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NARRATOR: A spacecraft is closing in on Mars
at 12,000 miles an hour.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
In a few minutes,
the Perseverance rover will be on the ground.
It's on a mission like nothing ever done before.
Searching for traces of life in an ancient river delta.
And collecting samples for return to Earth.
To get this far, its creators have endured gut-wrenching setbacks,
and a global pandemic.
Thousands of people played a role to make this happen.
But only a few have ever touched this marvel of human ingenuity.
It takes great minds to build something like this.
It also takes great hands.
ADAM: A spacecraft.
A NASA spacecraft of highfalutin, big ideas,
but in the end, it is handmade.
It's put together by technicians.
And so, you have this great contrast between heady theoretical ideas,
and engineering science, and craftsmanship, workmanship.
And by the way, it's... that's a big deal.
Because all the heady ideas don't go anywhere
without it coming together the right way.
We're gonna stick the spacecraft on a rocket,
light it up, and hurl it off towards Mars.
There will be no intervention once we're done with this.
We're gonna have what we have. And if something's not right,
or if there's a little tiny machine screw rattling around in there...
we're gonna... this... the whole mission can be lost.
MOOGEGA: As you design and build a spacecraft,
there are always hurdles that come up, it's never perfect,
it's never exactly as you plan.
So, engineers obviously are critical and pivotal to designing and testing.
But the flight techs, they're the people making sure that what they put together
is going to work on Mars.
It's crucial to have everyone hand in hand, working together.
-MALE TECH 1: Okay, crane ops. -MALE TECH 2: Crane ops.
CHRISTIAN: You don't have to have a college degree to do this,
but all us techs do have a role.
It's not like you can go on Amazon and order one of these spacecraft.
-MALE TECH 1: Good? -MALE TECH 2: Yeah, it sure is.
JIM: Flight technicians are the only group that's allowed
to handle flight hardware.
MALE TECH 1: Okay. Zack wants to do the first.
JIM: We're unlike any other place on the planet.
We're not industry, we're not pushing the techs
to get things done quickly, it's all about perfection.
(RATTLING)
LACK: We're mechanics, putting together a spacecraft.
It might be a little bit more sophisticated than being
a grease mechanic, you know, on an engine,
but basically, we're, you know, just space mechanics.
MALE TECH: You just tell me you...
MICHAEL: We're good with our hands, so we're good with tools, you know.
This is what I do
and if that leads to building a spacecraft, then that's what I build.
JAMES: My understanding of theoretical and design elements is limited,
but I'm the caretaker of many years of scientific effort.
Countless man hours of mechanical engineers,
the design engineers.
So, behind that one piece could be hundreds of people.
And we are entrusted with that system.
NARRATOR: Perseverance has the same basic design
as the curiosity rover that's been on Mars since 2012.
But the payload is all new.
The centerpiece is a complex robotic system
to drill and cache samples of Martian rock
for return to Earth by a future mission.
WILLIFORD: The idea of sending spacecraft to Mars,
grabbing some samples and bringing them back,
this is something that scientists and engineers have wanted to do
for a very long time, many decades,
because they might hold signs of ancient life.
(RUMBLING)
NARRATOR: A device called MOXIE will attempt to extract oxygen
from the thin, carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars,
paving the way for future human missions, if it works.
MALE TECH: One more above now.
NARRATOR: There will also be an experimental helicopter.
The first attempt to fly a rotor-driven aircraft on another planet.
This team could be the Wright Brothers of Mars.
MIMI: Flying a helicopter on Mars is a game changer.
Introducing the entire aerial dimension to exploring a planet.
(BLADES WHIRRING)
I mean, how often do you get a chance in a lifetime, right?
To go for first-of-a-kind?
NARRATOR: Dozens of iconic spacecraft
have come together at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
over the past 60 years.
Every one of them, born from the marriage of visionary engineering,
and elite hands-on skills.
MALE TECH: Uh, we're gonna go east.
NARRATOR: At this level, some of those hands-on skills
are as unique as the hardware they're building.
ADAM: You can go to school to train to fix jet engines,
because there's lots of jets, and they need jet engine technicians,
but there's no school for spacecraft technicians that I know of.
NARRATOR: The closest thing to a school for flight technicians
is JPL's legendary Building 18.
JIM: This is the hub for the flight technicians.
One of the oldest buildings on the lab.
It's been here about 60 years, and from here,
we're dispersed all across the whole lab.
NARRATOR: Jim Pearson started as a flight tech more than 25 years ago.
Now, he's the boss, and head talent scout,
recruiting people with the right stuff to work on spacecraft.
JIM: I'm looking for an attitude.
Somebody who's willing to dig deep.
Somebody who can understand the importance
of the work that we're doing.
JAMES: If you can come in with the right mindset,
then you can be trained how to work on spacecraft.
I remember very clearly the first hole I drilled.
Here I am, with a drill, in a clean room, with four people watching me,
and I'm dealing with hardware that's worth millions of dollars.
So, if I mess up, that could be catastrophic.
So... and I was reminded of that before I did it,
and I was sweating, I was sweating bullets.
STEVE: Prior to JPL, I was working in a bike shop.
You know, I'm used to having grease and dirt under my cuticles.
So, coming into a clean room
is a big eye-opener. It was a culture shock.
You don't wanna be too fast moving.
You don't wanna bump into anything.
You don't wanna... drop something.
You don't want to...
disturb this zen.
IVAN: I've had nightmares about this.
I do not wanna be the one person that's going to ruin this for everybody.
ADAM: The technicians are a bit like... a surgeon.
In that...
a slip of the hand... um, a mistake,
and you really can lose the patient.
So, they have tremendous responsibility.
PATRICIA: Gotta make sure there's room.
NARRATOR: The stakes are high and everyone knows it.
Even the veterans feel the pressure.
PATRICIA: You have to be able to really kind of block it out,
and not get nervous, even though they could say,
"Oh, that's a two million dollar camera," you know.
And so, you just say, "Don't tell me." (LAUGHS)
MICHAEL: I put in six screws in one day,
and come home exhausted because my level of focus
on those six screws was so intense.
They have to be so perfect, everything has to be so right
and exact that you come home and go, "Why am I so tired?
"All I did was six screws."
It comes back to the complexity of what we're building.
You can't do this and not have problems.
It's not that simple.
ADAM: Look, I'm an engineer.
Up here, on this floor, in our offices where we engineer
the spacecraft, it's intellectually collaborative.
"Whoa, what's... that's an interesting idea you have.
"I like that." Right?
"Let's think about that." Blah, blah, blah.
Down there, it's actual touch labor collaboration.
It's arduous. It's amazingly complicated.
When you design a spacecraft,
one of its greatest challenges is actually being made.
And that's the techs.
NARRATOR: In March 2019, 16 months before launch,
the spacecraft is in its final phase of construction
in JPL's Spacecraft Assembly Facility.
The rover is still a box full of wires.
Three-and-a-half miles of it, with 22,000 wired contacts.
It won't get its name, Perseverance, for another year.
For now, it's just "The 2020 Rover,"
still waiting for its wheels, robotic arm, cameras, and all the rest of its toolkit.
Meanwhile, it's filling up with the electronics
that will run all the hardware still being built.
ADAM: We have this phase of the mission called ATLO,
which means, Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations.
But along with being a phase of the mission,
it's this army of people, it's like a Seal Teams almost,
very carefully chosen, very select group of people,
that physically build our spacecraft.
JIM: ATLO is where everything comes together.
The integration of all the major components.
The ATLO team will eventually be on the launch pad.
They'll be conducting launch pad operations.
NARRATOR: The ATLO team is responsible not only for assembling the spacecraft,
but for making sure that it works
as a system when all the parts are put together.
The rover doesn't fly to Mars by itself.
The cruise stage manages the journey from Earth to Mars.
Then separates just before arrival.
Then comes the "Seven minutes of terror..."
as the spacecraft decelerates from 12,000 miles an hour
to a gentle touchdown.
Radio commands at the speed of light will take 11 minutes
from Earth to Mars, so the spacecraft is on its own.
The aeroshell carries it through the fiery collision
with the Martian atmosphere.
Then, deploys the parachute from its mortar.
(PARACHUTE FLUTTERS)
NARRATOR: The heat shield drops off.
And the rocket-powered descent stage takes it the rest of the way in.
Finally, there's the acrobatic sky crane maneuver.
And then, the rover is on Mars.
FEMALE TECH: Let's start pushing north east.
MALE ENGINEER: North east.
Slowly.
NARRATOR: Over the next few weeks,
they'll be temporarily stacking all those parts together
for a brutal series of tests, simulating the trip to Mars.
The rover's not ready yet, so they have a mass model dummy inside
to get the correct weight and center of gravity.
JIM: It's major work. It's heavy lifts, critical lifts,
millions of dollars in hardware.
So, the smallest little mistake can be huge.
-MALE TECH 1: On the crane. -MALE TECH 2: Crane.
-MALE TECH 1: East, slow. -MALE TECH 2: East, slow.
(OBJECT CLACKING)
NARRATOR: Engineers direct the lifts,
but only technicians,
and only the most experienced can operate the crane.
-TONI: Okay, stop. -MALE TECH: Stop.
DAVID: It's a potentially dangerous situation.
And so, doing it safely, making sure you have
everything hooked up right,
making sure you haven't missed something is key,
and that's a place where experience comes into play.
MICHAEL: You're now swinging a few tons in the air.
And there are hazards there.
By the sheer size of the spacecraft, you can't see all around it.
You have to trust that that person on the other side is doing their job.
MALE TECH: Down on, slow.
TONI: Okay.
JAMES: There are certain key moments that...
it just takes your breath away.
Seeing the spacecraft stacked for the first time,
you're reminded that this is real, this is happening,
this massive collaboration.
And I have all of that work in my hands.
At that point, you saw
the complete spacecraft that's gonna fly to Mars.
NARRATOR: The stacked spacecraft is now ready
for its first major system test.
Over the next 12 days, inside a space simulation chamber,
it will have to prove it can function in the frigid vacuum
of deep space on its seven-month journey to Mars.
WILLIFORD: Has life ever existed beyond Earth?
Does it today? Has it ever?
Has life ever emerged on another planet?
You know, as astrobiologists, we believe it must have.
But right now, we have no evidence.
So, we're going to Mars,
we're collecting the first samples from another planet,
with the intention of, one day, bringing them back
to our most powerful laboratories on Earth,
and we can analyze them for signs of ancient life
with instruments that are way too big to ever fly to Mars.
We're headed to a place called Jezero Crater.
The big signpost is the delta.
Up in the northwest corner,
we see this beautiful fan-shaped feature,
and a delta really only forms on Earth
where you get a river flowing into a standing body of water.
That tells us very clearly that three some billion years ago,
there was a lake in Jezero Crater.
A great place for life to survive and thrive, if it ever emerged on Mars.
We know exactly where we're going now. And it's an incredibly exciting time.
NARRATOR: A lot of 2020 scientists,
like Ken Williford, trained as field geologists,
exploring landscapes and unraveling stories
rocks can tell about the past.
With a rover on Mars, though, they'll have to work from home.
They've been practicing remote geology.
One team out in the desert, playing the rover on Mars.
And we got all these cables here.
NARRATOR: Pointing cameras at rock formations,
and streaming the images back to JPL.
Another team at JPL,
practicing how they'll interpret images from Mars,
and make decisions about what to do next.
Then, they visit the site to see what it looks like in person.
KATIE: Everyone was looking at the images on their computer,
looking at the data, you know, very remotely, just like we do on Mars.
But it's really a different kind of experience
when you can come out here as a person,
and look at the rocks yourself with your own eyes,
and point the instrument at the outcrop, and get that data back real time.
And I think it just gives people
a new perspective on the observations that come down from a rover.
It reminds you that when you are looking at the images that are on Mars,
there's a whole field site there.
So, that's why it...
NARRATOR: They have to travel a bit farther
to see what the jackpot on Mars might look like.
KEN: The key reason we came to this locality
in the middle of the outback is rocks like this.
Rocks like this are extremely rare.
What's very special about them is they have evidence
of the earliest life on Earth.
And they tell us what we should be looking for on Mars.
WILLIFORD: When we say with Mars 2020, we're seeking the signs
of ancient life on Mars,
this is precisely the kinds of signs of life that we'll be seeking.
These wrinkly layered structures that we call stromatolites,
which represent, basically, fossilized pond scum, in a sense.
This is what we would call a bio-signature.
Sign of life, observable to the naked eye,
and therefore, observable to say, the mast-mounted cameras on a rover.
If we see something like this on Mars, it is a very, very good day.
It would be a very important scientific discovery.
We would characterize it using the instruments that are on the rover.
And then we would sample it, and prepare it for return to Earth.
NARRATOR: Now it's up to the engineers to make it happen,
starting with Jezero Crater.
The most dangerous place they've ever attempted to land on Mars.
AL: Landing on Mars is always very difficult.
I mean, the vehicle has to do everything on its own, right?
We have no ability to joystick the spacecraft as it's coming in.
But at Jezero Crater, I see a lot of dangers
that we have to deal with. There are rock fields to the east.
We need to avoid steep slopes as well.
There's a 60 to 80-meter cliff that we definitely don't want to land on.
That would definitely be a bad day.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
NARRATOR: To improve the odds, they're developing a new camera system
to help the lander detect and avoid hazards on its own.
(BLADES WHIRRING)
AL: We're deep into the second week of testing.
This critical piece of new technology, for helping us land safely at Jezero.
This gives the vehicle the ability to figure out where it is,
using a camera to take pictures on the way down,
and to compare the pictures to pictures we've taken from orbiters,
kind of a map of the place we're trying to go.
And then, we can use our engines to steer the vehicle
to safe spots that we can reach,
because we know where we are finally.
Everything still has to go right for us to make it.
You know, it's my job to be nervous about everything.
But, you know, what we've been doing this week
has given me a lot of confidence.
NARRATOR: Landing on Mars is never a sure thing.
But it has been accomplished before by some of these same JPL engineers.
And apart from the new hazard avoidance system,
the descent stage is pretty much the same as it was for curiosity,
built by many of these same techs.
The biggest risks on any mission
are the things that have never been done before.
We want to bring samples from Mars back to Earth.
It takes three missions to make that happen.
One mission, to core into the rocks of Mars,
take core samples, seal them in inhumanly clean vessels,
and leave those vessels on the surface of Mars.
The second mission, to take those sealed samples,
put them in a small rocket, and put them in orbit around Mars.
The third mission, to scoop them out of orbit,
and bring them back to Earth.
And our mission, Mars 2020, is the first of those missions.
I think that almost everybody on this project shares my personal anxiety
that it's that sampling system
that is our greatest challenge on this mission.
I'm the Chief Engineer for the project.
And I try to be able to span the range
of all the different elements of the spacecraft,
and then find the holes in our defense against mistakes
and our defense against risk.
Prior to having this job, I developed the sampling system.
This incredibly challenging set of mechanisms that we use
to core rocky samples, and keep them clean,
and move them through, and process them, and collect them.
We have a sample tube... that sits inside this drill.
The drill bit's put into a corer,
and the corer goes... (MIMICS DRILL WHIRRING)
And as it does that,
it shoves that column of rock into the sample tube.
We then, bring the sample tube out.
We're doing this with the sample handling arm
on the inside of the spacecraft.
And we move that tube... to a station that assesses the volume,
to a station that takes images.
We put a seal on it...
and then, we put that tube back in storage.
I got 43 of these tubes inside the spacecraft.
We can do that 43 times.
A rocky core... this is what it's all about.
We want to bring a sample like this.
We want to bring 30 samples like this back from Mars.
And so, we're putting our system together,
this behemothly complicated thing.
It outstrips the complexity of anything that's been created by humans,
and put into space, ever.
KELLY: This equipment is not going to Mars.
This is our engineering model, so it's built to be
as flight-like as possible,
with the same functionality as everything in Mars.
So, we're in a very dirty environment here,
and we're gonna drill rocks with it, we're going to cover it in dust,
and really run it through its paces, and wear it out.
That a pretty good-looking core.
NARRATOR: This dirty testing version of the hardware
will take a beating over the next few years.
Eventually moving to a space simulation chamber
to prove it can function in the frigid, low pressure environment of Mars.
Two flight versions, one of which will actually go to Mars,
are still being built at this point, under very different conditions.
WILLIFORD: One of our key concerns with Mars 2020 is keeping it clean.
So, we're going to Mars, we're spending a lot of resources
to collect these samples.
We don't wanna be analyzing bits of Earth.
NARRATOR: On a good day, the air outside JPL,
just north of Los Angeles, is a soup of hydrocarbons,
and millions of microscopic particles in every cubic foot of air.
On a bad day, it can be in the hundreds of millions.
The spacecraft clean room is filtered to no more
than 10,000 microscopic particles per cubic foot.
The ultraclean rooms, where the flight sampling hardware
is built, have no more than one hundred per cubic foot.
LACK: About two and a half years ago, they came to me and said,
"We need to set up some clean rooms that could handle
"this cleanliness level.
"It's something that we've never done here at JPL before,
"and we don't know how to do it."
Everything inside the clean room had to be brand new,
which means brand-new flow wrenches, brand new toolboxes, with brand-new tools.
All the computer systems are brand new. Everything.
Right out of the box, and born into the clean room.
It took a year for me to get them up and running.
No... no joke. It took a year. (CHUCKLES) It was... it was crazy.
ADAM: The technicians have been part of the team
from the get-go, sort of, authored this approach,
and verified that we could actually pull it off.
NARRATOR: The rules for the ultraclean rooms go way beyond
what's required in any other cleanrooms at JPL.
They start with the same gloves, masks, and bunny suits.
There's the same air shower on the way in.
But in these ultraclean rooms, that's just the beginning.
BRIANNA: I work with the bits and corer team,
and these needs to capture what's coming from Mars,
not what's coming from Earth.
So, we have to take extraordinary measures.
JIM: I've got technicians over in the ultraclean rooms
that are wearing double bunny suits, double gloves.
JENNA: Anything that can produce a particle
that can cause contamination is not allowed.
No scented shampoo or conditioner, no perfume,
no cologne, no makeup, things like that.
BRIANNA: The rule is, if we smell you before you go in,
you... you can't come in.
You can't smoke. Oh, few people needed to quit that.
SETH: Yeah, it kind of became like JPL urban mythology
double bunny suiting and all stainless steel tools.
You'd hear these incredible things they were doing,
kind of on the bleeding edge of technology.
JAMES: We rarely see them. They're almost the ghosts of lab.
I honestly don't even know what to expect.
(RATTLING)
THORA: We are working on something that is the cleanest
we've ever really attempted to send into space.
So, we've had to rethink,
how do we do this as cleanly as possible, and keep all those particles off the rest
of the surface of the flight hardware?
NARRATOR: Cleanest of all are the titanium sample tubes
that will preserve Martian rock cores from the moment they're drilled
until they return to Earth.
By the time they go to Mars, they'll be the cleanest things ever made.
That is not hyperbole.
Literally, cleaner than anything humans have ever made.
NARRATOR: Even gloved hands can't touch the tubes during cleaning.
In hands-free cages, they'll go through a barrage of chemical solvents.
They've been through a complex manufacturing process.
Machining, polishing, special coatings, often sterilized between steps.
And now, before they go to the techs for mechanical assembly,
they're cleaned again.
Multiple soaks in solvent tanks agitated with high frequency sound,
strip away more particles and organics.
THORA: No particle's thicker than a strand of hair.
A fingerprint can weigh around 50 micrograms.
We are trying to hit less than point one micrograms
for organic contaminations.
NARRATOR: Then, they get baked in a high temperature oven
to burn off whatever is left.
They're building 200 of these tubes.
In the end, 43 of the most pristine will go to Mars.
In the meantime, the technicians have to add
mechanical parts without contaminating them.
That happens in an even cleaner room,
with sterile gloves, sterile smocks,
and sterile goggles on top of everything else.
They call it Area 151.
-FEMALE ENGINEER: You ready? -MALE ENGINEER: Yeah.
FEMALE ENGINEER: You can go in now.
ADAM: To put all of these very, very clean elements together,
is a tremendous amount of handwork.
And you have to do it in these very, very clean environments
using aseptic assembly protocols.
You're not touching a lot of surfaces,
you want your hands to be sterile, you want your tools to be sterile.
It's required all of our flight technicians
to retrain their minds about how they build the flight hardware.
JENNA: You have to be very, very conscious of your hands.
You can't rest your hands on the table, you can't rest them on your gown.
ADAM: It's all about the handwork.
There's a tremendous demand on the physical control
of the people with touch labor on the hardware
to make this cleanliness all come to pass.
They can get it right or they can get it wrong.
NARRATOR: Everything about this has been more difficult,
and taken longer than expected.
ADAM: One thing that we didn't appreciate
was that there were enough piece parts, enough special things,
special surface treatments, special processes...
that we have slipped our schedule.
We really wanted to be in the position that we're in now about six months ago.
So, the sampling system is what wakes me up
in the middle of the night most frequently.
NARRATOR: "Up the hill," as they say, at JPL,
is a legendary spacecraft torture chamber called the 25-foot Space Simulator.
This relic from the early 1960s, declared a National Historic Landmark,
is still the state of the art for recreating
the punishing environments of space on Earth.
THEODORE: After the whole spacecraft's been assembled,
we'll roll it through the high bay here, and load it into the chamber.
The primary function of this is to simulate space
as the spacecraft is actually flying.
It simulates the extreme cold of space and the extreme hot
from the Sun to the shade,
as well as the high vacuum, the lack of pressure.
We're gonna light up D-5.
MALE VOICE: (OVER RADIO) Copy that. D-5.
THEODORE: The walls and the floor of the chamber
are flooded with liquid nitrogen, which cools it to about negative 180 C.
NARRATOR: That's 292 below zero Fahrenheit.
THEODORE: We can then use the solar simulator
to heat up the top of the spacecraft.
The light that you see here is actually coming
from a Xenon arc lamp that's two floors down,
shining up through a lens assembly on the second floor.
Right now, we have one arc lamp running.
We'll run about 18 lamps
during the actual hot case for the spacecraft.
NARRATOR: The hot case can reach 212 degrees above zero
on the sunny side of the spacecraft.
(CHAIN RATTLING)
NARRATOR: Exploring this building is a bit like going back
in time to the beginning of the space age.
The Mariner 2 Venus Probe, NASA's first spacecraft
to visit another planet, was tested here in 1962,
followed by just about every interplanetary traveler since then.
So, this is the end bell of the chamber.
This is the bottom of the pressure vessel.
This is where the vacuum's held.
Most of the electronics for the spacecraft are passed through these ports.
(MACHINE WHIRRING)
This is a 32-kilowatt arc lamp.
Right now, it's running about 20 kilowatts.
This is just one.
We would usually use 18 of them for our warm case on the spacecraft.
NARRATOR: The 2020 spacecraft, minus the rover,
is now in the chamber for its first major system test.
Over the next 12 days, it will experience most of the extreme deep space conditions
it has to survive on the way to Mars.
The simulator can also replicate the thin, dry atmosphere
and wide temperature swings on the surface of Mars.
This is where the ingenuity helicopter proved it could both fly and control
itself in that environment.
(BLADES WHIRRING)
NARRATOR: It had to be very light, just under four pounds.
But powerful enough to spin the rotors at 2,400 RPM
to generate lift in an atmosphere less than one percent
as dense as Earth.
(BLADES WHIRRING)
(CROWD CHEERING, APPLAUDING)
MIMI: It was an amazing feeling.
We've been working for four and a half, almost five years.
It's a huge milestone for us.
NARRATOR: It will travel to Mars
attached to the bottom of the rover and drop free when it's time to fly.
(BLADES WHIRRING)
NARRATOR: It will only fly a few times.
The goal is to prove itself as a technology for future missions.
MIMI: We'll be able to get high definition images
of places that we want to send rovers to.
So, we'll have a scout to inform before long traverses,
and then we'll be able to have a totally new way
to get to places we simply cannot get to, today.
And to be able to sit here and say, "Yes, it's working,"
is a huge deal. It's a huge deal.
But, there's always gonna be a "but" until we do it at Mars.
NARRATOR: Of course, not everything can be tested
in the simulator.
To test the parachute under Mars conditions,
they had to launch a supersonic rocket
and deploy the chute one hundred thousand feet up,
where the atmosphere on Earth is as thin as Mars near the surface.
But even that doesn't tell them everything they need to know.
IAN: In order to get that parachute out behind the vehicle,
we have to shoot it out of a cannon, called a mortar,
at about a hundred miles an hour.
So, we're out here getting ready to do a test of that cannon.
We've got lots and lots of high-speed imagery,
recording it up to 20,000 frames per second
because we're witnessing and monitoring and watching things
that are occurring in microseconds or at least milliseconds.
We've got a parachute pack that's loaded into this canister behind me.
This is the 14th test.
There are a number of small changes that we've made along the way.
This is hopefully the final test to see that all those changes worked.
It's a pretty exciting test.
That's about two hundred feet high that this thing has to travel
in an, you know, a fraction of a second.
And when this goes off it's a... it's a pretty spectacular boom. (CHUCKLES)
-(GASPS) -Whoa!
IAN: It's 108 grams of black powder.
You know, we study, we analyze, we predict,
we model all of these behaviors,
but it's not till we actually do a test like this
that we get to see if it works the way that we need it to.
NARRATOR: That's true of pretty much every element
of the spacecraft.
A near twin of the flight rover,
designed for hard testing, is spun up to 18 Gs
on a centrifuge to simulate the crushing gravitational stress
of launch and landing.
That's about six times more than astronauts experience
on launch from Earth.
The wheels and suspension have to survive the shock of landing.
(CLANKS)
(RATTLES)
NARRATOR: And then endless hours of driving in the Mars Yard,
using a stripped-down rover to approximate its weight
in Mars gravity.
The Perseverance wheels are more rugged than the ones on the Curiosity rover,
which took an unexpected beating in the early days after landing.
When the problem first appeared,
they built a test track in the Mars Yard to get an idea of how much longer
Curiosity's wheels might last.
Helping to build that track was James Bailey's
introduction to the elite world of spacecraft development.
I went up to what is known as the Mars Yard,
and I was handed a 20-pound sledgehammer
and a bucket of rocks, and they said, "You're gonna break some rocks."
(CLANKS)
JAMES: My first couple months here at JPL learning about spacecraft
and the Mars mission. This is my first dose of it.
And coming from the army, yeah, it was the easiest money I ever got.
So, this is my beginning at JPL.
NARRATOR: The Mars Yard rock pile can test the attitude of new flight techs.
Those who pass, move on to work where the stakes
and the expectations are much higher.
The team building the rover's mobility system,
wheels and suspension, has been at it for three and a half years.
In a little over a month, they'll deliver it to the flight rover.
Today, they're drilling holes through the titanium suspension, by hand.
PATRICK: They've got about 30 plus
high precision holes that they're drilling.
It's titanium, so it's very difficult to drill on its own.
But then, irrespective of the material,
it's still difficult to hit the kinda size tolerances
that we're after. We're talking ten thousandths of an inch.
But we don't get to mount our suspension to a drill press
or to a mill to make these holes.
PASAN: Everything has a feel to it,
whether it's the drill speed, the temperature of the material.
You're communicating with the hardware. All the techs have that sense.
PATRICK: I think some of the engineers at the beginning of this would have said,
"You can't achieve this kinda precision by hand.
"Starting from a really small hole, making it a little bigger each time."
But now we can hit hole after hole to that level of precision.
NARRATOR: A few days later, they're installing the electric drive
and steering motors into the suspension struts
where they'll be mounting the wheels.
It's some of the most critical hardware on the rover
and some of the trickiest to handle.
These actuators have to be rugged enough to work for years on Mars,
at temperatures that can swing 100 degrees in a single day.
But they're vulnerable in human hands.
The rover has ten of them.
It took years to build and perfect 12, giving them two spares.
That makes them worth about one million dollars apiece.
PASAN: It's definitely a moment where you need to be extremely focused.
There's no room for error.
You kind of have to drown everything else out
and at the same time, not be afraid.
PATRICK: You know, we're at a phase now where the stakes are really high,
and it's not so much about, like, monetary value of something.
It's really about irrecoverable schedule at this point.
We're looking at years and years of another team's work,
and now it's our responsibility
to see it safely on to its next destination.
NARRATOR: The electrical cabling harness,
another system representing years of work by another team...
powered up for the first time.
Everything works.
PATRICK: That looks pretty good.
NARRATOR: Now, it's ready for wheels.
(MACHINE WHIRS)
NARRATOR: They've been in production for more than a year.
They have 43 altogether.
Only six will go to Mars.
The rest will stay behind as spares for the test rovers in the Mars Yard.
-(MACHINE WHIRRING) -(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
NARRATOR: Now, just days away from delivery to the flight rover,
they're in the hands of the mobility team for the first time.
PATRICK: This stuff looks beautiful
because it's a product of functional design
kind of being taken to the nth degree.
I find that complex designs are usually complex
because they haven't had enough time
to cook and distill down to something elegant.
MALE TECH: Okay.
-MALE TECH 1: Voila! -MALE TECH 2: Ta-da!
PATRICK: You know, it feels really high pressure now,
because it's not a few different piece parts
in different people's hands.
You know, it's one big installation.
So, we feel a great sense of responsibility, I think,
to really not mess it up in these final stages.
NARRATOR: A few days later, the rover mobility system
is leaving its birthplace in Building 18.
It's a venerable tradition at JPL,
the procession of finished flight hardware down the hill
to the Spacecraft Assembly Facility.
This is where the people who built it say goodbye to hardware
they've been working on for the past three or four years
and hand it over to ATLO,
the Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations team.
(CHUCKLES)
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
ADAM: It's not in the handbooks of engineering
at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
You run into it when you build your first piece of spaceflight hardware,
and you...
go to deliver it to the rest of the spacecraft,
and you watch this group grab it and carry it away from you, you're like,
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a second."
"You know, I understand
"this piece of hardware, and how do..." You know,
"Why do you think you understand?" As soon as you hand it over to them,
they're like, "Whatever, dude."
MICHAEL: Now, ATLO owns it. So, it's no longer their responsibility.
Now, we control it,
and we will be the ones to put it on the spacecraft.
We'll take care of this, we'll get it inside with QA,
and then we'll section it all off.
-Appreciate it, sir. -And we'll secure it for ya.
PATRICK: It's like taking a kid to college, I imagine. (CHUCKLES)
(WHIRRING)
ADAM: You deliver to ATLO...
then it kind of becomes possessed by this group of people.
They take tremendous ownership
of the elements of the spacecraft that come into them.
And I think that that's...
the perfect perspective for them to have,
because once they have those pieces of spaceflight hardware...
it's all in their hands. Literally in their hands.
If you make mistakes at that point, they can be very, very, very costly.
They can conceivably cost the mission.
MALE TECH: All right. Move this up.
NARRATOR: The stacked spacecraft has served its time
in the Space Simulator with no major problems.
From here it goes back to the clean room
to be taken apart again and given its final tune-up.
From now on, it's going to be all about the rover.
First up, the Remote Sensing Mast.
Essentially the rover's head, with high resolution color cameras,
navigation cameras, and the SuperCam laser.
Installations are meticulously planned,
closely supervised, and inherently risky.
-ENGINEER 1: Okay. Up, slow. -ENGINEER 2: Up, slow.
(MACHINE WHIRRING)
ENGINEER 1: Stop. Okay.
South, slow.
NARRATOR: Engineers direct...
ENGIRNEER 2: South, slow.
...and the techs handle the crane and flight hardware.
ENGINEER 1: East.
SETH: Most other places I've worked at are just like,
"Shut up and turn the wrench," but here it's very different.
Everyone is valued for the insight that they bring to things.
ENGINEER 1: Slow.
ADAM: It's more than just having the skills.
There's a mindset to those guys.
-ENGINEER 1: Stop. -ENGINEER 2: Stop.
ADAM: The work is very demanding. There's a lot of pressure.
The hours, you know, we're working two shifts.
There'll be times when we'll be working three shifts.
You're working over weekends.
SETH: Like in any work site, when you're in the middle of it,
you're just like, "Oh, why do I do this?"
But everyone comes back. (CHUCKLES) We're like the mafia.
Everyone comes back.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
MALE TECH: I must be nervous, my sweaty hands
won't go into these gloves.
(MALE TECH 1 LAUGHING)
NARRATOR: A week later, it's time for the wheels.
MALE TECH: I guess, by the end of the day, both sides should be on.
-MALE TECH 2: No pressure. -(MALE TECH 1 LAUGHING)
-MALE TECH: Okay, let's charge on. -(MALE TECH 1 CHUCKLING)
MALE TECH: It's show time!
NARRATOR: This will be an all-day operation
with two precision lifts on the crane.
-ENGINEER 1: West, slow. -ENGINEER 2: West. Slow.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
-ENGINEER 1: Stop. -ENGINEER 2: Stop.
MALE TECH: Hey, you gotta see this.
NARRATOR: It's a delicate balancing act,
lining it up precisely to mate to the body of the rover...
matching two pins to corresponding holes on the chassis.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
NARRATOR: The tolerance of the pinholes is one one-thousandth of an inch.
ENGINEER 1: Stop.
ENGINEER 2: Okay.
NARRATOR: The lead mobility tech makes the final connections.
ENGINEER: In line, 340. Correct.
PASAN: Everybody put so much work and effort into it,
a little bit of their soul is in the rover.
The hand touching the work is what creates it.
It's... it's a great experience.
ENGINEER: Slow.
LACK: Pretty cool. Starting to look like a rover now.
ENGINEER 2: One more, one more.
MALE TECH 1: I wanna hug it and kiss it, then...
-MALE TECH 2: Whatever. -(MALE TECH 1 CHUCKLES)
NARRATOR: The robotic arm is next.
A seven-foot long, five-jointed limb
that will carry the drill turret and two science instruments
to analyze rocks.
It connects to the rover through a single mounting plate.
And because this mission is looking for signs of ancient life,
the mating surfaces, which won't come apart again,
have to be as clean as possible.
MOOGEGA: It's my job to make sure that as we build this rover
that we do it in a clean way so that we don't contaminate Mars
with our Earth bacteria.
Because we're bringing samples back,
we also have to make sure that we don't find any dead bodies
of Earth bacteria that may be mistaken for ancient fossilized microbial life.
NARRATOR: They sample for certain microbes
that could potentially survive both the cleaning
and the lethal environment of space.
MOOGEGA: The spacecraft isn't sterile
but we have a maximum limit based on this whole journey.
It can still be a certain level of "dirty"
and still be clean enough so that it doesn't contaminate Mars,
because it goes through these harsh environments.
-(MACHINE WHIRS) -ENGINEER: Stop.
-(OBJECT CLACKING) -ENGINEER 1: Stop.
ENGINEER: Yeah. Just close to this side.
MALE TECH: Yeah.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
NARRATOR: The turret, the business end of the robotic arm,
holds the rock-coring drill and two science instruments.
ADAM: As the spacecraft goes from an idea to reality,
there are less and less opportunities to catch mistakes.
And people have got to be willing to call out when something's not right.
Because it... you can't sort of fake it.
ENGINEER: We need to pop a little.
IVAN: You have to make sure it's done 100 percent right.
The rhythm, the movement, that also has to be perfect.
You're holding out the torque wrench.
You're turning it. "Click." Ah, perfect.
Now, that's been torqued. Now, you have to get the tool out.
Make sure it's coming out straight. Don't hit anything.
JIM: Trying to cover up or hide a mistake is totally taboo.
Let's say you dropped a fastener.
"Clink, clink, clink, clink, clink."
If you don't tell anybody,
there is a possibility that that fastener could
stop something from working properly.
It's just understood, you make a mistake, you come talk to us.
ADAM: So, hand labor at the point of the spear
where a mistake can mean two billion dollars, is very unusual
and very intense and demands tremendous integrity
of the people doing it.
NARRATOR: Now, the fiendishly complex, unearthly clean sampling handling system.
They're building two potential flight versions,
one of which will go to Mars.
Neither is ready yet but one of them has to go into the rover now
to make sure it fits and connects properly.
So, this one will be coming back out eventually.
The bit carousel is another intricate part
of the sampling system that delivers bits to the drill.
And another challenge to keep clean.
SETH: It is all about being a contortionist with this thing.
And you have to be a sterile contortionist on top of it.
It is a very tight area.
It's definitely like nothing else we've dealt with.
NARRATOR: Finally, the Ingenuity helicopter.
It will ride to Mars mounted on the belly pan underneath the rover
and drop free when it's time to fly.
CHRISTIAN: This is something that not very many people get to do...
build these spacecraft with their bare hands.
So being a part of this is pretty amazing.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
WILLIFORD: One of the most incredible things about being at JPL as a scientist
is putting together this scientific way of thinking,
that is really trying to understand how natural systems work,
next to these engineers who are thinking about,
how can we build something that allows scientists
to answer these questions?
And then you have these incredibly talented technicians
who are out there really on the frontlines putting things together.
And it really is astounding. I mean, just the artistry.
The level of detail and complexity is mind-blowing.
We have these wiring systems that are all bundled together.
And then that whole bundle is tied together with string.
And that has always just struck me as just such a beautiful thing that we do.
This incredibly hi-tech enterprise and operation,
and you see little bits of string, you know, holding it together just so.
It's really wonderful.
NARRATOR: Perseverance is now ready for its most demanding test,
the Space Simulator, where the gloves come off,
and it will have to prove itself under Mars conditions.
MICHAEL: That is a biggie. If we get through that,
you can really have a good determination
of, "Are we gonna go or not go?"
NARRATOR: Before it goes to the Space Simulator,
the rover has to pass another test, mated to the descent stage.
Mounted together the way they'll fly to Mars,
they're going to experience some of the stress of launch.
This is the vibration table, and its job is to simulate
the experience of sitting upside down on an Atlas V rocket during lift off.
Just one of the many indignities
they will have to endure on the way to Mars.
A few days later, the rover moves on alone
to the 25-foot Space Simulator.
For the first time, it carries its weight on its own wheels.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
NARRATOR: Now, comes two weeks of virtual Mars,
a critical test of survival for the journey ahead,
and at least two Earth years on the surface.
MICHAEL: That is a major milestone
because that's where we actually get to run the rover
through all its functions as if it was sitting on Mars.
You know, so, everyone's excited to get it in the chamber, start that testing.
We get through that,
now we're on the downhill side towards launch.
We have the Mars rover in the chamber
right now, doing her system thermal test.
Over in this room, over here, we have the ATLO team,
the ATLO systems team, who's controlling the spacecraft right now
as she's powered on.
We're working 24 hours a day,
seven days a week for 14 days on this test,
and we haven't killed anybody yet. (CHUCKLES) Not from lack of trying.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER OVER RADIO)
ART: That's our baby in the chamber, getting ready to go.
To think that in about ten months, it's actually on her way to Mars. Yeah.
And just over a year, about 15 months, she'll actually be on Mars.
That's pretty amazing.
Yeah. When you're in the heat of battle,
sometimes you forget and it gets frustrating,
but you gotta take a step back periodically and go,
"I'm building something that's going to Mars, again."
They've been wanting...
-ART: Was it? -Yeah.
MICHAEL: This is by far our biggest test, and so far,
everything is working as expected.
We have now hit a point where the smallest little thing
that you wouldn't even think of can basically end the mission,
and it could be something so small as just dropping a screw.
Once we get through this test, we do not have the time anymore
to react to any kind of large mistake.
Point of no return, I call it.
NARRATOR: The launch deadline is firm.
Earth and Mars line up close enough to make it happen
just once every 26 months.
Miss that opportunity,
and the next one is another 26 months away.
The rover has now finished its time in the chamber.
Everything is working.
From here, it goes back to the cleanroom for its final tune-up.
In a little over two months, the entire spacecraft and JPL team
will move to Cape Canaveral, Florida to prepare for launch in July.
The one thing that's not quite ready yet is the centerpiece of the mission,
the robotic system to drill and cache Martian rock samples
for eventual return to Earth.
(WHIRS)
ADAM: It is an amazingly daunting,
complex system that we needed to assemble to get this job done.
So complicated that it took us longer to get it together
than we ever dreamed it would.
(WHIRS)
NARRATOR: Now, only ten months before launch,
this dirty testing version of the hardware is running a full sampling sequence,
end-to-end, for the first time.
Awesome. Not bad.
NARRATOR: Success.
But now it has to do the same thing under Mars conditions.
So, as Perseverance finishes up in the big Space Simulator,
the sampling system is moving into a smaller chamber next door.
The entire rig, robotic arm, drill turret,
sampling handling system, and an assortment of rocks to drill,
will be lifted into the vertical vacuum chamber.
Once sealed inside, the system will have to prove itself,
repeatedly drilling cores and handling samples
exactly as it will happen on the frigid, airless surface of Mars.
And the first attempt does not go well.
ADAM: The very first time we went up the hill to our vacuum chamber
that allows us to core in the conditions that we expect to see on Mars.
The very first tube we put into the coring bit,
we put that bit. We took a corer... (MIMICS DRILL WHIRRING)
We broke it off. Click. We brought it back into the rover.
We took our little sample handling arm, reached up,
and went to pull out the tube...
and the tube was stuck inside the bit.
We're now calling that Excalibur.
The sword is stuck in the stone. The tube is stuck in the bit.
What's the significance of that?
Well, that means that if we can't get that tube out of the bit,
this bit is no longer of any use to us.
We have six of these bits all in.
So, we could stick a tube in a bit six times
before it would be game over for taking corers.
We start to look in detail at some of the mechanisms
that could be involved.
There is another set of tubes that have gone through
our final flight cleaning process.
We're starting to exercise those tubes,
not in the dirty testing, but in another vacuum chamber.
And there we see things that don't look that great.
Those mechanisms are showing us stickiness
that's very close to locking the mechanism up and making it unusable.
And some of them, if they failed...
essentially the mission is over.
NARRATOR: That stickiness, friction,
turns out to be an unintended consequence of the extreme cleaning regimen
the tubes and their mechanisms have gone through
to prevent them from contaminating samples collected on Mars.
Powerful solvents and a high temperature bake out
drove off every trace of hydrocarbons...
including a microscopic layer that remains on conventionally sterilized surfaces.
Interesting thing.
Our engineers... do tests about friction,
understand how to design mechanisms based entirely on data...
of materials that have that thin layer of the hydrocarbons on them.
No mechanisms, no devices, no robots have ever been made
or conceived of to be this clean.
So, all of our understanding about friction,
about ways metals mate and don't mate,
is all based on metals that have this very thin coating of hydrocarbons.
This isn't an issue of workmanship.
It is really an issue of creating mechanisms
that are unearthly in their cleanliness and their function
is changed by that unearthly cleanliness.
Reasonably, we should have expected that.
But we didn't really have a finished flight design
to put through those tests four years ago when we committed to this.
And so now, it's only now when we're done
that we put it through the tests and we're like,
"Well, there's some problems here."
NARRATOR: The question now is,
can the hardware be made reliable enough to launch in July 2020,
just eight months away?
Or should they buy more time
and slip launch the next opportunity in 2022?
(RATTLING)
What is good enough, right? We...
None of us really know.
My previous experience has been landing.
Landing's very binary.
Good enough is safely landing the vehicle.
(ALL CHEERING)
Done.
If our sampling system successfully gets 30 samples
and then fails, well, okay, that's good enough.
Twenty?
Maybe that's good enough. Ten?
Not good enough.
NARRATOR: To miss the launch deadline,
putting everything on hold for 26 months,
would cost at least five hundred million dollars
and complicate planning for the sample return mission.
But launching on schedule and failing to collect enough samples
would be worse.
ADAM: Because this sampling mission is the first
in a three-mission program
spanning over a decade,
resulting in samples from Mars being returned to Earth,
some of our sampling system mechanisms, if they failed,
could not only kill this mission,
they kill the follow up missions. The stakes are kind of unbelievably high.
NARRATOR: By mid-February, six weeks away,
they have to decide whether to move the spacecraft
to Florida and prepare for launch...
or punt to 2022.
Between now and then, the project will focus on getting
the evidence they need to make that decision.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
ADAM: We launch in July.
We're December, we won't be done with this assessment in January.
We won't be done with this assessment in February.
But you don't wanna pack the thing up and ship it to the Cape
if you're not gonna then launch it.
NARRATOR: It's not unusual for Mars missions to flirt with disaster.
In fact, it's almost routine.
Since each new mission is trying to do something
that hasn't been done before.
ADAM: There is an escalation there due to the arms race
between exploration technology and that which demands to be explored.
I mean, this is so much more incredibly intense than Curiosity,
which slipped because it was so much more incredibly intense
than Spirit and Opportunity,
which were... I mean, each time, right, our ambitions,
we step up to a bigger plate.
We take a swing at it and we come very close to not making it.
I think that that's good in some regards.
I believe that one of the things that we're doing here
is performance art in The Art of the Possible.
We're asked... this lab is a place where we do things
that people don't think can be done.
But that means you're very close to doing something that can't be done!
NARRATOR: To understand what they're up against,
they'll need all the sample system hardware
for new testing.
So, the version installed in the rover a few months ago is coming out.
The other flight unit, the one that's been struggling
in the clean vacuum chamber, is also coming out.
Both are headed back to the ultraclean room
while the team comes up with a plan to save the mission.
The rover is ready to go.
It survived the Space Simulator and passed its first driving test.
FEMALE VOICE: Whoo!
-MALE VOICE: It's moving! -FEMALE VOICE 1: Oh, my gosh!
NARRATOR: The JPL crew is preparing to take it to Florida
for the final push to launch.
But with the sampling system in trouble and the launch deadline in jeopardy,
no one really knows what's going to happen next.
SETH: At this point, usually the guts of the rover are set.
Once it's closed up, this is where everything is gonna live
and it's not like that anymore.
There's always kind of a straggler, there's always a problem and like,
"Oh, we'll deal with it in Florida,"
but not on this scale.
ADAM: It has not been easy.
I've never felt as much uncertainty.
But we haven't played all the cards yet.
NARRATOR: The Perseverance rover, the spacecraft that takes it to Mars,
and the team that put it all together,
are supposed to move to Florida in just about a month
to prepare for launch in July.
The primary mission is to drill Martian rock cores,
cache them in sterile tubes,
and leave them on Mars for a future mission
to pick up and return to Earth.
The rover and the rest of the spacecraft have been tested, proven,
and are ready to go.
But problems with the rover's crucial sample handling system
have forced a last minute scramble to meet the launch deadline.
We'd been working on this for a long time and we followed every protocol.
We did everything that had been outlined for us to do.
But a lot of people were worried that when we got to Mars
something would get stuck, and mission over,
and we wouldn't be able to take any samples.
So, they decided that we needed to take a step back
and try to figure out what we're doing.
ADAM: We are in the middle of a suite of testing.
Both dirty testing up the hill in a vacuum chamber
where we're simulating Mars' environments, and dirtiness,
and coring, and looking where dust moves, and how it gets into trouble or not.
And also very clean hardware.
The hardware that we want to take to Mars,
testing in a very clean vacuum chamber.
Long days, nights and weekends, some folks are running 24/7.
And we've had... problems.
(WHIRS)
NARRATOR: Two months ago,
the first time they tried to core a rock
in the Space Simulator under Mars' conditions,
the sample tube got stuck in the bit.
They called it Excalibur.
Since then, they've learned that's not their biggest problem.
ADAM: So, we have that Excalibur that got stuck,
and the analysis suggests we've got a piece of dirt
or debris just in an awkward position.
We've continued to successfully take cores in dirty testing.
We're now up to core 13.
NARRATOR: That's the good news.
But the investigation into why Excalibur got stuck
has uncovered other, more serious problems.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
ADAM: The new things that have happened
is in our thermal vacuum chamber
with the clean hardware that's going to Mars,
at cold temperatures,
we saw lots of failures to get tubes just to go into the bits.
A piece that worked every time in dirty testing,
was working almost zero times
in our cold temperature thermal vacuum chamber.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
ADAM: We now have a war room.
For a vast majority of the hours of day,
there's people in that war room working those problems.
FEMALE VOICE: Flight stuff is good.
ADAM: As each issue comes up, we work to knock it down,
to understand it, to figure out if we can live with it.
(SIGHS)
Every morning... I come in... ready to kick the butt
of every problem we've got on our list,
and every evening I leave...
feeling a little discouraged that maybe we're not gonna kick all of the butts.
The good news is the next morning, I've reset
and I'm ready to kick them.
NARRATOR: Even if all the butts get kicked
and they proceed with plans to launch in July,
the sample handling system still won't be ready
to install on the rover
until after the spacecraft has moved to Florida.
LACK: I think it's going to be a little hectic
because there's a lot more to do, but we're gonna figure this out.
So, let's do what we always do, let's relax,
look at the problem, solve it, and move forward.
The job that the flight techs do,
a lot of times we're dealing with people that are under a lot of stress,
and we need to know how to deal with that person
to really get to what they wanna do.
LACK: Everybody's still doing their thing.
(CHUCKLES) They can't stop.
At this point, everybody is so driven to take this to its completion
and make a really good product
that nothing's gonna stand in their way.
-ADAM: It's February. -(DOOR LOCK BEEPS)
ADAM: Three and a half months have passed
all in since things got a little sideways.
Quite literally nights and weekends,
full team working through a lot of testing.
God, we are beating the bejesus out of this thing.
We are really working the system very hard.
The big thing that we've struggled with
over the last three months has been our sampling tubes.
You know, the sample tubes go into the bits...
-(CLINKING) -...inside the be... the beast.
Getting them in the bits, we really struggled with,
and we really struggled with it because of friction.
And because when we make these...
items unearthly clean,
the friction that arises between these metals is much stickier.
So, our strategy has been to change the way we clean these tubes.
We're only doing the unearthly clean
on the piece of the sample tube that matters,
where the sample will come in contact.
NARRATOR: The tubes get another barrage of solvent bath
like they got before.
But now, there's a final rinse with another solvent called hexane...
carefully applied just to the parts of the tube that would come in contact
with the sample on Mars.
All this makes it possible to do the final bake out at a lower temperature,
making things a bit less clean to reduce the friction
but still clean enough to protect the samples.
We were driving the cleanliness of the mechanism piece
to as clean as the sample, the part that the sample has to go into.
And now we are letting this be, still, cleanest thing that ever goes into space.
But only the business end of the sample tube
gets this final set of solvent rinses
which takes it to that unearthly... level of cleanliness.
That's helped.
Second thing we've done is done a lot of practice
of getting these... these tubes into bits
and discovered methods with our little robot arm
inside the vehicle to be successful even in the presence
of these higher frictions than we've hoped for.
Okay.
Sweet.
ADAM: And when we do that, it works.
So, I think we'll be probably more successful
because of our...
challenges than we would have been if we hadn't had them.
We've kind of emerged out the other side with a deeper understanding
of the complexities of this thing that we created.
Some of which we love, and some of which we hate...
but all of which we think we can fly.
All of which we think will be successful at Mars.
LACK: So far, everything that they came up with
has worked pretty well.
And here we are. We're a little late but we're still gonna make it.
NARRATOR: The flight bits have had their final cleaning.
Once installed in the carousel that transfers bits to the drill,
they won't see daylight again until the rover is on Mars.
ENGINEER: Okay.
NARRATOR: They have to be kept as clean as the tubes,
so this is an operation with sterile gloves, masks,
gowns, and goggles.
Even so, there's no way to eliminate all hydrocarbons in the air.
Those signatures of life are slowly but steadily coating the hardware.
So, the action is choreographed to unfold as quickly,
but carefully, as possible.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
NARRATOR: It may look like a sacred ceremony,
but it's just contamination control.
THORA: It's a good way to make sure your fingers don't touch anything else
-besides the hardware. -MALE TECH: Yeah.
THORA: Everyone's got different methods, like this. They do this, sometimes...
Sometimes like this.
NARRATOR: This is another one of those moments
when people say goodbye to their hardware.
MALE TECH: Oh, my gosh.
I was telling them, it's like giving away all your puppies.
(BOTH CHUCKLE)
MALE TECH: They all find a new home.
NARRATOR: In the room next door,
they're selecting the final 43 tubes that will go to Mars.
ADAM: There's a lot of inspection steps.
We wanna choose the most pristine, the cleanest,
the best-looking sample tubes.
A part of our inspection is baroscopic microscopy down
into the bore to make sure we've looked at every single speck,
fleck, slight reflection, then clean 'em again.
We put our sterile flight tubes in special sheaths,
and then that assembly goes into a bake out for sterilization,
and it's inserted in the flight vehicle...
just prior to buttoning the vehicle up
inside the aero shell and on top of the rocket.
This is just the start of the journey, literally, for these pieces of hardware
which will be the first pieces of hardware...
in history to go to another planet and come back.
Their trip is just about to start.
The rover will fly to Florida in a C17.
It'll never come home unless something terrible goes wrong.
It's essentially starting its way to Mars.
So, we're moving forward.
NARRATOR: The core JPL team is moving with it,
and they'll spend the next five months in Florida
getting the spacecraft ready for launch.
-MALE TECH 1: Come on, come on. Let's go. -MALE TECH 2: Very good.
SETH: We were moving everything out to the Cape...
and the people that were loading on the C17's were like,
"How much is this box worth?"
-"Two and a half billion." -(FORKLIFT BEEPING)
"How much is that box worth?" "Two and a half billion."
"And how much is that worth?" "Two and a half billion."
The entire project is worth two and half billion.
If that falls off a forklift, that ends it.
So, everything from here on out is worth two and a half billion.
We know what we're getting into a bit.
We know physically how everything is supposed to happen.
It's just when you're at the Cape, you no longer have home field advantage.
You can tell people how it's going to be,
but they don't know until they get out there.
NARRATOR: In fact, no one knows what they're getting into
in late February 2020.
Soon after they arrive in Florida, so does the COVID-19 pandemic.
(THUNDER RUMBLES)
NARRATOR: With the mission and crew at risk,
NASA locks down the spacecraft cleanroom to essential personnel.
Documentary cameras are now in the hands of techs.
Until launch, the JPL team is on its own.
A multibillion-dollar eight-year production
with a cast of thousands is down to just the handful
of people who know how to assemble the spacecraft,
test it, and get it to the Launchpad.
ADAM: The crew that went down to Florida...
that had signed up for, well, being away from home
and only seeing them maybe once a month, have found themselves isolated,
cut off from friends and family...
and with the pressure of the entire project on them. Right?
No real relief in sight except for launching this thing.
(MACHINE BEEPING)
NARRATOR: Just before the pandemic hit in Florida,
NASA revealed the winning entry in the contest
to name the Mars 2020 rover...
Perseverance.
ADAM: You know, when we got the name Perseverance...
we got that on the 5th of March.
What appeared at the first week of March like a good name
has ended up being...
prophetic, really.
I mean, I cannot think of a more perfect name
for this moment in our project, for this moment in NASA,
and perhaps in this moment for the world.
We're gonna have to persevere.
NARRATOR: Toward the end of May,
the final pieces of the spacecraft arrive in Florida.
Those unearthly clean sample tubes that nearly scuttled
the mission a few months before.
The sampling system is so complex, and so vulnerable to contamination,
the team that built it traveled with the hardware
from JPL to do the final installation.
LACK: At some point, it becomes personal. That's my hardware.
My hands have put it all together. I've built it from nothing.
If something goes wrong,
you feel an emotional attachment to the hardware.
All the folks that have been building, all the technicians,
and other folks, they kind of share that same attitude.
They're really involved in it and they're really taking ownership
of what they're doing.
NARRATOR: They made hundreds of tubes.
Only 43 are going to Mars.
What happens to the rest?
They have looked at the internals and they've estimated
that it's just shy of a shot.
So, somebody may fill one of those and take a shot out of it,
and not a flight one, but we'll see.
-(CHUCKLES) -(CAMERAMAN CHUCKLING)
NARRATOR: The spacecraft will soon be on its way to the Launchpad.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
NARRATOR: The rover has a nuclear power supply
that will charge its batteries on Mars.
The very last job for the techs is to install it
when the rover is on top of the rocket.
JAMES: We are on top of an Atlas V rocket. Everything is ready to go.
And this rocket is swaying. (MUMBLES)
And so, we have this nuclear power source
that we have on this fixture to shove it in the rover
and then bolt it down before we close it out
and then put the door on the rocket, and that's it.
It's off to the Launchpad after that.
(HORN BLARING)
SETH: It is a very unique experience.
You start having nightmares about everything going wrong.
You have trouble sleeping because once it's taken out to Launchpad,
there's not a lot else you can do.
LACK: You've buttoned everything up, and it's ready to launch.
So now, you're, like, "Are we gonna launch?
"Is everything okay? Is the rocket okay?"
JIM: Do you realize how many things have to go right
for this to actually work?
We've gone through a set of worries, gotten those behind us.
The vehicle's fueled. It's powered.
It's rolled out on the pad.
We're ready to go.
So hopefully, fingers crossed, tomorrow morning, we leave Earth.
(BIRDS SQUAWKING)
MALE VOICE 1: (OVER RADIO) NASA CE.
MALE VOICE 2: (OVER RADIO) NASA CE is go.
-MALE VOICE 1: (OVER RADIO) SMA. -MALE VOICE 3: (OVER RADIO) SMA is go.
MALE VOICE 1: (OVER RADIO) SMD.
CHRISTIAN: As soon as that spacecraft leaves the planet,
this Earth, I think that's really when it's gonna set in.
-MALE VOICE 4: (OVER RADIO) Go Atlas. -MALE VOICE 5: (OVER RADIO) Go Centaur.
MALE VOICE 6: (OVER RADIO) Go Mars 2020.
BRIANNA: That's all I wanna do is watch it take off
and do exactly what it's been made for.
MALE VOICE 1: (OVER RADIO) Launch Director.
LAUNCH DIRECTOR: (OVER RADIO) LD is go
and you have permission to launch.
IVAN: Man, mind blowing! This is to me like a dream.
That I'm part of this team.
MALE VOICE 1: (OVER RADIO) Proceeding with the count.
ALC verified T-0-set for 1150 Zulu.
MICHAEL: Now it's on that rocket, the countdown is happening,
and you can't do a thing about it.
MALE VOICE 1: (OVER RADIO) Eight, seven, six, five, four.
MICHAEL: Crossing your fingers going, "Don't blow up!"
MALE VOICE 1: (OVER RADIO) Engine ignition, two, one, zero.
Release, and liftoff... as the countdown to Mars continues.
JIM: I can't tell you the feeling that you get
when you see that rocket light up.
(RUMBLING)
JENNA: That's something that we did, that's something we created, and it's...
it's like nothing else to be part of that.
SETH: You hear about that Mars rover, that's something that I built.
PATRICIA: Hey, I worked on that. You know, I had a hand in that.
MALE VOICE 1: (OVER RADIO) And Atlas TU has gone
to closed loop control.
PASAN: Everybody touches it and a little bit of their soul
goes into it.
MALE VOICE 1: (OVER RADIO) Coming up on 30 seconds into flight
the RD-180 is throttling down as expected, engine response...
DELLON: You see it launching... and then the sound is hitting you.
And you're realizing that this thing is going.
-MALE VOICE 1: There it is! -MALE VOICE 2: There it is!
-FEMALE VOICE: Yeah. -ALL: Whoo!
-MALE VOICE 3: Yeah! Whoo! -MALE VOICE 4: All right!
-(RUMBLING) -Wow, listen to that.
It's just incredible that it was here one day and now,
(LAUGHS) ...now it's gone!
FEMALE VOICE: And now it's gone! Your baby... your baby is gone!
Jesus.
LACK: You devote your entire life to this, you know, years of it,
and all of a sudden, it's gone.
MALE VOICE: (OVER RADIO) Burnout pressure signatures look good.
Standing by for SRV jettison shortly.
LACK: We're trying to branch out into the universe,
and this is one of those steps.
MALE VOICE 1: (OVER RADIO) The vehicle is 50 miles
in altitude, 85 miles.
LACK: It's time for it to do what it's supposed to do.