(rocket launching) - [Narrator] In a post Cold War world of shrinking space budgets, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California was challenged to reinvent itself.

The lab's new assignment from NASA: land safely on Mars, in a revolutionary new way.

- Mars is the hardest planet to land on.

And I want you to do it cheaply.

- [Narrator] But could it be done?

And who was brave or foolish enough to sign up for such a risky mission?

- Nobody else wanted the job.

They were afraid to death of it.

- The rest of the lab was going, "What are these guys doing?"

Cause all they could see is the most embarrassing failures possible.

- [Narrator] Added to the challenges was the addition of an unexpected passenger.

- That silly little Rover, It was not popular with anybody.

- Command air, what's going on now?

What's broken now?

This thing's falling apart on me.

- If you crash, you're gonna crash and burn big time.

- You're not allowed to fail.

- Don't you dare fail.

Do whatever you need to do, but don't fail.

- [Narrator] "The Pathfinders JPL and the Space Age", next.

(patriotic music) (people shouting) In 1989, the Berlin wall fell.

(people shouting) Marking the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union.

The end of the cold war.

And the beginning of a decade of shrinking budgets for America's space program.

And that meant major changes, declared the new head of NASA, Dan Goldin.

- It is scary.

I can't promise that everything's gonna be okay.

- [Narrator] To the shock of many, Goldin predicted that the space agency's very survival was in doubt unless it embraced change.

- But I can promise that if we go for the survival mode, as an agency, in five years we're dead.

So let me walk you through some of the issues.

- [Narrator] Goldin delivered the same message at JPL.

- It will never ever go back.

JPL will never ever look like it did.

You will not build very many spacecraft that look like this.

You gotta erase that from your mind.

- I remember his first meeting with the JPL Executive Council.

And he was no nonsense.

He said, you know, when I came out to JPL, I see 6,000 people all clustered around a single spacecraft.

That's not the way to do business That's Battlestar Galactica.

And there aren't going to be any more Battlestar Galacticas.

- When I came here the first few times, it was with malice aforethought that I did everything.

But let me give you some evidence.

They were too cautious, so I used some theatrics.

The Mars Surveyor was supposed to be faster, better, cheaper.

(Drops books) Gravity works.

(crowd laughs) This is not the way to do things.

There is no excuse for all this paper in that package.

And what this package called out is the famous JPL Procurement Forms manual.

(crowd laughs) (crowd claps) Now, do you wanna spend your remaining days in the space program dealing with garbage like this?

Who has the courage to say that this is unnecessary?

This is not what we're about, we're about leaving Earth.

We're not about paper.

Just because... - [Narrator] There was a strategy behind Goldin's theatrics.

He wanted JPL to show how all of NASA could approach its work differently in the post Cold War world.

A concept Goldin called Faster, Better, Cheaper.

- Part of his charge was in fact to oversee the transition of the agency to a new direction, new scale missions and science in particular.

- The Jet Propulsion Lab is going to be the catalyst that change the whole NASA space program.

- So I was trying to understand exactly what kinds of things he was trying to promote and how we could then make them real.

Our job was to make them real.

- Everyone's tired of the shuttle going up and down.

It's boring.

My words was I wanted to darken the skies with a lot of satellites and spacecraft, and I wanted the American people to share in the excitement.

And the first thing they did was the Mars Pathfinder.

Brilliant, brilliant.

That's what we agreed to, we had it... - [Narrator] Goldin was not alone in his desire for change.

- And to revolutionize spacecraft development in a way to drastically reduce cost while maintaining.. - Wes Huntress was a former JPL scientist.

He was now at NASA Headquarters in charge of Solar System Missions.

And showing no hint of favoritism for the lab, where he had worked for two decades.

- JPL was incredibly upset at me.

They were so mad because I gave a mission to someone other than JPL.

JPL felt at the time we are the planetary program, we are gonna do all the flight missions.

We should do all the flight missions cause nobody else can do them like us.

How could you possibly give a mission to somebody else?

And the answer was real simple.

And that's because your proposed cost was way too high.

In the area of planetary exploration - [Narrator] With JPL's attention now fully engaged, Huntress offered up a challenge.

- JPL would give you a hard one cause you're good at hard ones.

And that's landing something on Mars.

And I want you to do it cheaply.

- [Narrator] Mars Pathfinder, as it came to be called, was to be a technology demonstration.

The goal proving that it was possible to land on Mars using air bags.

- And there was really no basis for knowing whether we could do it or not.

We had no experience in that area.

But we knew that if we didn't sign up for it, somebody who had less to lose than we did, would sign up for it.

And we might just deal ourselves out of the game.

So we said, of course we can.

The new coin of the realm are technology milestones that established ... - [Narrator] Huntress had another requirement.

He wanted to name the project manager.

- There's only one person at JPL that can do this, only one.

And that's Tony Spear, because he's a Maverick.

- Tony Spear was a JPL veteran, well known for being gregarious, enthusiastic and forthright.

- I never felt like I belonged at JPL ever, okay.

I just, I came from a still working mining family, you know, I was just overwhelmed by JPL.

And so I had to bust my butt all of the while.

I was incredibly intimidated.

I couldn't understand one word that was being spoken.

And I took acronyms home, lists of acronyms that every night I would study these things, you know.

- [Narrator] Spears' inherent optimism combined with feelings of being an outsider would serve him well.

He was being asked to land on Mars on a tight schedule of four years.

With a budget, less than a tenth of what the first NASA landings, the Vikings had cost two decades earlier.

- Nobody else wanted the job - Mars Pathfinder.

They were afraid to death of it.

They were saying you know, "You're a crazy ass, Spear for taking, what are you gonna do?"

Instead of being afraid, I don't know why, I got excited, I thought, Oh my God, you know.

I'm climbing mountains and I'm doing this and that.

And I says, "I'll take it."

- I will be a very close monitor of the time.

Tony, you have 10 minutes.

We got a 10 minute late start.

So I expect you, would it make it all up.

(crowd laughs) - John says he didn't care what I said just get done in 10 minutes.

Actually I'm young, I was good looking before I started this.

This is what happens.

Here's one experiment coming up.

We got this thing and now we've gotta do it.

And Pathfinder, its major objective is to demonstrate a low cost delivery system for landing things on Mars, okay.

And we use a Viking parachute, we use a Viking-like aeroshell, we use automobile-like airbags, we use Russian...

I would show the simulation of the balls bouncing and everybody in the room would laugh.

They would giggle, "Oh my God, give me a break."

Anyway, how am I doing, John?

How much time?

Five more minutes, good, okay.

I was thinking all the while, how the hell do you land on a planet?

I had no idea.

- [Narrator] Some of the original ideas for an airbag landing were these back of the envelope sketches.

As the plan envisioned, Pathfinder dives into the Martian atmosphere at 16,000 miles per hour.

Protected by its heat shield, the spacecraft burns through the Martian atmosphere, reducing its speed to 900 miles per hour.

Next, a parachute is deployed.

Then the heat shield and back shell are jettisoned and a rope drops to detect the ground.

The airbags inflate.

Seconds later, the lander hits the surface at 50 miles per hour bouncing stories high.

After the lander finally comes to rest, the airbags deflate and an antenna rises up transmitting back to earth the news that the lander is somehow still in one piece.

One of Spears' first challenges was finding people willing to sign on for what seemed to many, a career ending mission.

- That wasn't easy to form that team.

But once we got it, man, did they rock and roll.

- He created skunkworks and he brought together young engineers who were not steeped in the flagship way of doing things yet.

And the combination of these young innovative engineers and the old sage, the wise old sage, turned out to work beautifully.

JPL hated it.

- Nobody really wants to work on this.

We don't think it's going to work, you know.

We need somebody to fill this job.

Will you go do it?

But to me, I'm in my mid twenties.

I want kind of that adventurous, let's try new things, let's conquer the world spirit.

And so I didn't think twice, you know, it sounded great plus I didn't have a job.

- I was young enough and ignorant enough.

I didn't know and I didn't really care.

- The comradery in the esprit de corps was tremendous.

- I liked working with Tony.

He was very direct.

But if he thought you knew what you were doing, he'd let you do your job.

- It was the most fun project I've ever worked on.

But I also remember this little Jiminy Cricket in the back of your head saying, "You're a scientist, why you working on a mission that is not a science mission," right?

It's a technology demonstration.

What good is that?

You've sold out.

- I was new to the lab and I was naive.

This was just one other new thing to do.

- This is the carrier.

The rest of the lab was going, "Oh my God, what are these guys doing?"

Literally, there are people who wouldn't speak to me.

My colleagues who were just like, you know, I can't talk to you about this.

It's just making me sick to my stomach.

Cause all they could see is the most embarrassing failures possible.

Nothing good could come out of Pathfinder.

- So that was just, you know, an incredible gamble for all of those young kids.

You know, my career was already established and over pretty much.

But all those young kids I worried about, you know.

- [Narrator] The team wasn't entirely on its own.

They had the full support of JPL's upper management.

Veterans of the Viking mission provided tough, but often useful guidance.

And technical components from JPL's current Battlestar Galactica - Cassini - were incorporated into the mission.

Helping to keep Pathfinder from busting its budget.

Minimizing bureaucracy helped to keep down the cost too.

- We dumped paperwork that we just didn't think was necessary.

We made sure we had the right paper.

- It was dramatically underfunded and it was understaffed.

And what that created was tremendous opportunity.

So if you've got the right kind of person and they saw a job that needed doing and they had the ability to go, they just went and did it.

(suspense music) - Faster, better, cheaper missions are like race cars.

You gotta have one hell of a pit crew behind you and you need a really good driver.

But if you crash, you're gonna crash and burn big time.

(Aircraft engine roaring) - [Narrator] And early on, there were some minor crashes.

One involved an unusual test of the lander's aeroshell.

- So we had an engineer who basically had the idea, he was a parachutist by hobby.

And so he had decided we're gonna take a subscale version of this out, you know, of the heat shield, the four body and the parachute.

And I'm just gonna throw out the back of a plane and then I'm gonna jump after it.

And I'm gonna take pictures on the way down.

It's very interesting given JPL today, right?

You can edit all this out.

(aircraft engine roaring) - [Narrator] The aeroshell, weighing over 200 pounds, almost immediately began tumbling out of control.

Then the main parachute failed to open.

A second parachute did unfurl, but it was attached to the heat shield.

Meanwhile, the aeroshell smashed into the ground at an estimated speed of over 200 miles per hour.

- What happened?

- I think what happened is the static line attachment broke cause he had the, the break cord has to pull a canopy out.

- This is difficult and even embarrassing for us.

- [Narrator] Later, there was a second air mishap.

A legendary one for which unfortunately there is no footage.

It is remembered as the Pathfinder UFO.

The story begins when a commercial contractor, while conducting a parachute test, accidentally dropped lead weights over a cucumber farm.

- One of the local newspapers had talked about the UFO incident.

That a cucumber farmer found a lead base from potentially UFO embedded in his truck.

So that started the whole story.

And it was funny, the way reactions went.

So my reaction was shh!

Let's not talk about it it's a UFO incident.

And finally our management said, "There is no way you can't talk about this.

We have to come clean."

- We made the farmer very happy.

We bought him a new truck and we promised him that for his daughter's birthday, we would fly over with a happy birthday sign.

Now Caltech is really worried, "What are you doing, Spear?"

You know.

- [Narrator] Reigning in the younger members of the team was one of the responsibilities of Brian Muirhead.

A likable but hard nosed technical leader.

- Will somebody pay attention to the management, please?

(crowd shouts) - Brian was total nuts and bolts, you know, get it done kind of a guy.

And so that absolutely is what Tony had to have with somebody like that who could be his person to go off and clean up all the messes.

- If this is the surface of the atmosphere we're coming in.

And we have to.... - I had never been a flight system manager.

You know, I had delivered, you know, sizeable things at the lab.

But nothing like the flight system of a, of a spacecraft.

And the people that came around me on the flight system team.

We kind of created a team of radical kind of thinkers.

- [Narrator] Muirhead was open to new ideas, but they had to be subjected to tried and true methods of proof.

- Which is build it, test it, break it, fix it, do it again.

- [Narrator] But not everything could be fully tested.

- I was very scared of the parachute, I gotta tell you.

Mostly was that parachute was the one thing we couldn't test in any realistic way.

- [Narrator] Assuming the parachute worked, the next challenge was knowing when to inflate the airbags, just seconds before hitting the ground.

The original idea of hanging a rope with a sensor at the bottom proved unworkable.

So radar was added, but that solution raised new problems.

- The devil's in the details.

That's where I got into the picture.

Was the devil is in the details.

Like for example, in some of the drop tests of, you know, we do drop tests on parachutes and the radar was dropping and taking measurements.

And it was swinging, like you would imagine that it would be swinging.

And then we realized that the radar when it lose its lock, it has all these horrible altitude measurements The radar tells you these are good measurements, but they are really bad.

- [Narrator] To increase the chance of a safe landing, rockets were added in hopes of further slowing down the lander.

(explosion) (crowd cheering) - So there was a set of steps we went through where smart people thought about how to make it more reliable.

But it just kinda added more to the here's something that goes into this basket and then that basket dumps into this tray.

So it really gives you that Rube Goldberg sort of a feeling.

- [Narrator] Then there were the airbags, - Rolling, it's going the wrong way.

- I remember working with Sandia they had the most powerful computer in the world at that time.

And we brought it to its knees, trying to simulate this airbag.

- In the early 1990s, computer processing capability was just getting good enough that we could imagine really bringing all of these simulation programs together.

There were certain parts of it we came to realize you really couldn't treat very well with a computer simulation.

The airbags, being by far and away, the foremost example.

- I would guess that we didn't understand 90% of the fundamental physics that goes into the airbag.

I would also argue that we did not understand 50% at the end of Pathfinder.

- We're in world's largest vacuum chamber.

And we had the bags all the way up to the ceiling.

It still wasn't enough distance to drop and get to the 23 meters per second impact velocity that we wanted.

That's about 55, almost 60 miles an hour.

So we had to design an acceleration system.

- Release.

- Release.

- And when we released it, they just flew down like a bat out of hell, slammed into this platform and onto these huge rocks.

And you know, our worst fears were realized, and we got a pretty big tear in the bag.

- I don't think we cried.

I came close to have tears in my eyes.

There was one test in particular.

We said, okay, there's a way to solve this, just kill it.

Let's put a 800 Denier canvas on this thing.

Nobody could tear into that.

Put the lander.

- Release.

- Dropped it (airbags gush) Gashes tore the airbags lobe to lobe.

And that was the moment that both of us thought we may not make this.

We may not launch this.

I did develop a tick even sort of like this.

I used to think I could control it, but every time I wasn't paying attention, it would be going like this.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Despite the pressures, the engineering challenges were shaping the team into a tight knit group and they were having fun.

- The way to do this is to not have rules for building a team.

This is what teamwork's all about.

(laughs) I love my team, what can I say?

- [Narrator] But with no small island, the lander team soon found themselves in a reversal of roles.

They would be the insiders to a whole new group of maverick outsiders wanting to hitch a ride to Mars.

(intense music) Long before Pathfinder, scientists had dreamt of machines roaming the surface of Mars.

They would be robotic geologists, examining and collecting rocks to unlock the secrets of the planet's ancient past.

But the early prototypes were massive and impractical.

- Rovers needed big computers because they had to do all these calculations to keep themselves safe.

So one way light-time delay you can't joystick a vehicle on the surface.

So you need to be able to put in hazard detection and avoidance.

And at that time there was needed big computers and that made a big rover.

And so the rovers kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

- [Narrator} This behemoth called Robby weighed in at nearly a ton.

Earning it and others like it, the nickname Godzilla.

And we kept going, "There's no way you could make one of these function on Mars."

You know, the computers were too big.

- [Narrators] But as computers began shrinking, so did rover prototypes.

And now there was a political motivation for becoming serious about a rover on Mars.

Russia had its own ambitions for a rover.

- Talks about some specific projects.

- [Narrator] But as part of the Cold War thaw, Russian space officials were treated to a tour of JPL and a status briefing.

The Russians reciprocated with a Rover Fest on JPL's mall.

- A month or so ago, the head of the Russian Space Agency, Mr. Koptev was here.

And we showed him Rocky, but we wanted to have more substantive technical discussions with people and, try to get some information exchange going.

- [Narrator] Donna Shirley was the team leader for JPL's rovers.

She was also JPL's first female aerospace engineer.

- I got a lot of teasing and everything, but at the time, people were not interested in whether you were green or purple or blue or female or male or whatever.

They were mainly interested, "Could you get the job done?"

The only thing really bad about it was that everybody smoked cigars in those days.

And so they were literally smoke-filled rooms when you went to a meeting.

There were other women at JPL who were doing technical work, but they were running these mechanical calculators.

And these women were called computers because in order to do these complex navigational calculations, they would run these calculators.

Ch-ch-ching!

Ch-ch-ching!

Like a bunch of slot machines all running at the same time.

And if they were taking square roots, it would be absolutely deafening in there.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.

So they did all the complex calculations, but they weren't engineers for the most part, most of them didn't have degrees.

They just were smart women.

- [Narrator] Throughout Shirley's life, Mars kept appearing.

Her introduction began as a child, reading works of science fiction.

- Pretty much assume that either you know something... - [Narrator] And now she was the champion for a Martian rover, but finding the assignment a hard sell.

- And so when we say we have 25... And the scientists said, "Oh, that silly little rover.

What on Earth can it do?

It can't do anything useful."

Because they were used to the idea of a very large rover that would go a hundred kilometers around Mars and collect lots of samples.

- And the lander talks to us and the lander has the hard job of getting the data back.

- [Narrator] As part of her pitch, she could point to a recent test that had put a rover named Rocky through its paces in the Pasadena Arroyo.

Rocky began the workout by descending from a makeshift lander to the ground.

Then it dropped off a simulated seismometer to detect Martian earthquakes.

(light music) Next, the rover made its way to a rock where a small hammering device was to chip away at the stone's exterior.

But here Rocky experienced a major malfunction.

All of these vibrations caused the rover's computer to lock up, leaving the rover pecking away in an endless loop.

This glitch required a manual computer reset.

- They were ready to go.

- After the reboot, having regained its senses, Rocky picked up a soil sample and ambled its way back and up onto the lander.

(light music) - Something about the rover is a part of measure Pathfinder and we're a flight experiment.

Whereas Pathfinder... - [Narrator] Once skeptical scientists were beginning to see real possibilities.

- Just to give you an idea of this and it gives me... - [Narrator] To Shirley's delight and Spears' dismay, NASA directed JPL to give the rover a ride to Mars.

- If a project manager is trying desperately to do something nobody's ever done before for an incredibly small amount of money, and somebody comes up to him and says, "Gee, I want you to carry along this completely extraneous thing."

Well, it looks to him like the parasite.

And so it was not popular with anybody.

- If you'll shut up for a minute, I'll say something about it.

(crowd laughs) - I think that actually.. - The funding for the rover came from a separate NASA pod.

So Donna was appointed to be the Project Manager of the rover.

- The effort that these people.

- That immediately created this slightly two headed monster where Tony thought he was in charge and Donna had a similar feeling about it and she was not gonna let him tell her what to do.

And he was gonna treat her like a second class citizen at some level.

And that sort of animosity between the rover team and the quote "Lander" team it lasted for quite a while.

- [Narrator] Stories of their yelling bouts were legendary.

And the tension between these two headstrong managers only worsened when Shirley was promoted to also manage a newly established office of Mars Exploration.

- Which meant, I Tony spear now worked for her.

All hell broke loose.

- [Narrator] Besides a personality clash, there were difficult technical issues involved in accommodating Sojourner, as the rover was named.

And it would still be Spear, as the Pathfinder Project Manager, who would recommend whether or not the rover would actually get a ride to Mars.

- And that was a solar powered mission.

The inside of the panels had the solar rays.

We were gonna take up space, volume and real estate that had to be tucked in there.

And of course the ramps, the ramps were a big huge huge development activity to make these very lightweight, flexible ramps that would roll out off the edge of the tetrahedron panels.

- When we got to the point where we were doing environmental testing, we were in the chamber and the rover couldn't handle the cold temperature.

So they built this little dog- literally a doghouse for the rover, over on the side, so the rover could crawl into it while we were doing cold temperature testing on the lander and it could basically be protected.

The first time the rover drove out, there was pieces of tape confused the onboard algorithms.

And so it literally was afraid to drive you know, out onto this, onto the floor.

And so the lander guys all thought it was hysterical that here's this rover that, you know, is gonna drive around Mars and it can't even figure out a way to drive in the flat chamber floor of Building 150.

- [Narrator] Another source of contention early on was whether the rover should operate autonomously as the rover team wanted, or should it be tethered to the mothership for power and communication?

- This one manager at NASA, I would go back and brief.

He was listening to me, and I'm up walking around, with my microphone and I'm getting caught up in the cord.

He says, "Look at Tony Spear and his rover getting caught up in the tether.

He disavows, by the way, that he ever did that.

So I was getting nowhere with them.

And one night it was three o'clock in the morning where a lot of decisions happen.

I realized, "Man, do you have a good team."

I came in the next morning, I'm thinking, "Damn, I have the solution."

And I say, "I will let you do the rover without the tether."

They were stunned.

What I realized at three o'clock in the morning, if I chose their approach, they were gonna bust their butt to prove to me that I made the right decision.

And it just happened like a flash.

"Hey, that's the answer," you know, "Get over it, Tony, just do it."

(patriotic music) - [Narrator] With just one year remaining before the launch of Pathfinder, members of the team put aside their hectic schedules to take a field trip... to a place as close to Mars as exists on earth.

(aircraft engine roaring) - I thought it was a bit of a potential for boondoggle.

I had a lot to do, and I didn't think I had time.

But Matt Golombek says, "Rob, you gotta go, you gotta go."

As project scientists, you have to figure it out where to land.

And no one had done that since the Viking missions years before.

How do you go about making a decision that's so important?

Cause you're not just throwing a dart that, you know, you wanna pick a place that has the greatest chance for success, it's not safe.

It doesn't matter what science do you think you're gonna get.

- [Narrator] Golombek's recommendation was to land on an ancient floodplain.

And here on Earth, he was bringing Pathfinder engineers to a place that had once experienced a similar geologic event.

This is the Scablands in Eastern Washington state, a mostly barren region that experienced an almost unimaginably massive flood at the end of the last ice age.

- Why is this important?

Well, because where we were going, on Mars, is a place where clearly we can see that billions of years ago, water coarsed over the surface of Mars in exactly the same sort of cataclysmic flow of water.

The place we were landing, it was gonna be at least 10 times more dramatic, where even hundreds of feet high water, miles across, race down the mountain, and just completely altered the surface over the matter of hours and days.

Billions of years ago.

(intense music) We finally could visualize what the surface of Mars would look like.

We could see the boulders and the rocks had been formed in those conditions, we can see what the airbags had to handle.

And Matt Golombek saying, "This is what it's gonna look like."

I go, "There's a lot of rocks here, man."

He says, "Yeah, that's right, we're going to Mars, we're for going for rocks."

I say "Yes, okay great."

The landing guys are going, "But these are sharp rocks."

(laughs) It was great fun.

- And by the way, when you're this high above the ground as a rover, rocks this big are really scary.

(intense music) - Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon, welcome to NASA headquarters.

And what promises to be a very.. - [Narrator] Interest in Martian rocks went sky high a year later when NASA Administrator Dan Goldin set the stage for a controversial announcement.

The discovery of possible evidence that life once existed on Mars.

- First, the results today are not conclusive or there is not yet scientific consensus.

We're not here to establish, as in a courtroom, beyond a shadow of doubt, that life existed on Mars.

But we're here today to open the door just a little bit.

And we may see the first evidence that life might have existed beyond the confines of this small planet - The third rock from the sun.

- [Narrator] The clues came from a rock that was blasted off the Martian surface by a meteor that hit the planet millions of years ago.

After roaming the solar system, it too became a meteor when it entered Earth's atmosphere.

This remnant landed in the Antarctic.

Scientists found inside the rock structures interpreted by some to be microfossils of life-like bacteria.

The announcement caused a media sensation.

- It's a thrilling discovery and more steps, to the Heavens, the possibility of life on Mars.

- [Narrator] It also gave NASA a new argument for sending more missions to Mars.

Over and over, the stakes for Pathfinder were raised.

A mission originally conceived as only a demonstration of a new way of landing on Mars had become the poster child to prove faster, better, cheaper could work.

Then room had to be made for a pesky and demanding rover.

And now with the announcement of the Mars rock, NASA's hopes to expand its exploration of the planets was riding onboard Pathfinder too.

Failure, Spear was told, was no longer an option.

(intense music) - And I told everybody, you know, "Failure's okay, except on Pathfinder."

I said to Tony Spear, "You're not allowed to fail.

Don't you dare fail.

Do whatever you need to do, but don't fail."

(intense music) - [Narrator] The pressures on the Pathfinder team continued mounting all the way up to launch.

By then Spear had said yes to yet one more new requirement.

- Do you wanna land on the 4th of July?

I says, "Let's go for it, what the hell?"

If we're gonna splat, let's really splat.

- T-minus 10, nine, eight, seven, six.

Green board - five, four, three, main engine start.

One, zero and lift off of the Delta Rocket with Mars Pathfinder.

And the vehicle has cleared the tower.

(rocket roaring) (inspirational music) - [Narrator] The launch was picture perfect.

And as Pathfinder emerged from the shadow of the Earth, the spacecraft sent out the message that its solar panels were charging.

For some unknown reason though, the spacecraft sun sensor, vital for navigation, was failing to see the sun.

- Looking better than I expected.

I don't understand it right now.

I need to analyze it.

Because you know, we getting out of the sun sensor for the view right now.

- Yeah, yeah.

- [Narrator] Without the sun sensor to help with navigation, the spacecraft would never reach Mars.

- And I hear power colleagues saying, you know, "I see the sun and the solar arrays and they are interrogating ACS.

Do you see any sun yet?"

I said, "No, negative."

- We're getting out of the sun sensor (mumbling) - You're pointing what 30 nominally... - And then I hear you know talking, "We see the sun, you know."

And then I realize at that point, you know, I get you know this cold sweat.

(phone ringing) - I like to report that the tilt is about 3.4 degrees.

- [Narrator] The problem was surmised to be debris sticking to the sun sensor.

That would have occurred when the spacecraft separated from the final stage of the launch vehicle.

- Can you report the temperatures listed in the procedure?

So there was this anomaly with the launch vehicle.

The scoop goes on the sun sensors and we're looking and watching the data in the MSA.

Do you have the telemetry you need to..

It never went to sun.

It just said, "No sun, no sun, no sun, no sun, no sun."

You know being rocket scientists we're like, "We think the sun is there, We think that the, you know, the sun sensors just aren't seeing it."

- We screwed up.

- We screwed up, especially with the sun sensor glitch.

- [Narrator] Fortunately one of the few backup instruments on Pathfinder was a second sun sensor.

But to switch to it required sending up a software patch.

- I'm on console as a Flight Director, and I send the first bundle of software to the spacecraft and it worked fine, great.

Then I do another one, didn't work, what?

Did it again, didn't work.

It gets rejected, command error, that's strange.

What's going on now?

What's broken now?

This thing's falling apart on me.

- Okay, now.

- [Narrator] The files were finally loaded onboard by the peculiar solution of lowering the data transmission rate.

Had the fix not worked, Pathfinder would have been lost in the first few weeks of a seven month journey to Mars.

During Cruise, the makeup of the Pathfinder team changed.

Some members moved on to other missions.

Others stayed on to rehearse surface operations.

Whatever divisions there had once been between rover and lander teams were now long passed.

And the lab as a whole, we're showing more support for its maverick mission.

(crowd claps) - An interesting thing happened, everybody who felt that this was a mistake and that it wasn't gonna work and yada, yada yada.

When you get to the launch pad, there's no reason for anybody to not want it to succeed.

All of a sudden everybody is your friend.

(laughs) - Instrument's data looks good to launch, Roger, are you in entry mode?

- We are in entry mode.

- And the wind science is set to low?

- Yes - [Narrator] Friday morning, the 4th of July, 1997.

- Charge limiter, clear solar ray panels.

- [Narrator] One hour remain before the beginning of EDL - Entry, Descent and Landing.

- Mr.

Flight director and Mr.

Flight Software, - Go ahead.

- Got a question for you over here.

There's some concerns to maybe a possibility that the patch of the patch might not have worked properly.

Is it valid?

- The message that came down from the spacecraft in telemetry said, "You are on the old version of software."

- Is it valid for us to try and do a dump of the scum table and surface normal?

And if we've got to do it, we have to do a fast before we do the 3 stage separation.

That's like the only way we can verify the patch of the patch actually made it, comments?

- And of course this was the software that nobody wanted to use.

And we had not fully tested before launch.

And so everybody panicked.

- That's not even that important.

- Let's not do it.

- Get it ready.

- But I do wanna know that we are at least in the patch version of flight software.

- I mean with something with the hardware interaction and what else is there?

- This is in the last hour, right?

Like let's reset the spacecraft and make sure we're running the right version of software.

And I'm like, "No, no no.

We're not gonna do that unless we have no other choice."

- The only command I could even receive in sending a channel is to force those channels down.

And if we do that we don't have any action to take after that anyway.

We don't have any time.

So it's... - We were worried about it till the last minute.

We're looking at the telemetry data coming back and my Mission Director, he's looking at the data and he's becoming worried.

- And CNN's cameras are blaring and we're all trying to smile and I says, "Look... How could you do this at this time?"

- [Narrator] The team knew the original software was full of errors.

If it was still running, the mission was likely doomed.

Hoping to determine what version of the code was onboard, the engineers began scanning their files, looking for filler bits of information that had been added to the latest version of the software.

Those bits included, as a memorial, the name of a JPLer who had recently died.

They found his name, confirming the right software was loaded on the spacecraft.

Another crisis was averted, but other issues kept coming.

- That just took three quarters of my downlink power away.

- Yes, I understand.

- I know, - Where's Rob?

- That is not good.

- That's not good.

- This is the Mars Pathfinder Flight Director.

We are currently approximately 15 minutes away from the Cruise Stage separation.

All telemetry continues to look nominal.

(intense music) - All right, this is the Mars Pathfinder Flight Director.

We have confirmed that Cruise Stage separation has occurred.

(team claps) - Alright, we will now pass you know, operations to our Chief Engineer and Entry, Descent and Landing lead, Rob Manning, who will report the realtime medial status.

- Really there's these few minutes where everybody wants to know what's happening and you just don't.

- It's scary and at the same time, it's exciting as hell.

- The spacecraft now is about 7,500 kilometers above the surface of Mars.

It's still traveling at about 7.4 kilometers per second.

Very fast.

- We were all apprehensive.

There were so many things that could've gone wrong and everything had to go right.

- 30 seconds till entry.

Spacecraft is now slowing down very rapidly.

(intense music) We expect that the parachute will deploy in about 15 seconds.

(intense music) (parachute deploys) (applause) The parachute is now deployed.

(intense music) The lander separation should have ocurred about now.

Airbag should be inflated.

(parachute deploys) (intense music) I believe I have a firm signal.

(team cheers) - I won the lottery.

The feelings of the people, not just me, everybody in that room was incredibly relieved.

(applause) (melancholy music) Wes Huntress rushes into that room and he's crying beyond belief.

- (Rob) Thanks for trusting us, Wes - Oh, you're kidding!

You guys are great!

- Tony and I hugged each other.

Both of us, just tears, rolling down our faces.

- "I knew you could do this, Tony!"

I says, "Well I didn't know."

- The young people in that room, they were all young.

They all thanked me.

I just broke down.

Broke down, couldn't do it.

(melancholy music) - We have imaging data.

(applause) - When we landed and those first set of images came back, it was really exciting.

We kind of stole the image of at the telemetry stream.

I pulled up this little image on my monitor, this little black and white image, and before I knew it, the whole mission control was standing around looking at the, you know, the little square black and white imagery.

- [Narrator] More images began pouring in.

They were lander self portraits images of the Sojourner, and then there was Mars.

- What do you think, Mr. Geologist, got any rocks there that you'd like to investigate?

- Look at those rocks.

- They really tackled some problems that nobody had ever done before.

Many people said they couldn't do.

And when it happened, they were just exuberant and they should have been, because they had really accomplished a major step forward.

They had really opened up a new future for exploration.

- It was so different, but the impact it had on America, I mean, it was enormous.

People really were excited about the space program.

So this was a major event in world history.

(melancholy music) - [Narrator] On the second day of operations, Sojourner slowly rambled off the lander and touched the surface of Mars.

This small robot would capture the hearts and minds of people around the world.

And the mission would become a record breaking phenomenon on the brand new worldwide web.

Even the rocks in view became celebrities, when they were given names like Barnacle Bill, Yogi and Scooby Doo.

Demonstrating that science could be fun.

Scientists were elated with their findings too, especially for a mission originally conceived only as a technology demonstration.

It was always known that the lander's battery would eventually fail.

And on the 83rd sol, as a day on Mars is called, the lander went silent.

Sojourner, though, was still alive.

The little rover, as she was pre-programmed to do, would have circled the lander, calling out to the mothership, listening for a reply that would never come.

Eventually as the Martian winter descended, Sojourner would be stilled too.

By that time, Pathfinder had become a cultural icon and it had succeeded in becoming the standard bearer for the space agency's push for faster, better, cheaper missions.

But more than once the mission had skated near the edge of disaster.

Was Pathfinder the path forward for planetary exploration?

Or had it been an extraordinary once in a lifetime event, undertaken by a very special group of people?

The answer was not entirely clear.

As for those two headstrong managers.

Donna Shirley left JPL not long after Pathfinder.

Tony Spear, having won his version of the lottery, retired.

And many of the young Pathfinder Mavericks went on to assume major leadership roles at JPL.

They would be responsible for blazing new trails for future rovers.

That in the days to come would once again, roam on Mars.

(upbeat reggae music)