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On January 3, 2004, a compact rover named Spirit, cushioned inside a
pyramid of balloons, hurtled through the martian atmosphere and crash-landed on
the dusty surface of Mars. Minutes later, Spirit sent its first message
home. The elation of the assembled scientists, along with the much more
involved engineering story leading up to the landing, were captured by NOVA
producer Mark Davis in his popular documentary MARS Dead or Alive. That
elation is the starting point for the sequel, "Welcome to
Mars."
"Welcome to Mars" follows the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity
from the second they crash-land on the planet to many months into their ongoing mission.
Davis covered the story from NASA's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory as it unfolded and provided a unique,
behind-the-scenes take on this voyage of discovery, whose primary goal is to
find evidence that liquid water once existed on Mars.
The mission has had its share of
drama. The first two weeks after Spirit's landing were euphoric, with
fantastic new images arriving every day. But just a few weeks into its mission,
Spirit suddenly went silent ... and then, inexplicably, started spewing
gibberish. For three agonizing days Spirit's engineers worked around the
clock, trying to regain control of the unhinged rover. In the darkest hour, many feared that Spirit was
doomed. Then, just hours before Opportunity began its own fiery plunge
to the surface of Mars, engineers finally discovered the problem—a simple
memory overload—and saved Spirit from an early death.
The unfolding science has been equally compelling. With Spirit back up
and running, the scientists turned their attention to the arrival of its twin,
Opportunity. After tearing through the martian sky and bouncing on the
surface for several minutes, Opportunity rolled into a small, shallow
crater at the site called Meridiani. Early the next day, the first color
postcard arrived, and the scientists were stunned to see an outcrop of layered
bedrock just a few yards away. Bedrock is the holy grail of geologists, holding
an unambiguous record of geological history. This was the first martian bedrock
ever photographed at close range.
Confronted with this gift, the science team collected provocative clues that
they believed could prove there was once water on Mars. The race to collect the
data has been both physically and emotionally grueling. With two rovers on
opposite sides of Mars, two science teams work in alternating shifts around the
clock. Each rover's day begins when the sun comes up on its side of Mars, and
the scientists on Earth live on the same schedule. The martian day is 39
minutes longer than an Earth day, and within a few weeks everyone was in the
grip of unrelenting martian jet lag.
The competing scientific interests, the thrill of discovery, and the
accumulating stress has kept everyone on an emotional rollercoaster. A high
point arrived a little more than a month into Opportunity's mission. The
evidence at Meridiani added up, and NASA was able to announce that, after 40
years of speculation, solid proof was finally in hand that Mars was once awash
in water.
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It all began here: Spirit's lander and deflated airbags, at the site from which it began its wondrous explorations of Mars. Its fellow rover, Opportunity, has met with equal success.
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