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(wind whistling softly)
♪ ♪
(wind howling)
STEVE SQUYRES: At the beginning, there's nothing.
There's no concept of a robot explorer
crawling across the surface of another world.
And then, gradually, you start to think.
You start to act.
We just start to build.
And those machines come to life.
♪ ♪
BEKAH SOSLAND SIEGFRIEDT: A lot of people out there would say,
"Oh, they're just robots."
(beeping, whirring)
But once we turned them on for the first time,
they became so much more than just robots on another planet.
("Roam" by The B-52's playing)
(electronic trilling)
♪ Boy, mercury ♪
♪ Shooting through every degree ♪
♪ Oh, girl dancing down those dirty ♪
♪ And dusty trails ♪
(over speaker): ♪ Roam if you want to ♪
♪ Roam around the world ♪
♪ Roam if you want to ♪
♪ Without wings, without wheels ♪
♪ Roam if you want to... ♪
KOBIE BOYKINS: Once the rover's on Mars,
it has its own life.
There's energy pulsing through its veins.
And it needs to be given love.
("Roam" continues)
ASHLEY STROUPE: And so we try and keep her as safe as possible...
...but sometimes she has a mind of her own.
♪ Take it hip to hip ♪
♪ Rocket through the wilderness ♪
♪ Around the world... ♪
DOUG ELLISON: And so, yeah, it's only a robot.
But through this robot, we are on this incredible adventure together.
And she becomes a family member.
♪ Roam if you want to ♪
♪ Without anything but the love we feel. ♪
-(clicking, whirring) -(rumbling)
(buzzing)
(song fades)
(wind howling)
♪ ♪
JENNIFER TROSPER: Something I think we all wonder about
as we look up into the night sky...
...is if we're really alone in this universe.
And trying to understand that
is one of the great mysteries that we have.
ROB MANNING: Over the centuries,
Mars has been this enigmatic
little red dot in the sky.
It invigorated imaginations of millions of people.
What could be going on in that distant land?
STROUPE: The overall goal of the whole Mars program
has been the question of: Did Mars ever actually have life?
So, especially early on in the Mars missions,
we were following the water.
That's because, at least on Earth, everywhere that we find water...
...there's life.
(screeching)
And so the question is:
Was there water on Mars?
And what kind of water?
And could that have helped sustain life?
MANNING: So, in the mid '70s, the two Viking missions
were kind of the epitome of exploration at the time.
NASA sent two orbiters and two landers,
which would give us a whole new perspective on Mars.
SQUYRES: Uh-huh.
Ah...
Wow.
Yeah, there's the good one.
Wow.
(exhales, chuckles)
It's funny to have such intense memories
associated with a bunch of 40-year-old pixels.
(laughs)
But I do, man.
I remember the very first time I saw it.
♪ ♪
At the time of the Viking mission, I was a bang-it-with-a-hammer geologist.
I would go out in the field, and I would do geologic fieldwork.
Fascinating science,
but what I found disappointing about it
was that there weren't new places to discover.
But then I started working with the images
from the Viking orbiters, and I would look down
on Mars using these pictures...
...and I had no idea what I was looking at,
but the beauty of it was nobody did.
This was seeing stuff nobody had ever seen before.
And I knew that I was gonna do space exploration.
MANNING: The two Viking orbiters, as they looked down on Mars, they saw...
You know, that's strange.
There could be signs of past water flowing.
Was Mars once a green world
with living things and-and blue oceans?
SQUYRES: We'd go there ourselves if we could.
But we can't.
And I just knew from my training as a geologist
that if we could get a rover down on the Martian surface
and it could move around and travel
and actually look close up at the rocks,
we might find out the truth about Martian history.
And so, starting in the mid '80s,
I'd spent ten years writing proposals to NASA,
but the proposals all failed. (laughs)
And I was facing the unpleasant possibility
that I had just wasted an entire decade of my career
with nothing to show for it.
♪ ♪
MANNING: But then we pulled a team together at JPL.
Could we actually put the rover that Steve Squyres imagined
and use this landing system that we already designed?
So we produced a proposal
and presented that to NASA.
SQUYRES: And we finally get the phone call...
...that made our dream come true.
Well, I am indeed very, very happy that we're able to announce
that we are returning to Mars-- this time in force-- with twins.
The Mars twin rovers.
SQUYRES: We named 'em Spirit and Opportunity.
This was ten years of writing proposals
that finally produced the result that I'd been dreaming of.
But I think, if I had known at that time
what an arduous path it was going to be from that point
to actually get onto the surface of Mars,
I wouldn't have felt quite as elated as I did.
(indistinct chatter)
MAN: If we could take our seat, I'd like to get started.
TROSPER: Okay, I'm up here as the project engineer
in order to make sure that the big picture fits together
between the flight system and mission system.
I'll briefly go over launch, cruise and EDL.
Our whole objective was to build two autonomous
solar-powered rovers that could survive 90 sols,
three months on Mars.
And we were really hoping that at least one of them would work.
But we knew that if we don't get it right we're gonna miss our launch date.
SQUYRES: Schedule for mission to Mars
is literally driven by the alignment of the planets,
and if you miss that launch window, the next one comes around...
...26 months later.
MANNING: That's no time to design, develop and test two rovers
and put them on two rockets.
And the pressure on the team is really phenomenal.
So we had to come up with an amazing team
working around the clock to pull it off.
BOYKINS: From a young age, I was into Star Trek.
I wanted to be Geordi La Forge.
Engineering, this is La Forge.
Shut down power to all transporters. I'm on my way.
BOYKINS: But I didn't really know what that job was.
You know, I knew they were the "engineer," but I didn't know what that was.
I just knew that I wanted to be the person that always fixed things.
Building Spirit and Opportunity really started on just a whiteboard.
Okay, we want to have a 90-day mission,
and we want to find evidence of past water.
Okay, what do we need to do that?
And then this team of different engineers
has to bring that rover to life.
ASHITEY TREBI-OLLENNU: This was my first mission.
And it was very exciting, you know,
doing something that no one has done before.
I grew up in Ghana, and when I was a kid, I was very fascinated by radio.
And I also was curious-- are there people inside the radio?
So, one day, I opened a radio, and I was disappointed
to find there were no people in the radio.
So that's my fascination with engineering.
BOYKINS: For the rover design...
...it was a deliberate decision to make the characteristics humanlike.
TREBI-OLLENNU: When you're a geologist
and you're working in the field, you typically take the rock
and then break it up to look inside of it.
So the robot needs the robotic arm
that has multiple instruments to take measurements and microscopic images.
Like a Swiss Army knife.
SQUYRES: Now, the resolution of the rovers' cameras is
the exact equivalent of human 20/20 vision.
So, all of a sudden, they start to look an awful lot like eyeballs.
BOYKINS: And then the height of the rover was five foot two.
That's the average height of a human being.
So it would feel like, as the rover was driving, taking these images,
that a human being was walking along the surface.
ELLISON: It's just a box of wires, right?
But you end up with this
cute-ish-looking robot that has a face.
TROSPER: So we had these amazing science instruments,
but once you put all that stuff on the rover,
the mass gets bigger.
Then this is gonna be a big problem for landing on Mars.
But then what I'm trying to look at is actually literally using
six little bungee cords attached here to airbags.
And the challenge here is that there's a lot of different ways to do this.
A lot of different ways to do this.
We don't know which one is the best, and we really only get one shot at it.
TROSPER: So our landing system
had these big airbags that inflated.
And they would bounce it across the surface.
MANNING: The biggest problem right off the bat--
we started doing the math for how much the Spirit and Opportunity
were going to weigh,
and will those airbags be able to handle that weight?
So we started doing tests.
-What the...? -This is just dandy.
-This is not a problem. Yeah. -No, this is a... this is a good rock.
-I like this rock. -Yes.
TROSPER: And so we were trying out the airbags
with the types of rocks we could encounter on Mars.
We do the first big drop.
(laughing): Huge gaping holes in these airbags
get ripped by the rocks, and we're like, "Oh, this is not good.
Not good at all."
MANNING: The parachutes were another story altogether.
MAN (over speaker): Three, two, one.
MANNING: But we did those tests with this big rocket-shaped payload
and dropped it out of the sky from a helicopter.
First one, the parachute tore to shreds.
(helicopter blades whirring)
The second one...
MAN: Oh!
MANNING: ...was torn to shreds.
And so we realized we didn't have a working parachute.
Unfortunately, that chute that just exploded was the chute
that we were planning on taking to Mars.
Cut to the quick. You're in very, very serious trouble.
What part of this gives you gas?
Where are you concerned?
PETE THEISINGER: There's a list of threats that these guys have come to me with,
and I've added all those threats up.
They go in the category of everything we can think of that can go wrong.
I understand your concern...
TROSPER: In the back of your mind, you're like,
"This is a billion-dollar national asset.
This could be a complete disaster."
(machine whirring)
MAN (over speaker): Okay, we're ready.
Here we go.
(vibrating, rattling)
SQUYRES: So we built Spirit and Opportunity
with the intention of them being identical twins.
(laughing): And they kind of started out that way,
but things diverged quickly.
-(vibrating and rattling stop) -MAN: Okay, we're all clear.
ELLISON: All the way through assembly and testing,
it was always Spirit
hitting some sort of test first and she would fail.
(indistinct chatter)
-We lost a bushing. -We lost a bushing?
Look on… look on the deck.
ELLISON: And along comes Opportunity.
(laughing): Everybody... Okay.
Three, two, one.
-(whirring) -MAN: Oh.
MAN 2: Ah!
-Thank you. -(man whistles)
ELLISON: And on every test, Opportunity came through with flying colors.
So, even before they left this planet, Spirit was troublesome,
Opportunity was Little Miss Perfect.
BOYKINS: So, after so much time testing and building our rovers...
...now it's time to put Oppy on the ground.
♪ ♪
This is the very first time
we breathe life into the rover.
Move.
Her first steps.
I'm getting tingly.
'Cause it was like... (gasps) "It's alive!"
(applause)
SQUYRES: She becomes almost like a living thing to you.
A real living robot that you can imagine going to Mars
and doing the things that you've dreamed of doing there.
To say it's like a child being born would be to trivialize parenthood,
but it feels sort of like that.
MANNING: But you feel like it's not clear
your child is really ready for this wild and woolly world.
SQUYRES: Had we done all the testing we wanted to do?
Absolutely not.
But eventually, you just run out of time.
And it was time to fly.
(birds chirping, insects trilling)
BOYKINS: We're out here at 5:30 in the morning,
but, you know, for us, this is a lot of time,
lot of hours, lot of sleepless nights coming together, so...
It's sort of surreal. I don't know if it's really gonna happen yet.
You know, it's like the whole butterfly thing going on at this point.
♪ ♪
Lucky peanuts.
TROSPER: So, Spirit would launch first.
And Opportunity three weeks later.
MARK ADLER: This is Delta Launch Control at
T-minus eight minutes, 40 seconds, and counting.
TROSPER: And I was in the control room for Spirit at JPL.
And I actually like it when I have a job to do
because then I'm focused
and-and it's a little harder to get emotional,
because you have something you have to focus on.
ADLER: This is the final checks of the Spirit MER-A spacecraft.
TROSPER: I'm a farm girl from Ohio.
I grew up raising sheep, pigs, cows.
And my dad had worked in the Army Corps of Engineers...
...on the very first rockets, and he would just tell these amazing stories.
But aerospace engineering wasn't something that girls around me did.
So I just couldn't imagine that I would ever have
the opportunity to send a rover to Mars.
TROSPER (over radio): MER-2 is go for launch.
MAN (over radio): Roger.
BOYKINS: T-minus ten... you start freaking out.
ADLER: Nine, eight, seven,
six, five, four,
(echoing): three, two, one.
-BOYKINS: The engines start. -ADLER: And liftoff!
(rumbling, whooshing)
BOYKINS: You hear that rocket.
No firecracker, no firecracker,
no firecracker, no firecracker, no firecracker, no firecracker,
-no firecracker, no firecracker. -(cheering)
♪ ♪
MAN: Load relief integrated in. Vehicle's responding.
Vehicle's recovering very nicely from the liftoff transition.
I don't know whether I shed a tear, but I think, you know,
this rocket is carrying my hopes and dreams.
(chuckles): And, um...
you know, it's very...
it's very difficult to describe. (laughs)
But you-you feel your life's work in the rocket.
(whooping, whistling)
(cheering, whistling)
BOYKINS: I have raised this child.
Yeah!
That's sort of what it feels like.
And now it's that child's moment to shine.
SQUYRES: But it was hard to say goodbye.
I devoted 16 years of my life to these rovers.
And then you put 'em on top of a rocket
and you shoot 'em into space
and you're never going to see 'em again.
TROSPER: For Opportunity,
I was out with my, uh, family, and we were watching
from the same launchpad that my dad had launched his missions from.
And he had since passed away.
And he was the proudest dad anybody... anybody could ever have.
It was just very emotional-- for me, for my mom, for my family--
to just see how he had encouraged and inspired me
to do space exploration.
(whooshing)
BOYKINS: The travel time to Mars for both rovers was six and a half months.
Spirit and Opportunity were only three weeks behind each other,
so they're not super far apart in celestial terms.
So we have a trajectory to Mars, and we want to make sure
that we are following that road to Mars as we move along.
It's like you're in Los Angeles and you want to hit a golf ball
to hit a door handle at Buckingham Palace,
and that's what we're trying to do.
BOYKINS: We call it the quiescent period.
Six and a half months of quiescent time, nothing going on.
Well, that's not exactly true.
(explosive booming)
MANNING: We got hit by the largest series
of solar flares that had ever been seen before.
And we saw this big ejection of the sun's energies and particles
racing toward our spacecraft.
♪ ♪
TREBI-OLLENNU: Throughout solar flares,
the sun releases bursts of plasma.
Plasma is a highly charged cloud of electrons.
MANNING: And the energetic particles, which could actually kill a human,
they go slamming right into our rovers.
All the way in to the computer.
BOYKINS: Really bad for spacecraft.
(rattling)
MANNING: Now software we put on board had been corrupted.
So we had to reboot both rovers.
BOYKINS: So we told our Johnny Fives to go to sleep.
This is really scary.
TROSPER: So you're loading this new version of software up on the vehicles
and transitioning to it.
You know, control, alt, delete, hoping it all works.
♪ ♪
(whirring)
(beeping)
(powering up)
(clicking, whirring)
MANNING: It worked. They rebooted.
And it took us a couple of weeks to clean up our computers.
By then, the sun had calmed down,
the software was loaded, and we were ready to land on Mars.
SQUYRES: But at that time,
two thirds of missions to Mars had failed.
Mars was a spacecraft graveyard... (chuckles) when we flew.
(whooshing)
A few years before, NASA launched two missions to Mars,
Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter.
(explosion)
Both failed.
One burned up in the atmosphere.
The other one crashed on the surface.
BOYKINS: Mars Climate Orbiter--
it was a communication error.
We were converting what was given to us in English--
we thought it was given to us in metric.
And that's ridiculously embarrassing.
Big news from outer space, ladies and gentlemen.
Apparently now, scientists claim there is no intelligent life...
-at NASA. Yeah. -(laughter)
Couldn't find it.
SQUYRES: And so all eyes were kind of on us.
Our team felt that Spirit and Opportunity
needed to be a mission of redemption.
BOYKINS: As part of the team, we felt as though,
if this landing didn't succeed...
...this might be the end of NASA.
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to what promises to be
both an exciting and eventful night here at JPL.
This is live coverage of Spirit's landing on Mars...
Live coverage of Opportunity's landing on Mars.
And tonight, the navigation team says all systems are go.
♪ ♪
TROSPER: Spirit and Opportunity were going to land on opposite sides of Mars
three weeks apart.
The anxiety is very high.
I don't know at what point I, uh, went on blood pressure medication.
WAYNE LEE (over radio): And a pleasant good evening to the flight deck.
Our current speed is 11,320 miles per hour,
which is fast enough to traverse a distance equal to the United States
in 12 minutes.
At this time, we'd like to invite you to sit back and enjoy the landing.
BOYKINS: So, entry, descent, landing.
It's approximately 86 events where, if one thing goes wrong...
(whooshing)
...we will lose the rovers.
It's the scariest thing you can ever think of,
because the communication time
from the rover saying, "Hey, I'm doing this," to Earth is ten minutes.
There is nothing you can do
other than hope they'd survive.
TROSPER: We call it the six minutes of terror...
is the time from when the spacecraft
enters the top of the Martian atmosphere
until it does all the autonomous-- all on its own-- activities it needs to do
to get safely landed on the ground.
LEE (over radio): Atmospheric entry in...
three, two, one.
(whooshing)
TROSPER: Everything is on the line in the six minutes of terror.
LEE: The vehicle is now at the top of the Martian atmosphere.
At the time of peak heating, the heat shield will be heated
to temperatures upwards of 1600 degrees Celsius.
(wind whistling)
BOYKINS: Parachute opens.
Slows you down more.
LEE (over radio): Current velocity is 446 miles per hour.
At this time, we expect the vehicle has gone subsonic.
BOYKINS: You have this thing called the heat shield that's super hot,
and you have to get rid of it.
MANNING: But now the hard part begins.
The lander has to rappel down on a 20-meter rope.
BOYKINS: So now you have a parachute, you have this back shell,
you have this lander.
The airbags inflate.
At 40 feet, the back shell fires retro-rockets,
slows the rover down to zero miles per hour
and then cuts the last cord.
(quiet chatter)
LEE (over radio): We won't see a signal at the moment.
MAN: We saw an intermittent signal that indicated we were bouncing.
However... however, we currently do not have signal from the spacecraft.
LEE: Please stand by.
MANNING: Spirit vanishes.
The signal goes away.
Completely gone.
In other words, she may have crashed.
BOYKINS: Silence.
Everybody waiting for a signal.
Everybody waiting for something.
(takes deep breath)
MANNING: I was thinking that we did all of this in vain.
That maybe we lost this mission.
♪ ♪
POLLY ESTABROOK: Do you see it? Do you see it?
-Do you see it? -What do we see? -W-W-Wait, wait.
(cheering, excited chatter)
It's there, Rob!
(excited chattering)
LEE (over radio): We have a very strong signal
in the left-hand polarization channel,
indicating that… (continues indistinctly)
(excited chattering)
MANNING (over radio): We're on Mars, everybody.
You see us jumping up and down.
We're not jumping for joy.
We're jumping for relief.
Both rovers landed safely on the surface of Mars.
(excited chatter)
The signal's going up and down. It means that...
(chatter continues indistinctly)
NARRATOR: Spirit rover diary.
January 4, 2004. Sol one.
♪ ♪
CHRIS LEWICKI (over radio): Ladies and gentlemen, you are privileged to be
in one of the most exciting rooms on Earth at the moment.
ABIGAIL FRAEMAN: I was actually a high school student
when Opportunity landed.
I was selected, um,
as one of 16 students from around the world...
...to be in the mission control room with the science team
when Oppy sent down her first images.
MAN (over radio): Full Navcams are coming down now.
Full Navcams.
(applause)
LEWICKI (over radio): Wow!
We are on Mars.
(cheering)
TROSPER: When those first images come, the relief...
the relief, you know, the level of my bl-blood pressure going back down.
Then we're all on cloud nine.
(squealing excitedly, laughing)
(sighs)
My child has arrived.
(laughs) It's...
♪ Ah... ♪
Welcome to Mars.
NARRATOR: Opportunity rover diary. Sol one.
The signal from the vehicle is solid and strong.
Opportunity is on Mars.
♪ ♪
(whirring)
(buzzes, beeps)
BOYKINS: Opportunity landed in a small little crater in the Meridiani Planes.
And it was a 300-million-mile hole in one.
NARRATOR: Pancam, Navcam and Hazcams
are all returning spectacular images.
What in God's name are we looking at?
(rover beeps, buzzes)
SQUYRES: I will attempt no science analysis,
'cause it looks like nothing I've ever seen before in my life.
(laughter)
As we had expected, holy smokes.
I'm sorry, I'm just... (stammers, sighs)
(laughter)
I got no words for this.
There was this dark sand everywhere.
And then poking out in the distance were these light-colored rocks.
They were jumping up and down and saying,
"Oh, my gosh, that's bedrock, you guys. I see bedrock."
And, you know, of course, I didn't know what that meant.
I didn't know why that was important.
But I don't think I slept a wink that night.
It was so exciting.
NARRATOR: It's the stuff that can tell you what happened right here
in this exact place long ago.
(beeps, whirs)
(beeping)
NARRATOR: Hundreds upon hundreds of people around the world
have worked on this project.
And it all had to go perfectly to make this moment happen.
♪ ♪
(beeping)
Spirit's alive, Opportunity landed safely,
and we've got real bedrock in front of us at Meridiani.
Now it's time for sleep.
(birds chirping)
REPORTER: Hello, everyone.
This is a big day for the rover on Mars.
And it's ready to do exactly what it was designed to do
and be a robotic geologist.
Per custom, our morning wake-up song is coming right up.
("Born to Be Wild" by Steppenwolf playing)
♪ Get your motor runnin' ♪
♪ Head out on the highway... ♪
SQUYRES: A tradition in human spaceflight...
...has been to wake the crew up.
The crew wake-up song, which they would play music.
You know, "Wake up, guys. It's time to get to work."
("Born to Be Wild" guitar riff playing)
♪ Born to be wild... ♪
STROUPE: The Martian day-- we call it a sol--
is about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day.
So your schedule is shifting by about an hour every single day.
SQUYRES: We were all living on Mars time.
And it was a tough way to live
'cause, you know, the daily planning meeting today is gonna start at noon,
and two and a half weeks later, we started a new day at midnight.
♪ We were born, born to be wild... ♪
TROSPER: And so we were tired, we were jet-lagged,
and we needed to wake up, too.
♪ I never wanna die ♪
(playing faintly over speaker): ♪ Born to be wild... ♪
(clicking, whirring)
TROSPER: And now we were on this 90-sol race
to find out as much as we could about Mars.
♪ ♪
SQUYRES: We picked the Spirit landing site, Gusev Crater,
that looked like it had a huge, dried-up riverbed flowing into it,
and we went there hoping to find evidence of past water
and past habitability.
I mean, there has to have been a lake in Gusev Crater
at one time.
FRAEMAN: But all Spirit found was this prison of lava rocks.
(beeping, whirring)
No evidence at all for any interaction with water on these rocks.
(clicking, beeping)
ELLISON: On the other side of Mars,
Opportunity's landing site was unlike anything we'd ever seen before.
NARRATOR: Opportunity. Sol eight.
We've gotten down the first images of the soil
right in front of the rover.
It's the strangest-looking thing we've ever seen on Mars.
SQUYRES: So it turns out the surface of Mars at this location
is covered by
an uncountable number of little round... things.
(chuckles)
(whirring)
And when she got to the outcrop...
...these little round things were embedded in the rock
like blueberries in a muffin.
FRAEMAN: And it turns out the composition of these little blueberries
was a mineral called hematite,
which is a mineral that often forms in the presence of water.
(applause, cheering)
SQUYRES: From the mineralogy, from the geochemistry,
everything that we needed
to come to a reasonable conclusion that there was once water on Mars
was right there in the walls of Eagle Crater.
But...
this is a very acidic environment.
Not a place where life could have developed.
So, yes, there had been liquid water,
but this wasn't water that you or I would want to drink.
(beeping, whirring)
It was basically like battery acid.
You would not want to put your toes in there.
You probably wouldn't have any toes left if you did.
What you really want is nice, flowing, neutral-pH groundwater.
And so to go and find a story of habitability...
...you've got to go on a bit of a road trip.
But the problem is
these rovers only have 90 days to live.
VANDI VERMA: Rover drivers are those of us who operate the rover on Mars.
(quiet chatter)
It's such a fun job, but you can't
just use a steering wheel to drive it.
Because it takes anywhere from four minutes to 20 minutes
for a signal to reach Mars.
So we'd send the commands, we then go off and sleep...
...and then the rover will execute the drive that day.
And by the time the drive is done,
we come back and we get the results of that
and start planning again.
I grew up in India.
And when I was about seven years old,
somebody gave me this book which was about space exploration,
and I was just blown away.
Did you see how close we get to that rock in the beginning?
During the mission, I was pregnant with the twins.
And so it was a different way for me to relate to the twin rovers.
I thought about these two beings that are
so connected and so similar
and yet are going to have completely independent lives.
The rovers have their own personality,
and it's hard for me to pick which one of them is my favorite.
Can't really pick one, you know.
It's sort of like this twin thing. (laughs)
(indistinct chatter)
TROSPER: In Gusev Crater, Spirit was in a much colder site.
Opportunity was at the equator, kind of like the vacation spot on Mars.
And so Spirit just had a tougher mission ahead of her.
BOYKINS: And so Spirit, she finds this rock we dubbed Adirondack.
She touches the rock.
(beeping)
And she doesn't call home.
(indistinct radio chatter)
Uh, yes, sir, I'm not seeing anything from our displays.
Um, you're not seeing any signal at this time?
-MAN (over radio): Uh, that's a negative. -Copy.
TROSPER: I was one of Spirit's mission managers.
And so I didn't go home for several days.
We're all kind of somber in the mission support area
where we're commanding Spirit and trying to get any information from her.
(indistinct radio chatter)
And Mark Adler was picking the wake-up song for the day.
And I was just like, "Oh, do we have to play a wake-up song?"
You know, I was just worried about Spirit.
You know, the fun part of the wake-up song was lost on me at that point.
ADLER (over speaker): And all stations, this is mission.
Uh, today is not the day to buck a tradition, I think,
so we're gonna play a song.
("S.O.S." by ABBA playing)
♪ Where are those happy days? ♪
♪ They seem so hard to find ♪
♪ I tried to reach for you ♪
♪ But you have closed your mind ♪
♪ Whatever happened to our love? ♪
♪ I wish I understood ♪
♪ It used to be so nice ♪
♪ It used to be so good ♪
♪ So when you're near me, darling, can't you hear me? ♪
♪ S.O.S. ♪
(chuckling)
♪ The love you gave me, nothing else can save me ♪
♪ S.O.S. ♪
♪ When you're gone ♪
♪ Though I try, how can I carry on? ♪
TROSPER: I thought, "What a perfect song."
ABBA, "S.O.S."
(whirring, beeping)
("S.O.S." continues faintly over speaker)
NARRATOR: We got back a beep, but Spirit's a very sick rover.
Her flash memory on board the vehicle has somehow become corrupted,
so she's been awake through the last two nights,
crashing and rebooting over and over.
She's up all night. She's like the teenage kid
who just can't stop, can't stop playing their video game.
I mean, she was just going and going and going.
Until her batteries were almost drained.
So we said, "Let's try to get her shut down."
But we gave her the gentle shutdown command,
and she wouldn't shut down.
And so we started to get a little panicked,
'cause now we have to send Spirit a "shut down, damn it."
It's a command that, no matter what else happens,
it makes the rover shut down.
MAN (over speaker): 1-4-2 decimal alpha, decimal shut-down-damn-it until 24 hours.
("S.O.S." continues)
MANNING: We were about ready to tell the world that we had lost Spirit.
(indistinct radio chatter)
But then, suddenly...
-WOMAN (over radio): Go ahead, Telecom. -Can confirm data is flowing.
(cheering, applause)
NARRATOR: After a few nights of severe insomnia,
the rover is now sleeping peacefully.
Go power! (laughs)
NARRATOR: Spirit is back.
Like a well-oiled machine, isn't it?
-(laughter) -(song ends)
SQUYRES (over TV): ...is kind of an estimate.
The thing that's ultimately gonna limit the lifetime of these vehicles
is buildup of dust on the solar arrays.
You can think of 90 sols as being when the warranty expires.
Okay, that's how long the mission is intended to last.
We expect to get at least 90 sols out of it.
How much more than that we get depends on what Mars gives us.
(whirring)
TROSPER: We were concerned that after 90 sols on Mars
Spirit and Opportunity would not have enough power
and that would be the way that the rovers died.
♪ ♪
(beeping)
(whirring)
(beeping)
(wind howling)
TROSPER: And then we see these dust devils,
and we were concerned about what they could do to Spirit and Opportunity.
MANNING: We'd taken this picture
some weeks before, and it was getting really, really red and dusty.
You could barely see the solar panels anymore.
But the morning after the dust devil,
it's like somebody came along with Windex.
(imitates bottle spraying)
And the solar panels were as clean as the day that we landed.
TROSPER: Turns out these dust devils were the best friends these rovers had.
TREBI-OLLENNU: They were literally our life support machines.
They come in at the right time
to breathe… They let off... let off oxygen into us,
and then we get our energies back. (laughs)
-(cork pops) -(jovial chatter)
MAN: Here's to us.
(cheering, applause)
TROSPER: So, we had met our main mission success requirements: 90 sols.
And we start thinking we have maybe unlimited life on these rovers
because the dust devils have really helped us out here.
So let's go, let's hit the road, pedal to the metal,
and go see Mars.
SQUYRES: We got to sol 90 for both rovers, and we had fun.
So we were doing rover drag races.
I mean, the two rovers were competing with each other
to see who could do the most meters on a given sol.
With Spirit, we had this disappointment.
Like, this landing site is not what we thought it would be.
♪ ♪
FRAEMAN: But Spirit looked off,
and there were these hills rising in the distance
which were named the Columbia Hills.
And so, if there's any potential evidence of drinkable water,
maybe we'll find it in them hills.
And on the other side of the planet,
our lucky rover Opportunity was on a whole nother adventure.
NARRATOR: Opportunity rover diary.
What we really need is more bedrock deeper down in the ground.
The closest thing is that big crater off to the east, named Endurance.
SQUYRES: The beautiful thing about a crater is that
it's a time-ordered sequence of events with the old rocks at the bottom
and younger and younger and younger and younger rocks piled on top.
There's scientific gold down there.
But we had never intended to drive a rover down such a steep slope.
(whirs, beeps)
ELLISON: It's very easy to kill a robot on another planet
when you're in a place like Endurance.
I would plan to drive as far down as we need to drive.
FRAEMAN: The tension between scientists and engineers is
the scientists are the ones who want to do the crazy thing.
You know, "I want to drive at this
35-degree slope because that rock is so interesting,"
and the engineers are the ones who say,
"No, no, that's not safe. You can't do that.
This thing you want to do is completely bananas."
Frankly, if we can't climb pretty reliably up these rocks,
we're not going into this crater.
STROUPE: So we built a big test bed
with basically a full-scale model of the rover.
MAN: Oh, little slippage here.
STROUPE: We tried to simulate the geometry.
We tried to simulate the soil.
(indistinct chatter)
TREBI-OLLENNU: You know, the first time you go to test bed
and you just drive straight up,
it comes straight down. (laughs)
(groaning)
STROUPE: So we inched our way down.
Or I guess, you know, we should use metric.
We centimetered our way down.
(whirring, beeping)
Very carefully planning the drive
to keep Opportunity from getting into too much trouble.
(quiet chatter)
MAN: Did we clear it?
STROUPE: So we came back in the next morning and looked at the images,
and you could hear the gasp from different parts of the room.
The surface around the side of the crater
wasn't as grippy as we'd hoped it was, and she apparently started
sliding down the hill...
(buzzing)
...towards this giant boulder.
(alarm beeping)
♪ ♪
STROUPE: But we have something called autonomy built into the rovers.
We allow the rover to think for itself.
Because the rover knows more about the situation on Mars than we do.
STROUPE: So, when Opportunity went down into the crater...
...she noticed that she was sliding too much downhill
and stopped just centimeters
from the tip of her solar panel.
That short of crashing into this giant rock.
Which could've been mission-ending for Opportunity.
We all had heart attacks, but her autonomy saved us.
And we were so proud of our lucky rover.
SQUYRES: With Opportunity,
we had a big, big, big photo printed.
It was a north-to-south strip that was acquired from orbit.
And it showed Eagle Crater where we landed,
Endurance Crater where Opportunity was,
and we rolled it out on a table.
Way, way down at the end, there was this big crater,
you know, kilometers to the south, that we named Victoria Crater.
ELLISON: And I know it's ridiculous
to take a mission that was supposed to be three months and go,
"So, we've got this crater.
We think it'll maybe take two years to get there."
But we did it anyway.
So, first things first.
♪ Ow! ♪
("Walking on Sunshine" by Katrina and The Waves playing)
(laughter)
♪ Hey, yeah ♪
(over speaker): ♪ I used to think maybe you loved me ♪
♪ Now, baby, I'm sure ♪
♪ And I just can't wait... ♪
MANNING: So, Victoria Crater was miles away.
♪ Oh, yeah ♪
♪ I'm walking on sunshine, whoa-oh ♪
♪ I'm walking on sunshine... ♪
MANNING: But it was a pretty clear shot.
There's no hills or mountains in the way.
Just these ripples of dust.
♪ And don't it feel good ♪
♪ Hey... ♪
TREBI-OLLENNU: So we do what we call blind driving.
♪ Oh, yeah ♪
♪ And don't it feel good... ♪
So we told Opportunity,
"You're blindfolded. Trust me. Keep going."
♪ I feel the love, I feel the love that's really real ♪
♪ I feel alive, I feel the love, I feel the love that's really real... ♪
TREBI-OLLENNU: And with blind drive, the way we count progress
is the number of wheel turns.
♪ I'm walking on sunshine, whoa-oh ♪
♪ I'm walking on sunshine... ♪
MANNING: So, the wheels had turned on the drive.
♪ I'm walking on sunshine... ♪
But to our shock...
-♪ And don't it feel good. ♪ -(song ends)
...Oppy hadn't moved at all.
(whirring)
MAN: This is the previous day.
MAN 2: Went to exactly where it got stuck.
It literally didn't make much more progress after about this point.
But the rover thought it was executing its plan
as though it were all the way down here.
VERMA: So, the entire day, Opportunity was just spinning its wheels in place
and digging itself deeper and deeper and deeper.
(beeping, whirring)
ELLISON: There's no book that's, you know, "Chapter Four:
Extracting Mars Rovers from Sand Dunes."
So we built a copy of the sand dune at JPL, stuck her over it.
TREBI-OLLENNU: From an engineering perspective, it was exciting...
(chuckles)
...because we like... we-we like a challenge.
So it's almost like quicksand.
And we spent six weeks trying to learn how to extricate Opportunity.
STROUPE: But the soil had no friction on it at all.
It was almost like trying to drive through cake flour.
ELLISON: The engineers decided the only chance is stick it in reverse and gun it.
(whirring)
But on Mars, it was getting worse.
It looked like we were getting even deeper.
This could be fatal.
NARRATOR: Sol 483.
Power has dropped substantially.
At the moment, we're just keeping our nose above water.
(whirring)
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: Sol 484.
Long-term drive options are now back.
(cheering, applause)
MANNING: We said, "Okay, let's be a little bit more conservative
about our driving from here on out." (chuckles)
And so we carefully drove south,
and we finally eventually made it to Victoria Crater.
SQUYRES: There was a group of us
sitting around a table drinking margaritas at a party.
And somebody came up with the idea, "Hey, let's have a bet."
Picked up a cocktail napkin,
and we all wrote down our names.
And everybody had to put in 20 bucks.
MANNING: We said, "Okay. Who believes that
zero, one or two rovers are alive next year?"
SQUYRES: We kept that same cocktail napkin,
and we did it year after year after year after year.
MANNING: And every year, Steve Squyres, the project's principal scientist,
voted that both rovers would be dead in the next year.
My logic being that someday I would eventually win,
and when I did win, it would cheer me up at a time when I'd be feeling sad.
(indistinct chatter)
MANNING: I voted just the opposite-- that both rovers would still be alive.
So, actually, I did pretty well through the years in these bets.
(whirring)
SQUYRES: At this point, Spirit, our kind of hardworking blue-collar rover,
was exploring the Columbia Hills.
But she had been having mechanical problems.
And then the right front wheel failed.
-The five-wheel, five-wheel drive. -MAN: Okay.
STROUPE: Somebody said, "This is a lot like that grocery cart
with the stuck wheel that's easier to pull than push."
We're like, "Pull! Yes, let's go backwards."
ELLISON: So, Spirit slowly drove backwards through Columbia Hills,
dragging this broken wheel as it went.
And it was awful because winter was coming.
♪ ♪
BOYKINS: So, a Martian winter is twice as long as it is on Earth.
(shuddering): So it gets really cold.
It gets so cold that you have to use much of your energy
to keep all of your hardware above a certain temperature,
or it's likely to break.
SQUYRES: At the Spirit site, we desperately needed a way
to tilt the solar arrays towards the sun.
But the only way to do that was to tilt the entire vehicle.
♪ ♪
Spirit would have to climb backwards
up this rocky, rugged terrain...
...to stay alive all through the winter.
(beeping)
And it's not just the seasons.
You've also got things like dust storms.
SQUYRES: Sometimes dust storms will blow up into a global storm.
And this one hit Opportunity the hardest.
-NARRATOR: Sol 1,226. -(thunder crashes)
Opportunity has been fighting for her life.
Mars took off its gloves and pounded the Opportunity site
with record high levels of dust in the sky.
♪ ♪
(thunder crashes)
STROUPE: So we had to tweak the rover's onboard decision-making process
so that when the power started getting too low...
...Opportunity could shut herself down to preserve her batteries.
(indistinct radio chatter)
STROUPE: Nobody wanted to say out loud
that we thought the mission could end at any moment.
We could see the dust storm. We could track it from orbit.
But it took weeks before it started to clear.
The original time that was, uh, predicted for the data to come down
was 12... 20:40 UTC, but we are a bit tight.
So we actually had a lot of suggestions on morning wake-up songs today,
so I thought I would just continue to play them as we get the data.
(indistinct chatter)
("Here Comes the Sun" by The Beatles playing)
STROUPE: And then we just had to wait and see
if we were gonna survive.
♪ Here comes the sun ♪
♪ Doo-da-doo-doo ♪
♪ Here comes the sun ♪
♪ And I say it's all right ♪
♪ Little darling ♪
♪ It's been a long cold lonely winter ♪
♪ Little darling ♪
♪ It feels like years since it's been here ♪
♪ Here comes the sun ♪
♪ Doo-da-doo-doo ♪
-♪ Here comes the sun ♪ -(beeping)
♪ And I say it's all right ♪
(whirring)
♪ Little darling ♪
♪ The smile's returning to the faces ♪
(cheering)
♪ Little darling, it seems like years... ♪
ELLISON: I don't think anyone expected the rovers
to survive all these disasters.
♪ Here comes the sun ♪
♪ Here comes the sun... ♪
You get this feeling of--
there's nothing Mars can do to us at this point.
Like, we've survived everything. We're basically invincible.
♪ Here comes the sun, doo-da-doo-doo... ♪
But the mission wasn't done.
We were still hoping we would find a place where life could have arisen,
with neutral-pH water, with water you maybe could even have drunk.
(song ends)
(wind whistling softly)
(cheering, applause)
Thank you.
-Dr. Squyres. -Nice to be here.
-Thank you so much for joining us. -Yeah.
Now, um, this is a model of one of the rovers that's on Mars right now.
-That's right. -Which... Is this...
Is this, uh, Spirit or Opportunity?
SQUYRES: Uh, they're basically identical twins,
-so they look the same. -So you can't tell the difference
-between your two children. -Uh...
You're a terrible father is what you're saying.
-(laughs) -(audience laughing)
Um...
SQUYRES: So, Spirit and Opportunity's mission
had kind of taken on a life of its own with the public.
The traffic once again is heavy today on Mars.
Rovers Spirit and Opportunity still at it.
So far, they have traveled nine and a quarter miles
and captured more than 156,000 images.
SQUYRES: NASA does a lot of
wonderful things in space science.
But try to explain gamma-ray spectroscopy
to an eight-year-old-- it's hard.
But a robot geologist--
anybody could sort of understand what it was about.
And now exploration and adventure
can become a very large shared human experience.
(whirring)
MAN: What is he doing?
MANNING: The rovers became a phenomenon.
They represented exploration and curiosity and interest in the world.
Godspeed to the Mars rover, wherever you are tonight.
MANNING: And the more these rovers lasted
and the more promise of future discovery...
Elbow. Has a wrist.
MANNING: ...people around the world were becoming really attached to these rovers.
STROUPE: But I don't think any of us fully realized
the impact that we were having on the public until Spirit got stuck.
TROSPER: My alter ego, Spirit, had a problem.
She already had a broken wheel,
and she had gotten a little bit embedded.
And then another wheel broke, and it was getting close to winter.
(beeps, whirs)
But I figured, knowing Spirit, that she'd figure it out.
♪ ♪
STROUPE: This mound of rocks,
this may be what we're hung on right there.
And both on Mars and in the test bed, as we drive, it does sink.
This first slide here just is an overview of the energy requirements for Spirit.
Um, the numbers in red are the ones where we won't have enough energy
to survive for an extended period of time.
STROUPE: So now it was really a race against the clock.
We were making very slow progress, but we had to try and try to beat winter.
And we started getting letters and phone calls from the public.
This real sense of, you know,
we have to do whatever it takes to save Spirit.
VERMA: And the public called this campaign "Free Spirit."
And it showed us that
humans are capable of forming a connection and a bond to a robot.
NARRATOR: Sol 2,196.
Spirit has been prepared for her winter sleep.
She is tucked into bed,
and now we all watch carefully for the signal or lack thereof.
BOYKINS: As the rover starts to get hypothermia,
she can't communicate anymore.
And then she either wakes up the next morning
or she doesn't wake up at all.
When the sun came back up,
we'd listen, we try to hear
a whisper, a tone.
Anything.
And we don't.
It did feel like we were,
you know, watching a friend go, in a lot of ways.
I know people think it's weird 'cause I sound like I'm talking about a person,
but even though she wasn't a person,
it was still a huge part of all of our lives.
TROSPER: Spirit was our rugged and adventurous rover,
and her environment required more of her.
And so maybe it's just because I was Spirit's mission manager
and I wanted her to be like me, but...
...I feel like I connected with Spirit in that way.
You know, maybe she was just a little tired, too,
after all her hard work.
♪ ♪
SQUYRES: At any rate, if we can get something like
a hundred meters out of today's drive,
just project that line that you see...
MANNING: So, by this time, only a handful of people
who were on the design originally are still left on the team.
So we're in another generation of engineers who are operating Opportunity.
♪ ♪
SIEGFRIEDT: Never in a million years did I think
I would be able to work on Opportunity.
When I was in eighth grade, I saw this news story
of Spirit and Opportunity landing.
I was just some small-town girl
in the middle of nowhere in Texas.
But I knew that's what I wanted to do.
I wanted to help find life on other planets.
MOOGEGA COOPER: When I was about 17,
there was a naming contest for Spirit and Opportunity.
(laughs)
I ended up submitting the names
Romulus and Remus.
Their father was Mars, the god of war.
I don't know what I was thinking, but...
that is when my brain was completely turned on to Mars and space exploration...
...and eventually led me to NASA's Mars program.
SIEGFRIEDT: When I first started at JPL,
Opportunity was this older rover
that was in her extended, extended
times a thousand mission. (chuckles)
But she is the reason I started aerospace engineering.
I knew Opportunity was the place I wanted to start my career.
All stations, this is your TDL.
We will begin the downlink briefing in about five minutes.
(beeping, whirring)
SQUYRES: Now that Spirit's gone,
there's this-- what do we do next with Opportunity?
Do we just kind of noodle around till the wheels fall off?
Or do we put our foot on the gas and just go as fast as we can
and try to reach that big crater next?
STROUPE: Miles and miles away,
this huge crater called Endeavour.
It would have the oldest rocks
that Opportunity would've been able to look at so far.
But it was many years away.
And we might not make it, but it was where the next good stuff was,
so we might as well try.
NARRATOR: Sol 1,784.
Opportunity has been trekking toward Endeavour Crater,
driving as frequently and for as long as possible.
This week, she won the reverse galactic lottery
-and was struck by lightning. -(thunder cracks)
Sort of.
She got hit by a cosmic ray that stalled her for a few days.
But she is okay and back to driving.
Sol 2,042.
Opportunity seems to have become a meteorite hunter.
She has discovered three meteorites so far
on her journey to Endeavour.
Sol 2,213.
-Oppy is in her fourth winter on Mars -(wind whistling)
and the coldest yet.
So, in order to save energy, the rover is sleeping more
to keep her electronics warm.
ELLISON: So we're sprinting and we're sprinting and we're sprinting.
Some days getting great distance, some days not going very far at all,
but we keep going.
NARRATOR: Opportunity is only about two kilometers away from Endeavour Crater.
She'll make landfall at Spirit Point,
named in honor of Oppy's silent sister.
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the very first Mars Marathon
here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
(cheering, applause)
The Opportunity rover has achieved a marathon's distance on Mars
just a week and a half ago.
(cheering)
ANNOUNCER: Congratulations, everyone!
BOYKINS: So, at this point, we have
well exceeded our warranty and then the extended warranty
and then the phone call on your phone that says,
"Hey, we'll give you more warranty." We've run past that, too.
♪ ♪
(beeping)
And Oppy started to show signs of age.
Her gray hair was the dust accumulation
in the crevices between the cables.
STROUPE: One of the shoulder joints
in Opportunity's arm started getting arthritis.
We ended up realizing that if we keep trying to move it,
it's gonna quit somewhere that we don't want it to be.
VERMA: So we just kept the arm out
in front of the rover for the rest of the mission.
And with arthritis setting in,
Opportunity also started to have problems with the right front wheel.
So, when you were driving it, you had to think
in terms of it always veering off and how you were gonna correct for that.
SIEGFRIEDT: Once she started getting older and older,
Oppy started losing her memory.
She would go to sleep.
(beeping)
And she would essentially forget all of the science information
and all of what she had done before she'd wake up.
And around the same time that Opportunity started losing her memory...
...my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
And to see my own grandmother become not herself anymore...
-A… -Bicycle.
...it was one of the hardest things to go through.
♪ ♪
And so when I started seeing Opportunity start slipping away, too...
...we had to figure out a way to operate
in this new paradigm of her having amnesia.
(whirring)
And we did so successfully
just by forcing her to stay awake.
So she could send us earthlings all the data
before she went to sleep and forgot everything she did.
I think Opportunity helped me to really
better deal with my grandmother's situation.
And to... to understand that part of life.
But she was still the perfect child.
And she kept trying her damnedest
to complete her mission,
to find neutral water that can support life on Mars.
♪ ♪
FRAEMAN: After several years of travel,
we finally started to see the rim of Endeavour Crater rise in the distance.
♪ ♪
ELLISON: And even though this thing is ten-plus miles wide...
...it wasn't till we pulled up right to the edge, and suddenly...
...whack!
FRAEMAN: When Oppy reached the rim of Endeavour, everything changed.
It almost felt like the start of a whole new mission.
It was a whole new environment to explore,
stepping back tens or hundreds of millions of years in time.
(laughing): So I loved this part of the mission.
NARRATOR: Sol 3,300.
Opportunity is feverishly working to complete analysis of the rock Esperance,
which may hold the clues to an ancient habitable environment.
(whirring)
(beeps)
This is a clay that has been intensely altered
by relatively neutral-pH water,
representing the most favorable conditions for biology
that Opportunity has encountered.
This was a huge discovery.
Water.
Drinkable, neutral water once existed on the surface of Mars.
♪ ♪
And not only was there water, but it could possibly sustain ancient microbial life.
So that is just revolutionary.
SQUYRES: It showed us that the really ancient Mars
was much more suitable for...
the origin of life.
MANNING: This was the Holy Grail.
This is the reason we had gone to Mars.
Oppy discovered Mars was
a wet world very much like Earth.
There were oceans.
Water played a huge role in its early history.
It completely altered the planet.
SIEGFRIEDT: And Opportunity spent years exploring Endeavour Crater,
making incredible discoveries that tell that story of water.
So we could go back in time to a planet that might actually have had life.
♪ ♪
BOYKINS: A lot of people ask why I think it's important to explore Mars.
And I think one of the things that will come out of
Spirit and Opportunity's legacy is some of the answers to why.
Mars had water.
What happened to that water?
And can we take the information and understand
how that could happen here on Earth?
And can we understand our part in that?
Are we doing something that can accelerate...
...that change here on Earth?
Because that's not something you recover from.
♪ ♪
(whirring)
ELLISON: So we're 14 years into the mission,
and sol 5,000 only comes along once.
Like, it was a big landmark.
We've got an aging rover.
She's forgetful. She's arthritic.
Cameras are still working.
What can we do?
I jokingly said a few days before sol 5,000,
"We need to take a selfie."
FRAEMAN: So, we'd been seeing Mars through Oppy's eyes...
...but we hadn't seen all of Oppy herself.
Not since she left the planet in 2003.
We've got a bit of data mining ahead of us.
ELLISON: So, sol 5,000 planning comes along,
and the science lead pipes up and says, "So, the engineering team
"have this request.
They'd like to take a selfie."
And you could hear a pin drop, 'cause the entire science team
is like, "Come again."
We could be using up the remaining life of the robotic arm
on this act of pure robotic vanity.
STROUPE: We tried to sell this idea to the science team.
But it's tricky because her shoulder was broken.
So we had to figure out a way to get all of the different views of the rover
without moving the shoulder.
ELLISON: It wasn't great, but it was the best we could do.
And I think it was almost the science team way of saying
thank you to the engineering team.
"This one's on us.
Take the time to take a selfie. You deserve it."
Like, "Let's have a look at this robot you've made dance for us."
(whirring)
(beeps, clicks)
And so the engineers are taking pictures from 17 different angles...
(beeps, clicks)
...based on the little preview picture
of what they thought the microscope would be seeing.
And with Opportunity's slow, old computer...
...it takes about a minute
just to take a picture.
We're like, "Refresh. There's nothing here yet.
"Refresh. There's nothing here yet.
Refresh." Bang, all the thumbnails showed up.
Little, tiny, 64-pixel thumbnails.
The images were kind of fuzzy and upside down.
But then we run through it...
...and there's a picture of Opportunity.
Yes, it was little and black and white and out of focus,
but for the first time in, at that point, 14-plus years,
we saw our rover.
♪ ♪
(quiet chatter)
SIEGFRIEDT: Everybody who worked on Opportunity,
we'd get these emails with our Mars weather data for the day.
So I looked one day, and it's starting to get really dusty
and cloudy in the Opportunity site.
(typing)
So, this image was taken on sol 5,106,
and you can see the sun is a big bright spot.
But you can see only three sols later the sun has completely disappeared.
Yeah.
This is really scary.
♪ ♪
BOYKINS: There's this dust storm coming for Oppy.
Now, we've survived other dust storms on Mars.
Opportunity has survived.
But a few days into it, I think, uh, people began to realize
that it was different than anything we've ever experienced.
(wind howling)
NARRATOR: The dust storm that is affecting Opportunity has greatly intensified.
A spacecraft emergency was declared, anticipating a low-power fault.
(beeping, buzzing)
FRAEMAN: And then she went dark.
But we all said, "We know what to do.
"We have our little dust storm playbook,
"and we're gonna try everything we possibly can
to reestablish communication with Opportunity."
ELLISON: At this point, wake-up songs had kind of went away.
But we then brought the tradition back in the hope that maybe singing will help.
♪ Jitterbug... ♪
And we would play them every time we were trying to wake the rover up.
♪ Wake me up before you go-go ♪
♪ Don't leave me hanging on like a yo-yo ♪
♪ Wake me up before you go-go ♪
♪ I don't wanna miss it when you hit that high ♪
(faintly over speaker): ♪ You put the boom-boom into my heart... ♪
(wind howling)
NARRATOR: Sol 5,176.
It has been over 60 sols since we lost contact with Opportunity.
It may be weeks before the sky is clear.
♪ Don't leave me hanging on like a yo-yo ♪
♪ Wake me up before you go-go ♪
♪ I don't wanna miss it when you hit that high... ♪
NARRATOR: Sol 5,210.
After almost 100 sols without contact,
the team is waiting with anticipation to hear from Opportunity.
♪ I wanna hit that high ♪
♪ Yeah, yeah ♪
♪ You take the gray skies out of my way ♪
♪ You make the sun shine brighter than Doris Day... ♪
NARRATOR: It has now been more than six months
since last contact with Opportunity.
The dust storm is finally over.
MANNING: So, I had hopes that she would just...
(makes whooshing sound) ...wake up and say, "Oh, we're-we're alive."
♪ Everything will be all right. ♪
(song ends)
But it just didn't happen.
SIEGFRIEDT: She has autonomy on board
to wake up at certain times,
and we know when that alarm will go off,
so we earthlings can try and communicate with her.
So, every day at that time, we would try and try.
NARRATOR: ...we have begun commanding more aggressively.
We are listening every day for Opportunity to talk to us.
(static droning)
♪ ♪
SIEGFRIEDT: So, NASA declared we were gonna try one last time
to try and communicate with Opportunity and wake her up.
ELLISON: We were just staring out onto the floor of what's called the Dark Room.
That's where we... you know, for a decade and a half,
all the commands had been sent to both rovers.
♪ ♪
It's like, "Just wake up.
"We'll make it all better.
And we'll get back to exploring."
(static droning)
SIEGFRIEDT: Seconds go by,
a minute goes by, and at that point, we know.
FRAEMAN: And I just had the most vivid flashback
to landing night,
standing there as a 16-year-old in that same room
and just realizing what I wanted to do with my life.
-(Fraeman chuckles) -(cheering)
But the journey was over.
And it all just kind of hit me at once.
SQUYRES: The operations team said, "Hey, we wanted to give you the opportunity
to pick the final rover wake-up song."
I had never picked a rover wake-up song,
and I really wanted to pick something that felt right.
And in the end, the song that I picked was
about the ending of a relationship.
And it's... (stifled sobs)
("I'll Be Seeing You" by Billie Holiday playing)
It's this feeling of gratitude for the relationship that we had.
(indistinct chatter over phone)
MER project off the net.
♪ ♪
♪ I'll be seeing you ♪
♪ In all the old familiar places... ♪
SQUYRES: I don't have to tell you guys we get...
emotionally attached to these vehicles, right?
I... You know, you use a word like "love" advisedly, but... (sighs)
we love these rovers.
BOYKINS: As a parent, I'm proud.
We rewrote the history books.
But as a human being, I'm really sad.
Because she was a friend.
♪ I'll find you ♪
♪ In the morning sun ♪
SQUYRES: The whole project was bound together by that feeling of love.
♪ And when the night is new... ♪
You're loving the rover,
and you're loving the people who you built it with.
You're loving the people who you operated it with
and tended it with you so lovingly for so many years.
ELLISON: To each and every one of us,
it has been the privilege of a lifetime.
And, uh...
you-you don't... you don't get an adventure like that twice.
♪ I'll be seeing you... ♪
NARRATOR: Sol 5,352.
15 years into the mission.
Since the very first day,
when she rolled herself into a hole in one at Eagle Crater,
Opportunity has affectionately been called the lucky rover.
And now, after receiving 13,744 command files
and lasting 5,262 sols
past her original retirement age of 90 sols,
Opportunity's incredible journey has come to its end.
Good night, Opportunity.
Well done.
♪ I'll be looking at the moon ♪
♪ But I'll be ♪
♪ Seeing you. ♪
(song ends)
BOYKINS: This arc of exploration,
which is anchored in Spirit and Opportunity...
...now leads to the next rover.
♪ ♪
Perseverance will be the granddaughter of Spirit and Opportunity.
Her essence is built on the backbone of those rovers in front of her.
SIEGFRIEDT: Milo, you ready to launch the rocket?
(giggling)
♪ ♪
I became pregnant with my second child when Perseverance was getting built.
And it was almost like the rover was in a little NICU.
And we were all looking over her-- our next baby.
DERROL NAIL: What a beautiful morning here on the Space Coast.
-I'm Derrol Nail. -And I'm Moogega Cooper.
In the 50 minutes leading up to launch,
we will show you how this mission will reach
and search for ancient microscopic life on Mars
and test new technologies critical to the ultimate goal:
future human missions to Mars.
MANNING: It's part of our tradition.
Is open up peanuts.
Do you want some?
(indistinct chatter)
TREBI-OLLENNU: Some people think planetary exploration is very foreign,
but I always remind them, you know, when your forefathers walked the planet,
the first thing they did is they looked to the heavens.
And what did they see?
Constellations and stars, wonderful things.
What did they do with that?
They use the heavens...
to come up with a calendar,
to know when to plant and to know when to harvest.
MAN (over speaker): Flight mission, copy. It's go time.
TREBI-OLLENNU: And they did it from the confines of Earth.
So, planetary exploration has been with us from the beginning,
and we're using it the same way
that our forefathers have done for generations--
to make life better on Earth.
MAN: Two, one, zero.
(rumbling)
Release and liftoff.
♪ ♪
Milo, look.
-What is it? -Rocket.
-That's right. -(laughing)
And the rover.
SIEGFRIEDT: The rover. That's right.
The rover's inside.
♪ ♪
(music fades)