(soft music) - [Narrator] Mars has been called "The Death Planet" with good reason.

It has been a spacecraft graveyard.

More than half of the missions sent here have failed.

NASA's success rate is better than other nations'.

But in 1999, the Space Agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory experienced four unexpected and painful public losses.

One an Orbiter, a Lander and two Microprobes upon arriving were never heard from again.

(bouncy tension music) As if to taunt its victories Mars dared that it be challenged again in 2003.

A time the red planet would be the nearest to Earth that it had been in 60,000 years.

(bouncy tension music) The last time these two planets were this close Neanderthals roamed the Earth.

(bouncy music) (murmurs) Wanting to regain its confidence, JPL took up the Martian dare and then doubled down by agreeing to build and land on Mars not one, but two rovers.

Something never before attempted.

- [Lee] Second parachute deploy in five seconds.

- [Narrator] This is the triumphant story of Spirit and Opportunity.

Two rovers that survived the ordeal of landing on Mars.

- [Lee] One.

Mark.

(upbeat music) (soft music) - [Instructor] T-minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six green board, five, four, three, two, one, engine start and lift off (loud blast) of the Delta II rocket carrying T\the Spirit from Earth to planet Mars.

(rocket roars) (background noise drowns out other sounds) (loud blast) - [Radio call] We're approaching Mach 1.

(applause) And there we go.

We've exceeded the supersonic speed and the engine positions look good.

- [Matt] Just watching it get up and off the pad and shoot off into the sky is a fantastic feeling.

- [Radio Call] The forward video system working perfectly sending back an immaculate image.

We're now passing an altitude of four nautical miles.

- [Matt] It brings so much closure to what you've been doing that you have to be happy about that.

- [Radio call] Just coming up on 2000 miles per hour.

Passing T plus 60 seconds our solid motors have burned out.

- [Matt] But until you see the launch vehicle separate and spin down.

(wind whooshing) - [Radio] Looks like a nice crisp jettison from the fairing.

- [Matt] And turn on the star scanners and then exercise its propulsion system, find out where the temperatures are gonna level out.

Understanding whether the solar panels are generating the power they're supposed to.

Until you see all that kind of settle in, it was hard for me to relax.

- [Radio call] Now we're looking at a height of apogee of 90.0 nautical miles.

Extremely close to our nominal predicted orbit.

Hey, we've entered a coast phase of the mission.

(soft bouncy music) - [Narrator] The journeys to Mars for Spirit and Opportunity would take seven months, crossing a distance of some 300 million miles.

This cruise portion of a planetary mission can be a relatively quiet time.

But not for these two spacecraft.

- [Radio Call] We are acquiring code limits.

- So just in the last hour, we haven't moved very much.

- [Geoff] A lot of people think cruise is easy 'cause we are just cruising line.

You know, there was this animation of the Mars spacecraft and he saw it launch and he saw the excitement of the different stages coming off and then starts going on its way to Mars and sails off into the sunset.

And then it says seven months later.

Well those seven months, that's really what we're concerned with.

We have to work hard.

(crowd mumbling) - Currently Mach 16.6.

Altitude of-- - [Narrator] While navigators plotted trajectories the flight team practiced the complex landing sequences that are called EDL.

Short for Entry, Descent and Landing.

But also known as "Six Minutes of Terror."

EDL is the most complicated and dangerous part of any mission trying to reach the Martian surface.

In a matter of minutes multiple spacecraft transformations have to take place.

It begins with separating from the cruise stage.

(tension music) Next, the rover, enclosed in a capsule, hits the atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour.

(roaring rocket) Four minutes later the speed has been reduced to 1000 miles per hour.

Slow enough for a supersonic parachute to deploy without shredding.

(roaring sound) Then the heat shield jettisons and the lander begins rapelling down a metal tape and a rope bridle.

Meanwhile, a computer is calculating information about motion and altitude.

Only seconds remain before the airbags inflate, the rockets fire, (rocket roaring) the metal tape and bridal rope are cut, (soft bang) and the lender free falls to the surface.

The first bounce could be as high as a four story building followed by more bounces that could go on for half a mile before the Lander with the rover tightly wrapped inside comes to a rest.

Hopefully in one piece.

(Lander bangs) (murmurs) - [Narrator] The six minutes of EDL terror is still months away.

- All stations report the space-- - [Narrator] Part of this time is used for training.

What engineers call Operational Readiness Tests.

- Lucky peanuts.

- [Narrator] The tests are meant to be as realistic as possible including the JPL tradition of munching on peanuts for good luck.

But this test is not going according to plan.

(radio call mumbles) - A processor [unintelligible] faults.

- [Narrator] Unknown to the team, mission planners have inserted unanticipated technical gremlins into the drill to see how the team will react.

The results of early rehearsals were closer to six minutes of errors than terror.

(murmurs) - Do we know when this fail occurred to see whether this is enough time to recover so they're still?

- It occurred sometime after we got the last packet 'cause it would have shown up as the tone in tone here.

(female mumbles) - [Lee] We actually had three or four simulations where we would sit in the mission control room and we would pretend like a real thing was happening.

It was good thing we did it because the first time we tried this it was a sheer disaster.

- There's actually a small chance we did that actually failed-- - Failed the spacecraft.

it's going down.

The tests, the tests are [Unintelligible] now.

- We're now 26 minutes from entry.

Velocity 5,250 meters per second.

- [Narrator] Wayne Lee managed the rovers' Entry, Descent and Landing system that is responsible for getting the rovers down on the ground.

During the actual landings he will be in a different kind of hot seat as the voice of Mission Control.

- Four, three, two, one, mark.

We now have cruise stage jettison.

I kind of said to myself: on that day I have no control over it.

(mumbles) - [Narrator] Much of the information Lee will be calling out will come from Polly Esterbrook.

- EDL com, we are still receiving acceleration tone number one.

- [Narrator] Esterbrook's job is to interpret three dozen radio frequencies being transmitted back to Earth during EDL.

These tones will indicate critical engineering events the spacecraft is supposed to perform.

- If anything went wrong with the mission telecom was going to tell the answer.

I don't see the Doppler rate at a frequency-- I went to work thinking, "I don't know "how did I get into this situation?"

My fear was, if something bad happens, I should be able to say from this, the signature of the signal, what has happened.

- [Crowd Member] Mark.

- At this time parachute should have deployed on nominal trajectory.

- [Polly] I was very nervous.

- At this time it is expected based on the pre-entry predicts the vehicles should be on the ground.

We are waiting for telecom confirmation that has happened.

- EDL com, we are bouncing on the surface.

(crowd claps) (loud bang) - [Narrator] Another unexpected event, but one all too real, occurred 68 days before the first rover landing.

(tension music) It was the day the sun erupted.

(loud bang) It was the third, most powerful solar storm ever recorded.

When this massive solar flare reached the Earth communications networks were disrupted.

Airlines diverted their routes.

Earth orbiting satellites temporarily went dark.

And astronauts aboard the space station sought emergency shelter.

(loud crackling) - [Mark] And there's a huge amount of material, bigger than the sun itself went flying off of the sun (loud blast) out towards the planets, out towards Earth, out towards Mars and out towards our spacecraft.

(blast) - [Narrator] When the solar flare reached the two spacecraft their star sensors, essential for navigation, began seeing flashes that they mistook for stars.

(tension music) The two spacecraft were all but blinded by the flare.

Fortunately there was no major damage and the star sensors eventually came back online.

(soft music) But nature wasn't done with surprises.

(loud blast) In December as the first landing day drew near dust storms began blowing up on Mars.

And that was a cause for alarm.

Dust causes the Martian atmosphere to warm and thin.

That meant the parachute would move through the atmosphere at a faster speed resulting in less time for slowing down.

To counter this condition Spirit's parachute was reprogrammed to open two seconds earlier in hopes of gaining back lost time.

(mumbles) Meanwhile, other team members were continuously running computer simulations of EDL trying out different parameters to see what might occur.

- [Rob] Yeah.

So that's what you're looking for?

- Yeah.

- Much to our surprise after months and months and months of successful around the clock testing, we finally find that there are some failures that are occurring.

We said, "Well, these are flukes.

What's going on?"

What we've discovered is that the software is trying to turn on timers that countdown to firing pyrotechnic events.

(beep sound) (bang) So pyrotechnic event is an event that, say opens up the parachute or inflates the airbags or fires the rocket.

All those things are controlled by pyrotechnic devices and little timers that the software can control.

We're finding that the software wasn't getting around to doing it.

And there was a problem between the hardware and software that we did not know about until just two days before landing.

And in which case we'll have a failure.

Guaranteed failure.

We're pretty nervous about this.

(loud bang) - [Narrator] More testing provided no definitive answer leaving engineers in agony over what to do or not do.

With time running out, the decision was made to manually enable the hardware that fires the pyros by sending commands directly to the spacecraft an hour before landing.

There was still more bad news coming from Mars.

On Christmas Day Britain's Beagle 2 Lander entered the Martian atmosphere and was never heard from again.

A few days later as 2003 was ending, the Japanese Space Agency announced that its Mars mission had failed to go into orbit.

Of the fleet that left for Mars that year only the European Space Agency's Mars Express Orbiter had so far survived its arrival.

And now it was the rovers' turn.

(soft music) (birds chirping) On Spirit's landing day JPL Director Charles Elachi was playing host to VIPs scattered in buildings all across the laboratory.

- So I was telling a group which are from Hollywood this is a real thing.

We cannot say cut.

(crowd laughs drowns out the speaker) We cannot say this is a simulation.

This is a real thing.

So you are sharing with us exactly how exploration happens.

And we'll see frustration, nervousness, excitement, jubilation, depending what we see when we open that door.

You know, you're going to see it with us in real time.

- [Narrator] Elachi was a native of Lebanon who had earned his PhD at Caltech.

His first job at JPL was as a summer student intern.

He never worked anywhere else.

The landings of Spirit and Opportunity would be a major test for and for the lab.

For the outcome of this night would set JPL's course for years to come.

(murmurs) - We were coming from a very tough time and it was a nervous time.

And I knew what happened for Spirit is going to shape the future of JPL.

Either people are going to say, if it fails, "And here they crashed another rover," I mean that would have been decimating for JPL.

(murmurs) And I knew if it's successful, people will say, "Wow, these guys came from that huge adversity "and look what they have done."

So tension was very high.

Personally and in the room.

(murmurs) - [Narrator] There was another reason that made this an anxious moment.

A year before the space shuttle Columbia had disintegrated during re-entry killing all seven crew members.

The landing of Spirit was the first major NASA event since that tragedy.

The Space Agency's Administrator Sean O'Keefe was counting on a win at Mars.

- [Charles] And Sean O'Keefe was sitting next to me.

This is after Columbia.

He kept looking and said, "Charles, this is going to work, isn't it?

"It's going to work."

- [Radio Call] MTS is now on orbit 21,559 and we are ready to receive your EDL date.

- [Narrator] Ed Weiler, NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Science, was also at JPL and he never missed the opportunity to refer to Mars as "The Death Planet."

- There have been 34 attempts to go to Mars.

13 have been successes.

It's an incredibly difficult place to land.

Some would call it "The Death Planet" for good reason.

(crowd laughs) It's gonna be six minutes from hell.

It's gonna be high anxiety.

I mean, working on this thing for three to four years, success or failures can be determined in six minutes.

360 seconds.

- I'm Dan Whitcomb from Reuters.

I'm just wondering if someone can speak to their your general level of confidence or anxiety at this point, eight and a half hours out after this point in time.

- You know, we've talked a lot about how we're sending a very complicated system into a perhaps unknown environment at incredible speeds.

And so you may wonder why many of us here sitting here smiling (crowd laugh) as Pete pointed out yesterday.

Actually, you know, I mean right now, for some strange reason, I feel calm.

You know I feel ready.

And I can only conclude that's because I don't have a full grasp of the situation.

(crowd laughs) Today's a great day to land on Mars.

- [Radio Call] Copy that.

- [Steve] You're going through an event like that where everything that you worked for for so many years is on the line.

I mean, we had no control.

We were spectators, just like the rest of the world.

- [Lee] Flight sequence powered on the airbag gas generator heaters.

These gas generators are the solid rockets used to inflate the airbags near the surface of Mars.

- [Radio Call] Flight telecom?

- [Lee] Go telecom.

- [Radio Call] I think we see indications of the turn.

- [Lee] Copy that.

- [Peter] I worry that, that we've missed something.

I worry about the thing not yet found.

If it turns out that you've done something stupid there's no forgiveness.

(murmurs) There are a lot of poker chips on the table here.

They're professional.

They're personal.

They're institutional.

- [Lee] Okay, all stations we're gonna go ahead and begin the poll at this time.

- [Peter] There's national poker chips.

We cannot ignore where this happens to be in the history of NASA.

All these years, this whole period of time, to get to this moment will now be resolved.

(murmurs) - [Lee] One item that we are tracking now very carefully is the rate of change of the gas generator temperature.

It's currently creeping at a rate that would be at the maximum temperature.

- Copy that.

- [Narrator] This report about the gas generator is unexpected.

If the temperature continues rising the airbags might overinflate or not fully inflate.

(murmurs) (phone rings) - This is Adam.

- It's Rob.

You hear that about the gas generators?

Could you, they're running a little hot, right now.

- [Narrator] Rob Manning immediately seeks out Adam Steltzner who is monitoring the landing with other members of the flight team in another building at JPL.

- I'm trying to comb through and find it right now.

- [Narrator] Steltzner knows the details of the airbags literally inside and out.

- Looks like they're gonna be warmer than I thought by about five degrees after [unintelligible].

- So you don't have concerns for gas chamber?

Do we have to maintain temperature?

- We fired those at room temperature plus 20 degrees without any problem.

So I think the system, let's give it a green.

Yes.

Can you pass that along, sir?

(murmurs) - I will pass it on.

Okay, thank you very much.

- [Lee] Approximately two minutes 30 seconds ago the onboard-- - [Narrator] Based on previous testing done by the EDL team it appears the rising temperatures should not pose a problem for the airbags.

- Thermal subsystem and the EDL team.

The airbag engineers have also reported that the airbag gas generator temperatures are not going to be an issue.

So that issue has been resolved.

Currently all systems are green for entry.

Cruise stage jettison should occur in two minutes 40 seconds.

- "You will be selected for a promotion "because of your accomplishment."

(applause) I'll take that.

(bouncy tension music) - Cruise stage separation on my mark, four, three, two, one.

(rocket roaring) We have flight data that we have subcarrier out of lock on both 70 meters.

(rocket roaring) - [Jennifer] Jettisoning the Cruise Stage.

Wow, you know, the Cruise Stage is gone.

And now we're just this ballistic thing entering the atmosphere.

And the accelerations that we're getting reported back.

Wow, you know, we're really, really 12,000 miles an hour going into the atmosphere.

- Yes.

- Yes.

(crowd claps drowns out speaker) - We see tar tone 1 and tar tone 2.

- [Jennifer] In every key activity that was going on we got these signals that they were actually going right.

(crowd claps) (upbeat tension music) - [Lee] All systems are go for Entry, Descent and Landing.

And on behalf of the Entry, Descent and Landing team it's a pleasure to have you guys on board.

Best wishes for a successful science mission.

This time we'd like you to invite you to sit back and enjoy the landing.

(upbeat tension music) Please, tray tables upright and locked.

(laughs) - [Lee] We have just passed one minute the atmospheric entry, current altitude 121 miles.

Current velocity 12,084 miles per hour.

- [Radio call] Flight detective like tone five calibration tone, number five, we're coming back down again.

- [Lee] Copy that.

(rocket roaring) Thank you.

Parachute deploy in five seconds.

Four, three, two, one, mark.

(loud bang) (wind whooshing) - [Crowd Member] There it is.

(crowd clapping) At this time we expect the vehicle's gone subsonic.

(wind whooshing) (upbeat tension music) - [Radio Call] Parachute was detected.

(crowd clapping and cheering) - Time.

- Flight F?

- [Lee] Go on.

- [Radio Call] The one way Doppler has stopped being received indicating that the BBR and walk block, which is this system parachute deploy having occurred a little bit later than the predicted parachute deploy time.

- [Lee] Copy that.

(wind whooshing) Heat shield deploy event.

- [Radio Call] Spacecraft reporting that heat shield has indeed jettisoned.

(indistinct) (crowd cheering drowns out speaker) - [Lee] Supporting lander has separated.

It is expected radar will lock on the ground in approximately five seconds from now.

We are near our terminal velocity.

(air whoshing) - [Radio Call] [unintelligible] 17.

Data confirmation of radar in lock.

(air whooshing) - [Lee] Spacecraft reporting that the radar is in lock-- (crowd cheering drowns out speaker) - [Radio Call] Radar is working.

- [Lee] Expected retro rocket ignition on my mark.

Mark.

(rocket roaring) (cameras clicking) At this point in time, we should be on the ground.

We are now roughly 10 seconds from the latest expected landing time.

There is a dispersion landing time plus or minus 30 seconds.

So roughly any signal that we receive from now indicates the vehicle would be alive on the ground and bouncing.

Standby.

Still awaiting signal that we are on the ground.

(man coughing) - [Radio Call] We've got six signs of bouncing on the surface.

(crowd cheering and clapping) (cameras clicking) (crowd cheering drowns out speaker) - [Lee] The signal indicates we are bouncing on the surface of Mars.

This is a very good sign.

- That is really great.

- [Radio Call] Hang on everybody.

Please be quiet.

- [Lee] Standby.

- [Radio Call] We don't see a signal at the moment.

No signal at the moment.

- We saw an intermittent signal that indicated we were bouncing.

However, however, we currently do not have signal from the spacecraft.

Remember that bouncing and rolling is an event that it could occur for another 10 minutes.

The spacecraft has to survive all the bounces for landing to be a success.

(murmurs) At this time we're approximately 10 minutes after landing.

The vehicle should have rolled to a stop by now.

The Deep Space Network stations at Goldstone and Canberra are still searching for the signal.

(murmurs) The fact that a tone has not yet been received is not necessarily cause for alarm as during the bouncing and rolling event it is extremely difficult to send signals back to Earth.

Look at that.

- That's not what it, it that before.

- Start at 3900.

- [Polly] That issue was at 3911.

- [Lee] All right, so it's like we-- That was absolute agony.

And in fact, I was getting quite angry and frustrated with myself because I started thinking that maybe this thing had failed and that maybe all this work was just a waste.

The Deep Space Network stations at Goldstone and Canberra are still searching for the signal.

- [Radio Call] See it, see it.

- [Crowd Member] You see it?

(crowd cheering) - [Lee] We see it.

There it is.

(crowd cheering) - Goldstone has the carrier signal in lock from the Rover.

Electronic tone sent from the rover indicates that the rover has landed base petal down, which means right side up.

The airbags are still inflated however.

- [Narrator] The news that the rover has landed base pedal down tops a string of successful events for Spirit.

Now safe on the ground the spacecraft is programmed to automatically execute a series of deployment events.

- I've got your instruments to Mars guy.

Now the rest of it's up to you.

(murmurs drowns up speaker) Yeah, go do that.

They're probably going crazy.

- [Narrator] There's time now to breathe again and to engage in some reflection before Spirit's signals can again be heard.

- I woke up this morning and I said to myself, when I wake up tomorrow, on Sunday, the world will be different.

And it really, really is.

It's completely different.

This is a tremendous day.

(camera clicks) And, we've got many more steps to go before this mission is completely over but we've retired an awful lot of risks with this landing and we've got a good system and we're alive on the surface.

And that gives us real good hope a harbinger of things to come that we're gonna be very, very successful here.

I want to hand it over to a guy that's been on both the highs and the lows of this kind of businesses, and let him explain his feelings too you.

- Thanks, Pete.

I really, really like doing it when it works like this.

(crowd laughs and cheers) About seven years ago I sat up on this stage with my friend here and talked about a similar set of experiences what we've been through tonight.

And it was a great experience.

I think we were all young.

I had a lot more hair then, than I do now.

But we didn't know what we couldn't do and so we achieved a great thing.

And in doing so, we learned what the highs of exploration are like.

Well, four years ago I think a lot of you saw me sitting up here sort of at the depths of exploration or the depths of what it takes to make this happen.

We're in this business of exploration for obviously moments like this.

So, you know, I think that that's certainly what keeps me going and what makes this really a worthwhile endeavor.

(soft music) (crickets chirping) (crowd cheering) - If you were watching NASA TV earlier for Spirit's landing, you probably noticed we now have a bit of a change of scenery.

Once the Rover has landed on the surface of Mars the operation of Mission Control switches over to the Surface Mission Support Area.

This is the surface MSA.

And here is where the operation will stay.

Hopefully for the next 90 sols or 90 Martian days.

(murmurs) With me right now is John Callas.

He is the Mission Science Chief.

Pretty good Entry, Descent, and Landing earlier tonight.

(laughs) - Fantastic evening.

Fantastic.

We're safely on the surface of Mars.

We had perfect targeting going in and then the sequence of events as we went through this complicated and dangerous descent onto the surface went right on plan.

Oh!

- And we hear something.

(crowd cheering) - [John] They're very excited.

- Fantastic.

- Oh wow!

- [Gay] We're getting information.

- We're getting pictures from Mars.

(crowd cheering) - [John] The really exciting news is that if you have this pass with Odyssey it means everything has gone perfectly on the surface.

Even if we get one bit of data from Odyssey it means all the critical deployments happened just as we had hoped they would.

The rover is safe.

It is healthy.

And it's doing everything as we planned.

(crowd cheering) Based on the sounds of the applause on the background I think we're gonna get very good news, very shortly.

- Welcome to Mars Mr. Mihelli.

(murmurs) - [John] And if we're lucky, we might have a postcard from Mars tonight.

- No I didn't get an image.

- Image is coming down.

- I did see pre landed step normal moments.

- [Radio Call] We have images.

(crowd cheering) (intensified crowd cheering) Wow!

We've got the first pictures from the surface of Mars.

Look at that!

Wow, we are on Mars!

(crowd cheering) (man laughs) (continued cheering) - Oh, yes.

Look at that.

- [Blonde lady] What is that?

- That's looking down on our vehicle.

(crowd cheering) - We're gonna egress and then we're gonna drive.

- It's all good.

- (murmurs) I mean because.

Well we got the blind spot that we can't see anything under the solar arrays, We don't actually know what's there.

- [Participant] Right I saw that it was in this region.

- Okay, so you've seen that region.

- [Participant] Right, so I just wanted make sure you guys have the headings so that you can start figuring out where in there.

- Yeah, right now the matching of features actually puts us south of that.

- [Narrator] It wasn't long before eager scientists began searching for exactly where the rover had landed and what nearby might be worth exploring.

- I think there's gonna be a lot of push from the geology team.

(murmurs) And then the thing about this site is, it's so flat, and there's so few rocks - Yeah.

- We ought to be thinking about whether we could get.

(murmurs drowns out speaker) That stuff's poking up through.

Man, that's different, man.

- [Narrator] The initial images from Spirit showed a landscape lacking large rocks.

That was good news for being able to maneuver.

There would be no major obstacles to avoid.

But even at first glance these small rocks seemed all of a similar type.

- Maybe that there's not a huge variety of rocks, but that's all subject-- - [Narrator] That observation would turn out to be true.

The rocks were mostly made out of volcanic lava.

- This is where you all get to wear these lovely looking glasses.

Generally you want to use a-- - [Narrator] To find rocks with a richer geological story to tell Spirit would have to make good use of its wheels.

Once it was actually on the surface.

For the moment, the Rover was still tightly tied down sitting atop its lander and airbags.

To reach the surface Spirit would first have to cut 126 cables fastening it to the lander, stand up, stretch out and roll off.

But images showed that the forward egress route was partially blocked by airbags.

- [Radio Call] Engineering cameras.

(radio call mumbling) - The rocker.

This is the forward rocker, F rocker.

- [Narrator] As the operations team worked on freeing the Rover and scientists mulled over which rocks to inspect the Entry, Descent and Landing team pored over Spirit's telemetry to reconstruct just how safe or dangerous the landing had been.

(murmurs) (wind whoshing) Spirit's parachute had opened a mile lower than expected.

And the metal tape and rope bridle that lowered the rover away from its back shell had taken twice as long to deploy.

12 seconds instead of six.

- So this is obviously something that'll have to be investigated to determine what has happened here.

This is a mechanical issue that has to be resolved to make sure that we don't break it the next time around.

And we've got a real mystery to solve.

- [Narrator] There had also been two wind gusts.

The second one occurred at the worst possible moment, tilting the lander just before the retro rockets fired.

Had not additional rockets been added to right the system the rover would have hit the surface at more than 50 miles an hour.

The upper limit of the rover's ability to survive a hard landing.

Even then Spirit hit the ground hard and bounced at least 28 times, before coming to a full stop.

(soft music) - Cut to the chase and tell you what it is right away.

I'm pretty confident that this dot here is the heat shield.

- [Crowd Member] Wow.

And then Jay figured out that this is the parachute shadow.

- [Narrator] The second landing site's higher elevation and the ongoing global dust storm raised the worry that the lander would run out of time between the parachute opening and touchdown.

To buy time required deploying the parachute higher and at a faster speed which meant the dynamic pressure on the chute would be higher, and that had its own risk.

If stressed beyond the tested limits of dynamic pressure the parachute might shred to pieces.

- Well, the fact that it worked so beautifully and crisply at 725 is a signal that it will work at 750.

Because we believed that the parachute would be explaining to us at 725, that it was-- - On the edge.

on the edge.

Okay, and if there's seems to be another group that says it works at 725, so don't change it.

Fly it at 725.

- Both equally valid opinions.

- Yes.

- Yeah.

- Okay, let me-- - [Lee] And of course it's more relevant.

(crowd laughs) - The elephant in the room in this is the parachute deployment project.

We're still not comfortable with the atmosphere 'cause its moved quite a bit from where it was for two years in our baseline model.

What is the size of the residual threats?

And how far are you willing to use the good parachute deployment to buy yourself insurance against those residual threats?

Which takes us, as appropriate segue, into the set rate [unintelligible].

(crowd laughs) - [Narrator] Out of these discussions came the decision to open Opportunity's parachute 4,500 feet higher enough to gain a few extra seconds without, they believed, adding undue risk to the parachute.

(murmurs) Meanwhile, the surface operations team was working to get Spirit onto the ground.

Having traveled 300 million miles airbags and three feet of elevation were still in the rover's way.

And as engineers knew all too well from testing those last three feet could end in catastrophe.

(crowd shouting) - It's okay.

It's okay.

(faintly speaking) - [Kevin] That was particularly frustrating to me.

I was looking at those airbags in front of us and trying to figure which one was which.

So if we tried to pull them in some more we could pull the right one in and do what we wanted to do.

And in this case it was involving assessing which of our paths was the best path, assessing the deck heights.

(loud bang) So it was establishing a whole plan that said how are we gonna get from this current position to on the soil?

We've done all this wonderful stuff.

EDL, "Six Minutes of Terror."

And if I was wrong, if I made a mistake all of these other efforts before me are going to be for naught.

(faintly speaking) - [Narrator] These full scale model tests indicated that the best option was to have the Rover turn and exit off the Lander to the side.

It wasn't ideal.

And it caused a delay in the plan schedule.

- [Instructor] 16 on the ground.

- [Chris] Zero, zero, five, zero, decimal alpha, decimal zero, zero.

- [Narrator] But on the 12th sol the command to roll onto the surface was beamed up as an anxious team, held their breath and awaited news from Mars.

- Flight eight, go ahead, - Flight to have alpha, alpha, charlie tango underscore echo, zero, zero, five, zero, decimal alpha, decimal zero, zero, end of queue.

- [Chris] We have a tilt by the rover around 30 degrees.

That's an indication we probably went down the ramp.

- Copy that.

(crowd cheering) - [Kevin] This is this incredible feeling of relief.

- Sounds like it was a nice trip all we need now are the pictures.

(crowd laughing) - [Kevin] You know, you're incredibly happy.

You know, for a moment, and you're so incredibly relieved.

Like all this pressure has been lifted off your shoulder for a little while.

(crowd cheering) ♪ I'm back in the saddle again ♪ ♪ Out where a friend is a friend-- ♪ - [Narrator] Having six wheels in the Martian dirt topped off a series of high profile events that have kept JPL and NASA in the news.

(crowd cheering) One day earlier, Vice President Richard Cheney had visited and addressed the lab.

Later that same day in Washington president George W. Bush had used the good news of Spirit to announce his administration's vision for space exploration a plan that called for sending astronauts back to the moon.

By then Bush had already spoken directly with the JPL team to personally thank them for giving the nation a proud space achievement.

- [Bush] This came obviously at a fortuitous time.

This mission will really help me explain to the American people why what we're doing is so important.

- And Mr. President, you are more than welcome also to come and visit us here in the mission operation area.

(crowd laughs) - [Bush] Well I appreciate, we can sit around and kick around a few ideas on quantum physics.

(crowd laughs) - And string theory.

- Yeah.

- And Mr. President the lady in charge of the mission operation said she would loves to let you drive that Rover.

And we really mean it.

- [Bush] Yeah, well I'll appreciate that.

(crowd laughs) And I'd just like to do it here on Earth.

(crowd laughs) ♪ Whoopi-ty-aye-yay ♪ ♪ I go my way ♪ ♪ Back in the saddle again.

♪ - [Narrator] Now on the ground the science mission began in earnest.

Spirit stretched out its robotic arm to inspect the Martian soil and in doing so, took the first microscopic image of the surface of another planet.

Then the Rover traveled six feet to its first target.

There on Spirit's 18th sol, Spirit went silent.

- We would want to be able to get this deep in and completed before the prep time before the 11:00 a.m. fall pick up.

So we've deployed the arm and I'm Flight Director.

And we've got the arm ready to abraid the rock, that we're sitting in front of.

But then we lose the signal.

The way we left it yesterday afternoon we did not receive our fourth DTE and we then looked for our Odyssey overflight and did not receive any data.

It was believed that the MER vehicle did not attempt any communication with the Odyssey orbiter.

There was no-- It's oh gosh!

What happened?

Was it the station that didn't send it properly?

Did I not send it at the right rate?

So you start walking through that.

The Mission Manager is there to help you walk through those events.

What are we gonna do?

Well, let's just try to send another beep and see if it'll communicate back to us.

- Yes, sir, I'm not seeing anything from our displays.

You're not seeing any signal at this time?

- [Radio Call] It's a negative.

- Copy that Forchy.

Let's keep on looking.

- We now know that we have had a very serious anomaly on the vehicle and our ability to determine exactly what has happened has been limited by our inability to receive telemetry from the vehicle.

There is no one single fault that explains all the observables that we know of it the present time that we can conceive.

We do not know to what extent we can restore functionality to the system because we don't know what's broke.

As you know, we do have another spacecraft coming in.

We are now two days out from the Opportunity Entry, Descent and Landing.

(soft music) (wind whoshing) (soft music) - [Narrator] On sol 19 Spirit managed to send out a single beep sharing that she was still alive but clearly not well.

(indistinct) - So we had the anomaly, you know, the rover we don't know the state of the rover.

We did have a communication session which was supposed to happen in the middle of the night while the rover was asleep.

And so what we're going to do is send a beep on the low-gain antenna with the same command that we sent beeps yesterday and see if we are still commandable at 31.25.

Unfortunately the data from that session is just garbage.

It's unintelligible.

Then the rover wouldn't go to sleep and it wouldn't shut down.

So then it was just another problem.

It became problem after problem in terms of what we thought were the ways to solve it.

- [Narrator] Was the problem related to Spirit's hardware or its software or both?

Glenn Reeves, the architect of the software, began to think he knew the answer.

(murmurs) - [Reeves] It's a software problem.

And I don't like software problems because software is my world.

- [Narrator] Although what Spirit was communicating was mere gibberish, Reeves knew that even gibberish can convey a message.

- [Reeve] Now the evidence is starting to point to the fact that maybe we're just resetting.

We understand the behavior of the system.

If it's in a mode where it has a significant error like that one of the ways to clear that error in many situations is to go through a reset.

Bring the software up brand new and effectively start again.

- [Narrator] That was easier said than done.

For Spirit's computer appeared to be in a manic state of constant rebooting refusing to rest or sleep resulting in a major drain on the rover's batteries.

- [Reeves] We now think that the system has never shut down for two days.

And are we gonna have enough batteries or we effectively gonna burn out?

- Light telecom?

- What.

- Previous signs report they lost signal so it could be that something ended or got terminated.

- [Lee] Flight software, do you have anything to report?

- No.

- [Lady With Black Hair] Please, that's a no.

- [Reeves] And when you're dealing with a spacecraft that's 200 million miles away every single moment you have where you interact with it is precious.

You cannot waste any of those.

You're worried that maybe these are the last couple of times that you're gonna talk to it.

You wanna capitalize on everything you can possibly do.

- [Narrator] A plan emerges to send up new boot commands that will bypass Spirit's normal startup system and instead use its Read-Only Memory.

But to work the new command has to be inserted during a narrow window of time before yet another automatic reboot.

When the new command goes up on the third sol of the crisis the second rover, Opportunity, is just hours away from its own rendezvous with Mars.

On everyone's minds is the possibility that on this day the team may go from having two rovers to none.

(upbeat music) (wind whooshing) - [Chris] Flight A?

- [Radio call] Go ahead.

- [Chris] Flight station reported that they're seeing signal at one, four, three, five, three, six, on all the-- And then the stuff responds, so that you know whatever-- (murmurs drowns out speaker) (indistinct) (crowd clapping) - It's like a well-oiled machine, isn't it?

(crowd laughing) (soft music) - [Narrator] As the sun rises over Pasadena the crisis ends.

There is still work to be done to restore Spirit to a healthy state but that will come in the days ahead.

For later today, following the setting of the sun, it will be Opportunity's turn to encounter Mars.

(soft music) (bouncy music) - Good evening, everyone.

Welcome to live coverage of Opportunity's landing on Mars from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Spirit is definitely a hard act to follow but Opportunity is certainly going to try.

- [Narrator] Spirit's dramatic arrival at Mars and its software crisis had made for a steady drum beat of headline news all across the globe.

(beep sound) (camera clicking) - Hello.

- Now the hottest ticket in town was to be at JPL for the landing of Opportunity.

- And a good evening from the flight deck of the Opportunity.

Our current speed is 11,402 miles per hour which is fast enough to transverse a distance equal to the continental United States in less than 12 minutes.

About 15 minutes ago-- - [Narrator] Wayne Lee was again providing play-by-play commentary dressed in the same shirt in hopes of it bringing more good luck.

- Weather today at the landing site is suspected to be fairly mild the temperatures averaging about minus 15 degrees C and there is no chance of rain today.

Looking back on it, there was actually more pressure the night of the second one.

You would think that there would be less pressure 'cause we got one of them to work.

But that night of the second landing I looked up in the viewing gallery and there was the Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger sitting up there.

There was former Vice President Al Gore.

There was also a whole lot of people from Congress up there thinking, "Well, the first one worked let's come out "and party for the second."

The seeing all those dignitaries up there, I think that in an odd sort of way it would almost have been more embarrassing to fail the second one just in front of everybody.

And I also think that a lot more people around the country tuned in thinking, "Oh, okay, well the first one worked so good "let's watch the second."

- Atmospheric entry.

Five, four, three, two, one, mark.

- [Lee] The vehicle has now hit the top of the Martian atmosphere.

We are now at an altitude of 73 miles moving at a speed of 12,187 miles per hour.

- [Radio Call] Right now?

- [Lee] Go now.

- [Radio Call] The Doppler indicates that atmosphere deceleration is occurring.

- [Lee] Copy that.

We expect parachute deployment approximately 50 seconds from now.

Parachute deployed.

(crowd cheering) Radar solution reaches 21.

(crowd cheering drowns out speaker) The rocket has fired.

(crowd cheering drowns out speaker) Getting a bouncing signal.

(crowd cheering) - [Narrator] Long before Opportunity ceased its bouncing the celebration began.

As days of pent-up worry and tension turned to relief and joy.

VIPs descended upon mission control to congratulate the team.

And of course to take advantage of this ready-made photo op.

(crowd cheering) JPLers led by the EDL team then piled out into the street intent on storming the Post Landing Press Conference to make their contribution known with a victory lap.

(crowd cheering) (crowd chanting) One might think this was all anyone could wish for on one single day, with two rovers now safe on Mars.

But the night was still young despite the late hour and the best was still to come.

- You are privileged to be in one of the most exciting rooms on Earth at the moment.

(crowd member laughs) So don't abuse it.

(crowd laughing) - [Narrator] Following the raucus press conference the scene at JPL shifted again to the mission operations room.

- [Chris] Thank you for everyone for being very well behaved.

(crowd laughs) It's reasonably quiet in here.

- [Radio Call] Wait'll we get the data.

- [Chris] Flight imaging.

(crowd cheering) (murmurs) (crowd cheering) - [Rob] It felt like the 4th of July like fireworks going off.

Picture after picture after picture!

Just enough time between them for us to assimilate what an incredible place this was.

- Craters means rocks.

Oh my gosh.

We've got all sorts of stuff.

(crowd cheering) - [Rob] Just an experience of total awe that you've broken this vast barrier of time and space between us and Mars.

(crowd cheering) - Look at this.

Look at this.

- [Radio call] Got image on the screen.

(crowd cheering) - I don't know, I just don't know.

I don't know.

- [Chris] And now would be a good time for our PI's assessment of what we're looking at.

- [Crowd] Yeah.

(crowd cheering) - It's the weirdest most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

(crowd laughing) We knew going into this that at a fine scale the texture of-- - [Narrator] Though it would take time to realize Opportunity had scored an interplanetary hole-in-one bouncing its way into a small crater.

And right in front of the rover was everything a geologist could ever hope for: exposed bedrock.

Just waiting to tell the story of its ancient past.

- I've got nothing else to say I just wanna look.

(soft music) - [Narrator] Spirit and Opportunity by now had captured the attention if not also the hearts of people all across the globe.

The rovers' warranty or expected lifetime was just three months after which time it was thought that dust collecting on the solar panels would cause their demise.

But for these twin machines Mars proved to be anything but a "Death Planet."

Time and again, benevolent Martian dust devils would roll across the rovers wiping clean their solar panels giving new life to these two explorers.

And explore they did.

In combination, they roamed over 30 miles over a combined period of 20 years.

During that time these robotic field geologists accomplished their science goal of determining that Mars was once a warmer, wetter place, a vital step in the quest to determine if Mars had ever or still does harbor microbial life.

And of course, to the delight of everyone, Spirit and Opportunity transmitted back a stream of images more than a third of a million of them.

In doing so, Mars was transformed from an alien planet to a place we can now feel we know easily imagining ourselves taking in these vistas from the same vantage.

Spirit and Opportunity have changed not just how we think about Mars, but how we view it.

And that may be their greatest legacy.

(soft music)