Kind: captions
Language: en
curiosity meet perseverance
this nasa rover just landed on mars more
than 130 million miles from earth
its task to continue the search for life
on the red planet
confirmed perseverance faithfully on the
surface of mars
ready to begin thinking of past life
so happy and so excited that things
worked out today
anything that nasa does i feel is for
the knowledge of not only just our
nation but the world
i not only want to share with everybody
far and wide but i specifically want to
look back
to my home community the place that i
came from and and and
share with indigenous communities share
with the navajo nation
all the successes that are going on with
nasa because i want them to feel part of
it
the seven-month journey to mars for this
rover ended in a successful landing in
the jezreel crater
a 3 billion-year-old delta that
scientists think
might be home to ancient microbial life
back from when mars was much wetter
and warmer if you want to set yourself
up for success for finding ancient life
that is the place to go for two years
perseverance will drill into the martian
surface
in hopes of collecting fossilized
microbes
here's how it'll work a sample tube is
loaded inside a drill at the end of the
rover's arm
we had to come up with an entirely
unique design
to drill into a lot of different rocks
so it's actually a very sophisticated
mechanism
after we're done drilling the depth that
we want to
we do one final motion to extract the
core from the inside of the rock
then the sampled tubes prepared for
storage inside the rover
we take the robotic arm with martian
sample inside of it
and we dock it inside the belly of the
rover we want to
inspect it we want to figure out how
much volume we may have collected
take some pictures of it and then we
seal that tube
and then go put it back into our storage
rack
perseverance is no way of knowing if it
actually collected ancient microbes
for that the martian samples will have
to return to earth to be analyzed
that be a first current plans between
nasa and the european space agency
involves sending another lander to mars
within the decade
collecting samples on mars and bringing
them back to earth is one of the most
complex things we've tried to do with
one of our robots
but if we succeed in bringing the
samples back to study how do we know we
won't accidentally find life from earth
microbes that hitched a ride on the
spacecraft
we don't want to send an expensive
vehicle like perseverance to mars
and then just detect ourselves because
we didn't work to make sure that
we kept the spacecraft and the
instruments and everything that it
touches
as clean as possible you want to have a
nice pristine sample without any earth
contamination
so that's why we work really hard to
keep that spacecraft clean
to ensure there's no contamination
researchers at nasa's jet propulsion
laboratory
had to build an entirely new clean room
we take a normal clean room
and we start breaking everything down to
understand additional sources of
contamination
and how do we make that room even
cleaner the gloves that they use
how often they need to change gloves how
often they have to change the gowns
when we can reuse things even the
computers that are used in there
most importantly the sample tubes were
designed to remain
impeccably clean the gold coating is a
mixture
of titanium and nitrogen especially
engineered in order to prevent
organic compounds from sticking to the
surface these sample tubes are the
cleanest things
that we've ever sent to another planet
by far in fact these sample tubes are
probably the cleanest thing
on earth but perseverance isn't just
collecting samples
it's also testing technologies that will
take interplanetary exploration
to the next level a few months after
landing perseverance is dropping
a tiny helicopter named ingenuity future
explorers could use technology like this
to scout and survey the landscape the
rover's also carrying a little gold box
named moxie that'll run tests on turning
small amounts of the dangerous martian
atmosphere
into breathable air these technologies
might make it possible for humans to
inhabit mars one day
but before then will we know if life
once existed on the red planet
perseverance is playing a very critical
role in our understanding
of our place in the universe and i think
that's very noble
if life exists on mars then almost
certainly life has developed all over
the universe
and and the universe is teeming with
life
maybe we won't find anything and that'll
just tell us that our
one planet is so unique and miraculous
that question about life is the one that
really perplexes
and i think really drives us something
about our desire
to not be alone keeps pushing us forward
in the search for life and the
perseverance rover
now continues that search
you