

formed by liquid water.

(dramatic music)

They had gone through periods of groundwater

that had changed their composition,

and it was a classic sedimentary sequence

that we've seen on the Earth in many places.

And this is where it really gets interesting.

We see these little bead-like things in the soil.

We thought what could these be?

Many people started conjecturing,

but when we put the infrared eyes on them,

we can see iron and oxygen in them.

We're thinking, "Holy crap, Batman."

We found hematite.

(dramatic music)

Hematite is a mineral here on Earth

that's formed in water,

and a lot of it in moving water,

that allows this mineral to be formed.

And they were all over the place.

Oh my gosh, we found the Holy Grail.

(dramatic music)

So the whole point of the Mars

exploration Rovers was roving.

We wanna move.

(dramatic music)

Now the Spirit and Opportunity mission

was expected to last just 90 days.

But as both of them traversed the Martian surface,

they soon blew right past that.

(dramatic music)

We hopped from crater and crater and crater

and drove tens of kilometers.

They outdid their warranty by factors of hundreds.

We're several years into the mission

that we had real trouble with Spirit.

Spirit had lost one drive wheel.

In doing so, we got stuck in a sandy crater,

and it was very difficult.

And that was the end of Spirit, yeah.

(dramatic music)

But Opportunity just shines like a radiant star,

'cause this Rover keeps going and going and going.

(dramatic music)

Opportunity really began to show evidence of past water.

We started to see the kind of mineral signatures

that were the stuff of dreams,

that support water as a persistent liquid thing.

Water that forms and-- Caused by water.

Acid rain.

River flows, groundwaters.

If you were there when the water was there,

you could drink it.

This is just this ongoing saga of water.

Water, water, everywhere.

(dramatic music)

Then in 2012, a new Rover drops into the party.

Curiosity, equipped with a drill

and carrying an entire laboratory on its back.

This machine rolled into town

and immediately changed our view of the Red Planet.

(dramatic music)

As we dug into the soils, and we found,

to our delight, it had carbon, hydrogen,

oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, and sulfur.

That's everything between these two fingers.

All the right stuff that life is made of is on Mars.

(dramatic music)

Meanwhile, after 15 years on the surface,

Opportunity had covered a record-breaking 28 miles,

documenting every step of the way.

It's this unstoppable machine.

It just keeps driving.

(dramatic music)

And then in June of 2018,

here's a dust storm in the distance.

(dramatic music)

It turns out to be a whopper.

(dramatic music)

The sun was almost blacked out.

And at that point, there was no power getting to the panels,

and we've lost contact.

(dramatic music)

Four months, we don't hear anything.

It's gone silent.

We all just kind of held out hope.

We tried for months and months and months

until there was just nothing.

(dramatic music)

And at that point, eventually you say that's the end, yeah.

(dramatic music)

We had one final day where they called the team

out to JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,

where anybody that wanted to come and be there

when they sent the final commands could come.

(dramatic music)

We had all gathered in this area called the dark room,

overlooking mission operations,

and we're watching the flight commanders

sending off the last commands to the Rover.

We did basically four final pings.

(dramatic music)

The light-time delay comes and goes.

We got no signal.

And everybody just kind of sits there in silence.

(dramatic music)

And then the manager of the mission, John Callas--

This concludes operations for MER-1,

spacecraft ID 253.

Says thank you for your 15 years of service.

Thank you.

But this is the end,

so this is MER signing off the net.

MER project off the net.

(dramatic music)

In the dark room, it was just silent,

and everybody's kind of looking around

and we're like, "This is it; this is actually the end."

(dramatic music)

It definitely lead to a lot of tears.

(dramatic music)

When we look at these missions, it's an enormous legacy.

(dramatic music)

What we know about Mars really has been

built up over a series of missions,

and we've learned really spectacular

things in each and every one of them.

(dramatic music)

We've gone from this first rapid flyby

that sent back 22 images to today,

we've discovered that's it's not a dry, dead world.

Four billion years ago, if I stood on Olympus Mons,

I would see a vast ocean and begin to see the land.

And maybe on that land was vegetation.

Mars was wet, warm, wonderful,

and there's no reason to believe that life

did not develop on Mars four billion years ago.

(dramatic music)

The story is getting sharper.

Water, habitable environments in the past,

organic molecules, this is a new Mars.

The story's only gonna get better.

(dramatic music)

I am now 95 years old.

Never give up, never, never,

never, et cetera (laughs).

(dramatic music)