- [Narrator] Zero and lift off of the Delta Rocket with Opportunity.

- [Narrator] Rocket carrying the Mars Polar Lander.

- [Narrator] Mars Global Surveyor.

- [Narrator] Carrying NASA on an odyssey back to Mars.

- [Narrator] It’s a journey back to the Red Planet.

- [Narrator] A chance to explore and unlock the secrets of our neighboring planets.

- [Narrator] For eons, Mars has been the object of our affection.

Our desire to learn about and especially touch Martian soil has spurred many attempts to reach the Red Planet.

Most have failed.

- [Narrator] On November 5th, 1964 Mariner 3 was launched, but a failure in the protective shroud aborted the mission.

- [Narrator] Undaunted though, a new team is set to carry on with our lofty dreams.

- Let’s pick a target on the feature.

- [Narrator] The risk is great, the reward is greater.

Rising from the ashes of previous failures is the Pheonix Mars Mission.

(adventurous orchestral music) (triumphant orchestral music) (man speaking indistinctly over radio) (camera shuttering) (man speaking indistinctly over radio) - [Man Over Radio] Ignition.

(explosion rumbling) - [Man Over Radio] Lift off.

Watch out.

- [Man Over Radio] Roger (indistinct radio chatter).

- [Man Over Radio] We’re on our way.

- [Narrator] Mariner 4 blasted off from Cape Canaveral determined to discover evidence of life on Mars, a driving force behind most Mars missions.

In 1964, just seven years after Sputnik 1, the first manmade object to escape Earth’s atmosphere, we were on our way to Mars.

Using state of the art slide rolls and specially designed chalkboards, this mission actually reached its target.

- [Narrator] The spacecraft is flying towards Mars about to pass within 6,000 miles of its surface, and then-- - [Narrator] Mars resembles Earth more than any other planet in our solar system.

Mariner’s goal was to help answer the question on nearly everyone’s minds, does life exist elsewhere?

- [Narrator] Picture Number 11 shows craters three to 75 miles across.

The picture suggests that Mars has never had an ocean or substantial atmosphere.

The Mariner 4 pictures neither demonstrate nor preclude the possible existence of life on Mars.

- [Narrator] Even then scientists knew there wouldn’t be life without water, or its frozen version, ice.

The Phoenix Mars Mission has a single leader, the principle investigator who is the brains and brawn behind the mission.

The primary cheerleader, shepherd, and orchestrator of all those gizmos, gadgets, and lingo.

Phoenix is led by a veteran of previous Mars successes and failures, Peter Smith.

- First goal is to land safely on Mars.

That’s one we’re working really hard on now.

And the second goal is to dig down under the surface soil to try and find an ice layer.

This is an ice layer that was discovered by Odyssey in February of 2002 and has yet to be actually verified that it’s truly there.

NASA’s theme has been follow the water.

There isn’t any water in the equatorial zone, it’s dry.

So, we thought we’d take them literally and we’d find a place where there is water even in the form of ice.

While it’s ice today, it may not always have been ice.

And we have ways by looking at chemistry and mineralogy to understand the history of that ice.

(suspenseful music) - [Narrator] Two back to back NASA Mars missions went awry in the late 1990s.

The Mars Climate Orbiter failed likely due to navigational errors, and the Mars Polar Lander failed during the challenging entry, descent, and landing phase.

The next scheduled mission was canceled.

NASA regrouped, and after considerable introspection initiated the Scout Program.

At a lower cost and driven by science goals, the resourceful Phoenix Mission is Scout’s first attempt.

- We took our instruments from Mars Polar Lander and Mars Surveyor 01, and we are using the Mars Surveyor 01 spacecraft.

It seemed to us that having that kind of huge amount of heritage is really a big advantage.

It gets you far ahead of a blank piece of paper where you’re designing a spacecraft from scratch.

So we thought of it as bringing a new bird out of the ashes of the flames that killed the old one.

So, we called it the Phoenix bird.

It’s the resurrection symbol.

- [Narrator] Unlike the Mars rover mission still driving around elsewhere on the planet, Phoenix is a fixed site lander and can only sample within eight feet of where it touches down.

Fortunately in 2006, the usually successful Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO, began its Mars orbit.

With its HiRISE camera, short for High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, MRO could offer invaluable assistance to the Phoenix Mission for selecting a tiny patch of real estate with only an eight foot radius.

The principle investigator behind HiRISE is the University of Arizona’s Alfred McEwen.

- It got there in late northern summer, so the light was fading at the latitude within this landing site.

So, we had to work fast.

They did their best to pick the best landing site based on pre-HiRISE data.

The hope was that we would just image that location and confirm yes, this is a good landing site.

So, we imaged that location and found lots of rocks, boulders that they hadn’t known about.

This was in October of last year.

So I sent ...

I sent Peter Smith a little Halloween card here with the boulders and false colors for Halloween like colors.

But these boulders here, that one is a big one, maybe three or four meters diameter.

But any boulder, even some of the smaller ones like one meter, they land on top of that that’s the end of the mission.

This was definitely a scary sight for them.

So then we had sort of a race against time to find a new landing site and characterize it before it got dark at that latitude.

We only had really a few months.

This went well.

We took images of lots of different longitudes.

They have a latitude belt where they can land between something like 60 and 72 degrees latitude, which is the right latitude for having ice at the right depth.

So, we took lots of samples in that band, and they quickly zeroed in on one area that there had been fewer rocks.

It was a different geologic unit.

It’s also, ironically, the spot that Peter Smith first wanted to go to when he wrote his proposal was this particular spot.

Then they decided that the other spot was better mainly for science in terms of depth of the ice.

But then because of the rocks that trumped everything.

You’ve got to land safely, so now they’re back in the same spot, Region A they call it.

Took those images and characterized that landing site pretty well, and by the end of last year even it was pretty clear that they were in good shape.

I sent Peter a new card for happy New Year.

- [Narrator] The Mars Lander will face nighttime temperatures as low as negative 100 degrees Fahrenheit at its landing site near the northern polar region.

February is a bit more hospital in Tucson as the mission scientists gather for training, planning, and updates.

- Right now we are about six months prior to launch, and we are in the stage where all of our instruments are in their final build and test phase, and the spacecraft is fully built.

- [Woman Speaking To Room] And then finally the Science Team’s job is done after 4/16, and then the Sequence Team comes in with the Spacecraft Team and works on generating and taking those inputs from our Science Team.

- We have a system of the very top level one requirements and mission success criteria, and those are our project’s agreements with NASA headquarters where we get our funding of what we have to do and what has to be in place in order for something to launch.

- [Man In Room] Right now it’s not any good, because the camera model is wrong.

- [Leslie] If one of the instruments is not in that list, it didn’t make it, that wouldn’t be considered a mission ending type of situation.

- [Narrator] An assemblage of seven instruments will conduct the scientific experiments on Phoenix.

The robotic arm is the only way to bring samples in board from the surface to the devices which perform the experiments.

The Surface Stereoscopic Imager, the SSI, serves as the eyes of the mission.

The chemical character of the soil and ice will be explored by a gas analyzer called TEGA.

Another analyzer named MECA will test the composition of the soil, and with special needles determine its water and ice content.

The rest of the instruments include a camera on the robotic arm, another camera called MARDI used only during the descent, and a Canadian made meteorological station, MET.

The MET will peer into the atmosphere with a laser called lidar.

The amount of surface wind will affect how much of a soil sample is blown away as dust and how much dirt remains for the instruments to analyze.

Phoenix will measure surface wind by means of a telltale.

- It will give us some indications of both wind direction and wind speeds.

And it will be imaged, so it will be possible to take an image and show how it was a strong wind and determine what are the correct timing to put samples into the many experiments on board.

If one wants to get rid of the dust component one would select a time of day where the wind is blowing heavily, but if one wants a time of day or selects a time of day with low wind speed one would get the dust also.

The atmosphere is less than 1% of our atmosphere, so there are not enough molecules to move such a device.

So it had to be very sensitive but still very robust, because on the way up through the atmosphere, our atmosphere, it will be exerted to forces that are six orders of magnitude stronger than it’s supposed to measure, and that was the challenge basically.

During the launch, which is the most harsh treatment when everybody is having a good time opening champagne, I will be, I will be somewhere throwing up.

I know what it’s going through at that time.

(suspenseful music) - [Narrator] A sour stomach and sleepless nights are not uncommon at this point in the mission for all those who are assembling their own instruments.

- [Leslie] Be back at 10:30.

- [Man] What’s next?

- [Leslie] What’s next?

- [Narrator] Principle investigator is not immune.

He’s also the principle worrier.

- Gonna be very time intensive, because getting the arm to just the right position.

From a high level view we’re in great shape.

When you look at some of the details it’s scary.

- [Man In Room] And now you can click around, click around on the image itself just based on the settings-- - Yeah, we don’t have any pictures there right now.

- We had two major concerns several months ago.

One was the landing site selection.

- See if there’s any rack image of the same target?

- There aren’t any, because this is based on the MIPL data that we had from awhile ago.

- And the other was the landing radar.

If it doesn’t work we don’t know if we’re near the surface or far from the surface, and if we don’t know we may have to burn so much fuel to be prepared that we may run out of fuel before we get there.

We went from a rapid deviation from being on budget, on schedule, technically healthy, everything going smooth, instruments delivered right on time, to a month later all of a sudden schedule is blown, we’re out of money.

We have technical problems that look unsolvable.

Where did this come from?

- Not trust that unless we had some, some low independent measurements.

I try to get ... - For us we have another 154 days I think it is to find all the problems in the spacecraft and correct them before we launch, and then after that we have no chance to do it.

We’re building the oven experiment called TEGA, and they had a major setback about two weeks ago and they had to redesign it, rebuild it, requalify it, all in the space of the last two weeks.

- [Narrator] All the reworking of TEGA, the gas analyzer, happens in a spotless room at the University of Arizona.

- Today we’re just a week or two away from actually delivering the instrument to Lockheed Martin.

We had a problem with the mass spectrometer that we believe we fixed, and we are now testing to make sure that that repair is going to work.

TEGA stands for Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer, and what it’s gonna do after we get to Mars is it’s gonna analyze some soil that we dig up.

And it will heat up the soil and see if any gasses are given off.

And then we actually analyze all of the gases given off from the sample coming out of the oven.

We want to understand what has the role of water been in the past history of Mars.

So, by looking at the different minerals and seeing how they’ve reacted with water we can tell something about the aqueous environment on Mars.

And although this mission is not actually designed to look for life, we want to understand the question of habitability and whether the situation is such that ice could exist in the past.

For the TEGA instrument we can analyze eight samples and that’s all we can do.

We’re bringing along eight different ovens, and they can only be used once.

- The top goal of the Mars program is to search for life.

The first landed mission to Mars focused very specifically on that, and that was the Viking mission, which flew in 1976.

The thing was that the Viking Mission found no evidence of organic compounds on Mars.

Now in fact, that turned out to be a significant result, because there were less organic compounds found on Mars than one would expect even from an in fall from meteorites.

So, there were less organic compounds on Mars than there are on the Moon.

There are all these mechanisms at the surface that would, if there was a record of life it would wipe it out.

So, you have to dig to get to that record of life.

You have to get into the subsurface.

And the question for Phoenix is going to be can we get deep enough into the subsurface to sample that record?

- Now if we are lucky enough to find organic compounds, we’ve also brought along a blank sample, and that’s to make sure that if we’re seeing small amounts of organic materials we know they’re not contamination that we’ve brought with us.

Obviously, we try to make things as clean as we can to avoid that possibility, and that’s why we have this clean room here that we can build an analyzer with very, very little organic contamination that we have in it ourselves.

The clean room ha really cost us an awful lot, both in terms of the money to set up the clean room, but also in terms of the time in that almost anything you do in the clean room takes probably three times as long as it would take in a normal laboratory.

(suspenseful music) Right now, this is probably our most stressful time, because we’re really up against the gun of delivery and we really don’t have more than a few days left.

And if things go wrong or if some of these repairs we’re making don’t work, there’s some chance we might not even be on the spacecraft, and we certainly wouldn’t want that to happen.

If we are lucky and everything works right and we see organic compounds there, we’re just gonna be going crazy and we’ll be probably drinking some organic compounds of our own.

- [Narrator] The first instrument installed on the lander was MARDI.

It arrived March 23rd at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Facility outside Denver, Colorado.

Delivery of a qualified instrument is its own successful landing so to speak for the instrument team, and it’s a launch for the spacecraft assembly team.

- [Man In Blue Scrubs] This one does lidar, so we do the card, then lidar, and then MECA has its own logs.

- Today we would be putting four instruments on the spacecraft.

As you’re seeing, we’re putting two on because one of the instruments is having difficulty in its final testing, and then the order with which we have to build the spacecraft prevents us from putting the other one on.

So, we’re replanning a little bit right now.

The biggest challenge really is that when you get down to the last set of electronics that you can build due to the old technology is you’ve got no safety net.

- [Man In White Scrubs] That one is very discolored.

- [Man In Blue Scrubs] Yeah.

- [Man In White Scrubs] I wonder if we ought to snap a photo of that.

- If something goes wrong, if you break those, if something goes wrong there’s very limited spares available.

Just because something has worked one time doesn’t mean it’s gonna work again.

So, we have to be diligent every day always expecting that there could be a problem out there and making sure we find it when it’s there.

- It’s really an exercise in systems engineering and optimizing the design space.

If you push on this here something else is gonna pop up over there.

(suspenseful music) Having a planetary lander is an entirely different endeavor than building an orbiter.

It’s essentially two different vehicles that goes through a metamorphosis in between these two primary configurations.

The real challenge between the thing is balancing the design needs of a cruise vehicle and a landed vehicle into a single set of design solutions that perform all the functions.

So it’s really like doing two vehicles in one.

- And what we have over here, this is a, this is what’s called the back shell.

The back shell is the outer part of the vehicle that protects the lander inside of it during its cruise cruise phase to the planet.

It protects it from all the heat and the elements of space.

(suspenseful music) - The engineer’s function is to really provide the means for the scientists to be able to carry out their investigations.

One cannot exist without the other.

Peter Smith is our PI.

Peter is a great guy.

And the bottom line is we’re putting this mission together, and we’re gonna go fly this so Peter and his scientific team can get the science that they’re looking for.

It’s a pretty cool thing.

If you’re an engineer, it doesn’t get any better than building a lander that goes to Mars.

- Myself personally, the relief is gonna come when we land.

Everything up until that point is a step to getting to landing.

Launch is a big milestone, and on an orbiting mission it might be the biggest milestone, but on this mission having been through the loss of Mars Polar Lander, I felt relieved on the day that one launched.

I’m not gonna feel relieved on this one.

I know that we’re working towards the landing as much as we are, more so than we’re working towards the launch.

- [Narrator] The mission is a kind of mega team made of smaller but still grand teams.

NASA gets the mission off the ground and into space.

Lockheed Martin designed and built the spacecraft and operates it during its journey and throughout its life on Mars.

JPL handles navigation and takes over flight operations for the nerveracking seven minutes of entry, descent, and landing.

The University of Arizona is responsible for the science.

After two grueling weeks, testing is complete.

The TEGA team accompanies their instrument on its final terrestrial journey.

- It’s been a long road, but yes, definitely excited that we can finally get it get on the spacecraft and going on the next part of this mission.

There were several times where all of a sudden it just seemed like it just was not gonna happen.

So, we’ve had our share of disappointments and are ready for our share of excitements.

So it definitely will give all of us a sense of closure and ability to (mumbles) now that we can focus on the next part of this mission.

(quiet gentle piano music) We’re all pretty excited to get our lives back, but our families are probably pretty excited, and our friends, are probably excited for us to get our life back, too.

For the most part I think they think most have disappeared into a black hole.

- [Narrator] The 121 pound payload of scientific instruments will eventually sit atop a lander that ways 772 pounds.

It in turn will be encased in a Delta 2 rocket weighing over 500,000 pounds built to propel that package into the Martian atmosphere at 12,750 miles an hour.

Unlike the airbag landings of the Mars rovers, Phoenix will have a relatively soft landing, the first one since the Viking missions over 30 years ago.

- [Man Over Radio] Touchdown, we have touchdown.

- [Narrator] Slowed at first by a parachute, the craft will then land safely only with the aid of 12 thrusters and guided by that pesky landing radar.

- The problem it doesn’t seem to have (mumbles).

We’ve been working on it for a year now.

We’ve had three or four different drop tests where we dropped this radar out of a helicopter and simulated landing on Mars, and we found problem after problem after problem.

We think we’re getting near the end, but this does cause me a lot of worry.

Well just recently we put on all of the instruments in the final configuration exactly the way they’re gonna appear on Mars.

So, it is ready to ship to the launch site where it’s gonna be integrated into the launch vehicle.

We have a couple months to do the final integrations of the spacecraft to the launch vehicle.

We have to put fuel in it.

We have to arm the explosive devices that pull things apart as we go through the atmosphere when we finally get there.

And so there’s a whole series of steps that have to be made, plus a lot of reviews.

And finally, it’s closing out of paperwork.

Paperwork is a major part of a mission of this sort.

I think if you took any piece you wanted off an electronics board and pointed to a component or a mechanical piece, you could find a large packet of documentation that goes with that piece.

I’d have to say there may be 10 million pieces of paper associated with this mission.

- [Narrator] Assembled, wrapped and crated, the Phoenix is now ready to leave the nest and take wing.

Its short flight to Florida is minuscule in comparison to its 422 million mile journey to Mars.

(triumphant orchestral music) With great care amid plenty of attention the lander is under the safe keeping of many watchful escorts.

- [Man] Today is gonna be one long day.

The spacecraft left the Lockheed Martin facility at 4 a.m. Our flight manifest calls for liftoff from Buckley Field at 2 p.m. We’re gonna land at 7:30 p.m. East Coast time.

And if everything goes well we’ll have it buttoned up in the clean room at about 11:30 East Coast time tonight.

That’s a pretty long day.

(anticipatory orchestral music) - [Narrator] After an uneventful and sometimes sleepy flight, Phoenix arrives in Florida on the same runway that the space shuttle uses.

This will be its last conventional landing.

In preparation for their summer on Mars, every instrument on board and the assembled lander itself have already gone through rigorous testing, including what’s called shake and bake.

They’re encased in a vacuum chamber to simulate the harsh Martian environment, and then shaken vigorously to replicate the forces of launch and landing.

The instruments are designed to last for the entire 90 days of the mission before winter imprisons the lander in thick carbon dioxide ice.

(ominous tone) MARDI, however, has a much shorter lifespan.

- The descent camera is designed to take images as we are descending towards the surface to give us a broad overview of the landing site and also to give us higher resolution views than we can see from orbit.

The camera was designed to work and work very well for two minutes or three minutes, and that was its entire job.

- [Narrator] Not the taking of the pictures but the storing of those images has created a critical flaw.

During the multitude of tests back in May at Lockheed Martin, a major communications problem was discovered.

The news is just coming to light.

(suspenseful music) - We were originally limited to about 20 images, which we would’ve taken right after parachute descent started all the way down to power descent and then eventually to the surface.

However, a recently discovered problem on the spacecraft has limited us to a single image that we will hope to take somewhere around 300 meters above the surface.

There’s a computer card inside the spacecraft that my camera connects to, and that card has a problem when it’s reading data from the camera at a high rate.

It loses track of the number of bytes it’s pulling off and that causes the card to reset.

- [Narrator] That card also works with the unit that will make sure Phoenix has the correct attitude during landing.

A reset could mean that the craft lands on its head, not its feet.

After landing safely, the 420 million dollar Phoenix mission will be headquartered from the Science Operations Center at the University of Arizona, the first time NASA has allowed such offsite control.

Here in July, the scientists themselves undergo testing.

- Let’s start with the most important activity we had yesterday, which was the robotic arm unstow.

Matt, you?

- There were no volts (mumbles).

- [Joel] Okay, and did you get assignage of the tunnel position?

- No, I didn’t get an assignage.

- [Joel] Okay.

- We are conducting our first operational readiness test, which is our first full up, full scale test of what we’re going to do when we get to Mars.

- So there is a set of criteria in your email, Peter.

- And working as if we were really on the surface of Mars.

- [Joel] Usually do, there’s just a particular format to talk to.

So look for your email.

- Today reminds me very much of almost 10 years ago when we were preparing for Mars Polar Lander, and we were doing these same type of exercises, and they were not going well at all.

- We have a a conflict, we already have a conflict in the ... - [Peter] And they were very frustrated.

Today is a huge advance over what we were able to do 10 years ago.

- [Ray] Aren’t we upping the data rate?

- [Man With Gray sweater] Okay, so then let’s (audio trails off).

- [Man In Room] We haven’t heard from the Spacecraft Team yet.

- [Man In Room] What’s the allocation?

(Joel mumbles) - We did the go no go with Odyssey, so we should plan on this being a 128K pass.

- This is a virtual expedition of Mars.

- Yes.

(man mumbles) - I told you flash would be the Achilles heel.

- [Peter] We are running all of our observations on a computer that simulates the spacecraft to a very high degree of accuracy.

So, when we send commands out to our simulated spacecraft it reacts just the way the real spacecraft will react.

(suspenseful music) - [Narrator] The replica spacecraft in a simulated landing location is out of sight and behind close doors at the operations center.

This will be used for testing commands and communication both after landing, as well as during realistic simulations like this.

- Today we received data in the morning showing our first pictures of the site in front of the lander where we could dig.

And so we went through the process of putting all that data through the system to calculate a three dimensional terrain model so that we can plan out where to take our robotic arm to scoop up some dirt.

And then we after looking at those pictures the Science Team weighed the pros and cons of different spots of where we would dig, worked with the Robotic Arm Team as to what’s safe to do, and then from there we baselined a plan to go acquire a sample.

- I started back with Viking Lander 1 and Lander 2 in 1976.

We didn’t have these tools.

Everything was done by paper and handing things back and forth.

And the process, the interaction with people, is very much the same.

It’s the system end to end and the system, it’s people, fundamentally, but also the tools, and the spacecraft, and the whole flow.

(peaceful orchestral music) - Like most complex machines, very few people understand how all the different parts of it work, and so those very few people have to work very hard and long hours between now and landing in order to pull it off, so burnout, burnout of the people, but they’re a great bunch of folks.

If anybody can pull it off this group can.

(peaceful orchestral tone) - [Narrator] Human testing complete, all eyes focus again on the next major milestone, the launch.

Blastoff is scheduled for August 3rd, but the destiny of the launch itself is out of the hands of the engineers, scientists, and technicians, and at the whim of the weather.

Lightning during scheduled fueling causes a 24 hour delay.

The team takes the news on this momentous day in stride.

- You know, it was four years today that we were accepted on this project, our proposal finally accepted?

And here we are ready to accomplish all the goals we set out in our proposal.

We are ready for Mars.

I’m an optimist.

I am extraordinarily confident.

I know the team that put together all the pieces of this spacecraft.

I know every one of those people, and I’m truly confident that they’ve done a fabulous job and that Phoenix is ready to go to Mars.

- [Narrator] Two days prior to scheduled launch, media interest peaks.

The Launch Team and the Science Team gathered to give their reports and to answer journalists’ questions.

- The Mars program science theme in this decade has been follow the water, and Phoenix is actually gonna go land on it in the form of ice.

- And as I speak, I’m still hearing thunder outside.

So you can understand what us and the weather community has been dealing with on a day to day basis.

But that’s Florida in July.

While there are challenges getting a successful landing on Mars, my biggest challenge is getting it out of Florida.

So that’s what we’re going to be working on over the next couple of days.

- Part of the way that you control and improve the success of the landing event is to control your horizontal velocity, and that’s really probably the key thing for the touchdown event.

- These things working together will detect the samples that are in the oven and characterize them, kind of in the same way that if you’re baking chocolate chip cookies in your kitchen at home essentially anyone walking into the kitchen can immediately sniff and tell exactly what’s in the oven.

- This is the entire MECA.

Now I remember as a kid we’d play 20 questions and you’d always ask, "Is it bigger than a breadbox?"

About the size of a breadbox but sort of squatter than a breadbox, a little bit shorter.

- It’s important to note that we found a place that minimizes the risk associated with landing because we’re in a program of Mars exploration.

So using Mars Global Surveyor data, Mars Odyssey data, and very importantly, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE images, we now have a database of five million rocks.

- [Narrator] Some reporters have studied the mission more than others.

- From my perspective, the greatest result we can find is that there is a wealth of complex organics associated with this ice, and that would give us the sense that this is the place to go to search for life on Mars.

Then you’d probably want wheels, and mobility, and a long term mission.

We don’t have any of those things, and we’re just taking the first step.

- [Reporter] And astronauts?

- No, we don’t have any astronauts.

(laughing) - [Narrator] Phoenix’s first chance to escape this planet is now less than nine hours away.

- We’re in final preparations for what we call the mobile service tower rollback, and this is the structure that surrounds and protects the rocket leading up to launch.

It actually pulls back so that the rocket is left on the pad so it can launch into space.

If everything goes well, it’s about a 30 minute process.

It’ll pull back about 10 yards and stop to make sure everything is cleared, and then it’ll pull back all the way.

- [Announcer] On 20.

- [Michael] It’s kind of like Christmas morning, you know?

You think in your mind what it’s going to look like when you put the rocket with the boosters, put the spacecraft altogether, and it’s another thing to see it pulled back and you have this brand new, sparkling rocket with its payload that’s brand new ready to go into space and do great things.

(triumphant orchestral music) - This is the culmination of four years of hard work.

It feels great.

I have utmost confidence in our team and the ULA Team that built the launch vehicle, and we are ready to go.

We are going to Mars.

- [Man] We’ll launch at about 5:26.

I think about 3 a.m. the last person will be out here, and the closest person at that point will be about 1.2 miles away.

- [Peter] I’m in the control room along with the rest of my team, and we’re doing the countdown.

And if anything happens to go wrong we’ll be consulting on what to do, but if everything goes right I don’t have much to do at all.

I’m gonna run outside the building and watch it actually face to face rather than on TV.

(triumphant orchestral music) (radio chatter) (man speaking indistinctly) - I’m fantastic.

- [Man Over Radio] We’re ready to proceed with the countdown.

(chatter) - [man] You go out there and you see this whole tower and you don’t even see the rocket.

(people chattering) (radio chatter) (dramatic exciting orchestral music) - Ready.

(radio chatter) Ready, four.

- [Man] Engine start, two, one.

(cheering) (triumphant orchestral music) - [Woman] Oh!

- Oh, waited a long time for this.

(radio chatter) (cheering) - How does it feel now?

- No words.

I got no words.

That’s unbelievable.

- [Man] I think what’s next is a little (mumbles).

- [Woman] There you go.

- We gotta learn how to run this thing now, now that it’s off the ground.

(radio chatter) Spending months and months and months just getting everything working, waving goodbye, but this is gonna be a tough thing to run.

- Oh, it was fantastic.

Four years of hard work and we finally see it to go off and head off to Mars.

It’s just, it’s just incredible.

- [Man] Congratulations.

- It was great.

It was a beautiful light show.

It was everything.

The best launch I’ve ever seen.

- That’s so fun.

- It’s too bad Peter is not here, but I know he’s celebrating.

- He’s (mumbles).

- Another launch, not quite as important.

(cheering) We got to wait about another hour before we know that everything is good, because that’s about when we start talking to the spacecraft, but it feels good.

It feels great.

- TEGA!

- [Several People] Yeah!

(cheering) - TEGA!

- [Man] TEGA!

Hey, hey, hey!

- [Man] Whoa, you don’t see airplanes (mumbles) to that.

- [Man] No, no, no.

(inspirational orchestral tone) - [Narrator] An anxious world awaits news from the Phoenix delivered by a team now themselves much less anxious than they were just hours before.

- Well, there’s a lot of smiles around this center and around the country today.

Pretty exciting morning.

Phoenix has left Canaveral Air Force Station and next stop is Mars.

- It was pretty cool.

It doesn’t get any better than this when you’re in this business to put a spacecraft up and then wait for it to call home and have it respond the wait it did.

So, we’re all thrilled.

- It’s 295 days from our entry descent and landing where we get to do everything that was done today but we do it in reverse.

We go from the velocity we’re in now down to five miles an hour in seven minutes.

It’ll be a lot of fun.

Come see us in JPL on May 25th.

- From the position I was in it was headed directly towards Mars, which was near the Pleiades.

The exhaust gases from the solid rockets were still there in the cloud, and the cloud was slowly being pulled by the winds.

This cloud turned into what looked like wings and a beak and a long tail, and looked amazingly just like a Phoenix bird.

The message to me was the Phoenix bird has risen.

- [Narrator] Like all the previous journeys into the heavens, the Phoenix bird has risen not just because of the mega team, the dedication and efforts of the folks whose hands and hearts touched the spacecraft have been essential, surely, but also integral are the hopes and dreams of tens of millions more.

The sentiments of President Lyndon Johnson praising the successful Mariner mission ring just as true for the Phoenix.

- [President Johnson] In the history books of tomorrow, unlike the headlines of today, the project’s name may be lost, but the names of the men of vision, men of imagination and faith who made this enterprise such a historic success is going to be honored in the world for many generations to come.

- It’s a human endeavor as much as anything.

It’s not just scientists who care about whether it’s a carbonate or a sulfate, or engineers who make sure that that resistor is adjusted just right.

It’s really about the dreams of our population.

(inspirational orchestral music) Everybody is just waiting for that day when the announcement comes that something absolutely incredible has been found on Mars and changes our whole way of thinking.

- [Narrator] Phoenix will travel 422 million miles over nine months to get to Mars.

Shortly after launch a TCM is on tap, a trajectory correction maneuver.

(phone ringing) - [Mark] Joe.

- [Joe] Returned yet?

- In 30 seconds.

If we didn’t do this burn today we’d actually miss Mars by about 100,000 kilometers.

(suspenseful music) - It’s not aimed at Mars to begin with, because when we launch the spacecraft off of the Earth there’s a piece of that that’s called a third stage, and that’s basically on the same trajectory as the spacecraft is directly after launch.

It’s not cleaned as well as the spacecraft for Earth organisms and overall contamination.

So we intentionally bias the launch vehicle’s target so that that third stage won’t hit Mars.

- [Man On Speaker Phone] We can verify that we are at the burn attitude for TCM2.

- [Man In Room] Awesome.

- [Man Over Speaker Phone] We can confirm that was a very good burn from the doppler.

It is fractions of a sigma off.

- The burn was very nearly as designed.

- [Man Over Speaker Phone] All stations Phoenix GNC contraindicates that we’ve begun a return slew.

Another 15 degrees slew.

Take about 40 seconds.

- I think we’re a ...

They were going pretty much where we aimed, which is really good news.

Feels great, very good.

We’ve got a long way to go.

We still have, what, seven months, but every one of these milestones that we can put behind us always feels good.

- [Woman On Speaker Phone] (mumbles) confirm the TCM block.

(suspenseful music) - [Narrator] Phoenix has one chance to survive EDL, entry, descent, and landing.

Seven minutes of terror while the spacecraft enters the Martian atmosphere, slows down while descending, and then lands safely on the surface.

More than half of all landed missions to Mars have failed.

If Phoenix survives the landing the team will use six on board instruments to conduct their experiments for the scheduled 90 day mission.

The TEGA, or Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer, will sniff out organics and compounds in the Martian soil and ice.

(suspenseful music) The Microscopy, the Electrochemistry, and Conductivity Analyzer, or MECA, has a probe that will measure humidity, two microscopes, and a wet chemistry lab that will taste the soil for chemical properties like acidity, saltiness, and composition.

The robotic arm will touch Martian soil and deliver samples to the instruments.

There’s a weather station aboard and two cameras, one the stereoscopic imager, atop a mast, another attached to the arm.

What Phoenix is trying to do is first to land successfully and then to accomplish its science goals.

There aim is to assess both the climate and geology of Mars, also to determine if life ever existed on Mars and whether it could be habitable in the future.

To be habitable, water is critical.

NASA’s interplanetary mantra is follow the water.

In order to achieve all this, Phoenix’s payload is full of intricate and precise instruments, none more so than TEGA.

- The TEGA instrument itself is actually doing quite well.

We have two versions.

There’s the flight model, which is on its way to Mars right now.

The other version, the engineering model, we keep here in the laboratory, and that’s the one that we use for testing all of our command sequences on and make sure that when we command the instrument it does what we want it to do.

Sometimes it has a nasty habit of doing what we tell it to do rather than what we want it to do, and of course we run these tests so we can fix up and make sure we tell it what we want it to do.

- And 15.

This is another opportunity to make sure that what we’re running is consistent with what we’ve modeled and tested in the past to make sure that we’re not going to exceed those current limits on the spacecraft and inadvertently mess somebody else’s experiment up or the mission in general.

- We hit start when we’re at the beginning of this, and then ... - [Narrator] With only 27 days to go, the team is practicing for the last time their one chance at landing safely.

- [Woman Over Radio] JPL latitude systems voice check.

- [Man Over Radio] I read you five by five.

- Today what we’re doing is we’re actually practicing for landing and going through the operations for the first couple days on the surface of Mars.

What we try to do is we make this even worse than it is most likely to be in real life.

Just want to make sure that it’s up and running before crew stage separation.

- The spacecraft is designed to survive a whole range of environmental excursions like less dense atmospheres or denser atmospheres, that kind of thing.

As far as component failures or parts on the spacecraft that might fail, the spacecraft is what’s called single fault tolerant, meaning that any single component if it fails can cause a failure of the mission.

- [Man On Radio] (mumbles) affirmative.

- The engineering challenge that we have signed up to here is by far the hardest and most challenging endeavor that we do in this industry right now.

- [Man Over Radio] 15 seconds from a nominal touchdown time.

- [Woman Over Radio] Okay copy, thank you.

- It’s not often that you get a second chance in life, and it’s even less often when you get a second chance in the aerospace business to work on a spacecraft that’s canceled.

I consider that a great, great thing in my life that I’ve been able to come back and do that.

- We’ve done everything we possibly can to reduce the risk, to really try to put us in the best position, but we know that this is a very risky thing to do and we know that success is not guaranteed.

- It’s not like we can go into orbit and revolve around the planet looking for a nice, soft spot to land in.

We’re on a trajectory that’s gonna take us directly into the atmosphere and we’re done.

There is no no go.

There is no delay.

- Okay, that’s what we’re talking about.

- [Woman In Room] There we go.

Very nice.

- In seven minutes we’re gonna know whether it’s successful or not.

- [Narrator] The seven minutes of terror during EDL follows years of hard work and decades of dreams.

- We had a vision back in February of 2002, let’s follow up on this great new discovery by the Odyssey Orbiter that there’s ice in the polar regions.

But following up the quickest we can do it is six and a half years.

That’s a long wait.

You can see my hair has gone gray and I’m turning into an old man while I’m waiting for this mission to happen.

So, now it’s coming up.

I’m ready.

It’s been hard to wait so long.

(chattering) There’s a lot of passion that goes into this mission.

We had a kind of a debriefing last night at the end of our training period, our dress rehearsal.

And I was telling people, "This is a once in your life adventure we’re on.

"And accept that experience with your full heart, "because it’s not gonna happen again.

"We only land on Mars once, "and that is a thrilling adventure to get involved in.

"And just feel every moment of it.

"Don’t sit in the back and pretend it’s not happening "or that it’s just another test.

"This is real."

- Welcome to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and we’re about 77 hours right now from that sequence known as EDL.

- We’re having a press conference tomorrow to talk about the health of the spacecraft.

- As we sit here today it’s really very humbling what we’ve gone through the past five years.

- Hopefully the whole world is watching with us, because this is really a mission about the the world community going to Mars.

That’s the way I look at it.

- Are we going to see, are we gonna see the northern plains in those first pictures, or are we gonna be just seeing solar panels?

- Today we are one day away from the entry into the Martian atmosphere and the descent and landing at the north polar region of Mars.

- If we land successfully and if we’re able to do the science that we’ve designed into this mission, I have every expectation that we’ll be able to rewrite the textbooks.

- Go where there’s no path and leave a trail for others to follow.

That’s what Phoenix is doing tomorrow.

- It doesn’t get anymore exciting than this.

- Welcome to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and thank you for joining us for today’s final pre-landing briefing for the Phoenix mission to Mars.

I’m Veronica McGregor.

- The sky is clear.

We’ve been watching the weather.

Everything is set for us.

We have a sunny day.

The rest of the day is just watching and waiting.

- Atmospheric entry on my mark.

(suspenseful music) Five, four, three, two, one, mark.

- For those in another room, the question was what’s gonna happen to the lander I guess after the mission is over and whether wind and other things might move it around.

- [Man] So, it takes us eight hours to get up to 12,700 miles an hour, and then we have seven minutes to take that velocity down to zero.

- You’ll see him scream, and you’ll probably see me scream, and then I’ll run off and get some champagne.

- There’s no second chance.

There’s no ... You know, we’re not going into orbit or anything.

We’re going straight in.

That’s our fate.

(suspenseful music) (cheering and applause) (cheering and applause) (cheering) (cheering) (triumphant orchestral music) - [Narrator] So far, the only confirmation of success is a collection of ones and zeros, raw data.

It will take another 90 angst filled minutes to receive pictures of Phoenix’s new home.

(chattering) - The pictures are gonna come down roughly two hours, because we have to wait for Mars Odyssey to come around for one more orbit.

(inspirational orchestral music) (cheering) (cheering) - Did you see it?

- [Man] Unbelievable!

- Whoa!

Fabulous!

- [Male Reporter] So how did it go?

- We rehearsed over and over again.

We rehearsed all of the problems and none of them occurred.

It went perfectly just the way we designed it.

- [Woman] Tell us your goal for the Phoenix now.

What are your goals?

- Get some pictures back.

We want to see Mars.

(applause) - Congratulations.

- Congratulations!

- [Narrator] While celebration engulfs JPL, in Tucson the HiRISE Team will spend the night scanning images covering hundreds of square miles of Mars looking for the eight foot diameter lander while in flight.

- Maybe it landed here actually.

So it turns out that Heimdal Crater is right in the middle of our image, and given the projection of the line of sight it looks like Phoenix is about to land right into this big crater.

It’s actually an illusion.

It’s landing in front of the crater.

- [Narrator] Phoenix survives the night and has awakened on schedule and sent home a few new pictures and healthy vital signs.

Another historical feet is then marked when the keys to the mission are handed over from JPL Headquarters to the engineers and scientists 500 miles away.

- Hello again from the Phoenix Mars Mission Science Operations Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.

I’m Sara Hammond.

- U of A is the first public university to lead and operate a mission to Mars.

- [Narrator] The whirlwind first weeks of the mission are a shakedown period.

All instruments must be checked out and methodically characterized.

- [Man] So, we designated some areas where it’s okay for us to work.

We designated some areas where we’re going to keep it natural.

- We had a bit of drama here yesterday.

There was an anomaly on the MRO spacecraft.

- [Man] There it is in color.

It stands our remarkably well against dark red Mars.

- [Man] And you’ll see in the initial image that the bio-barrier is draped over our elbow.

- We’re not going to rush anything.

We’re going to be very deliberate in our steps.

- The Canadian Team is walking on moonbeams today, because all three of our instruments that we’ve provided are up and running.

- We sent commands to the spacecraft to unstow the robotic arm, and today I’m ecstatic to let you know that it was successful.

- [Man] Well, we still very much like our landing site.

- One of the filaments is appears to be shorted out.

- This was a very proud moment for we Canadians as Canada is so nicely displayed.

- These are the ten sols that have shaken my world.

One door is partially opened, but that’s not gonna impede us at all.

- The other problem is that on this (mumbles) we don’t have any contact switches.

- And after seven shakes some of the material has gone inside and has filled the oven, so this is a very exciting time for us.

- Before we sign off from Tucson, I want to wish all the gentlemen a happy Father’s Day this weekend.

We’ll talk (audio fades out).

- [Narrator] The lander signs itself off nightly to charge its batteries under the never setting summer sun, and in the morning it’s roused to receive that day’s instructions.

(chattering) These commands are sent from Tucson across 400 million miles of space to MRO and Mars Odyssey circling above the planet.

The instructions are held until Phoenix awakens and sends up to the orbiters the results from the previous day’s experiments, which have been stored in flash memory.

Traveling at the speed of light, the data then takes 15 minutes to arrive back at the computers of the anxious scientists.

It’s a sequence wrought with possible hiccups.

- For instance, yesterday was a really particularly tough day for a lot of loss.

We didn’t get about a third of our images, which was very disappointing.

But the team scrambled and worked very hard, and instead of going to Phoenix again they went to the memory on the satellite feed and had Odyssey retransmit what had happened.

Not only did we get the missing pictures we got, it helped fill in a lot of the gaps of the other ones that we had.

So, we’re very excited about that.

I got a whole day’s data back that was almost lost.

It was like catastrophic.

- The soil delivery for the first sample soil surprised us I think quite a bit.

It turned out to be quite a bit stickier and properties that we really hadn’t fully appreciated.

- [Narrator] That pesky soil is just beginning to give the TEGA Team headaches.

The instrument was designed for and tested with an array of soils the scientists expected to encounter.

The first step is to open the protective door covering one of the eight single use ovens.

Then, soil is dumped onto an initial sifting screen to diffuse individual grains.

Solitary particles are then expected to fall into a hopper and through the opening of the tiny ovens, which are about the size of a ballpoint pen ink cartridge.

When the anxiously awaited image from the robotic arm camera arrives moments later it shows the discouraging news, a second door not completely open.

- [Man] Can we sweep it clean?

Do we have a broom or wiper?

- Heart attacks we’ve had more than our share of.

- Yeah, yeah, you guys-- - I really didn’t ...

I really was convinced it was gonna open though.

- You’ve had the lion’s share of the challenges.

- And if they all end up like this first one I think we’re fine.

That’s a plenty big opening we already know.

- [Narrator] The soil that TEGA hopes to eventually study inside its ovens plays a role in the study of the Martian climate.

Prevailing wind direction can be determined by specific patterns of the soil swept around rocks.

But as it turns out, not on this Mars mission.

- None of these wind streaks or soil behind rocks as we have seen on I think every other landing site on Mars.

The ice underneath is probably modifying the surface in some way so that if a wind streak forms it is destroyed in a very short time scale relative to the time scale it takes to form such a wind streak.

(suspenseful music) - [Narrator] While much of the Phoenix team continues trying to discover water, the wet chemistry experiment on MECA has brought it’s own water to mix with the soil.

In the quest to discover signs of life, MECA tastes the soil to quantify its chemical properties.

It is these that determine what if anything can live in it.

- Well there we are.

This really looks like ... - The character of the soil and the fact that it sticks together so quickly and so strongly that it forms bridges.

You can put it in a container that has no bottom and it won’t fall out.

That’s been new and we’ve had to learn how to deal with that.

- [Man] Physical puzzles that-- - Our preliminary data shows we have an alkaline soil where we are on Mars.

It’s somewhere between a pH of 8 or 9.

We’ve also found a variety of salt components, things like magnesium, sodium, potassium, chloride, a little bit, not very much calcium.

So you’d probably have a great time growing asparagus, but I don’t think ... Strawberries wouldn’t like it there.

I have a bunch of graphs here showing this is magnesium.

And these came out beautifully.

If we found material that was the strength of Clorox bleach and sulfuric acid, it would’ve been pretty hard to imagine life.

But what we found are limits that are reasonable.

Life as we know it would not have a problem there if that material was here on Earth.

- [Narrator] One problem for the Earth based scientists and engineers is adjusting to living on Mars time.

Each Martian day, or sol, is 40 minutes longer than Earth’s, meaning the start of every work shift begins later each succeeding day or night.

- Technical mission manager is like the captain of the ship.

When everything is going well the captain has the helmsman steering, the navigator navigating, the engineering taking care of everything below decks, and the captain stands around with his arms folded looking contemplative and authoritative.

I don’t get a lot of time to look authoritative and contemplate.

(light piano music) - [Man] A lot of material, too.

(chattering) - [Man] Then just two holes.

- Just two holes.

- Just two holes.

Cool.

- On the back of the arm is the little Dremel tool, the rasp we call it.

And we put it down against the soil and spin the rasp, which digs up material and actually puts it in the back of the scoop.

And we did a rasp and then we move it over and we did a second one, and it produced what looks like nice fine grain material that has a good probability of getting through the screen on the TEGA, which is sort of the holy grail that we’re working toward.

- You can see we got a nice a little bit of material in the scoop, so that tells us that the maneuver performed beautifully.

It’s a lot of material, too.

- Okay, let’s get started with the midpoint meeting.

Jim, you want to take us through the spacecraft report and what we got on the pass?

- [Jim] Okay, TDL?

- All the instruments look healthy except for TEGA, who is still safed.

- [Robert] Tricia, do you know how the pointing was specified for the SSI images of the rasp holes?

- [Tricia] I know ...

I know they were a little lower, but I’m not entirely sure.

I know Cherie was looking at that I think.

- A little lower is an understatement.

You guys got lucky to have it in the image at all.

The pointing was wrong.

- No, the pointing was not wrong.

The pointing was, the pointing was to try to get as much as the scrape area, the area we wanted to scrape, so that we’d have the DEM of that area, as well as incorporate the rasp holes.

- It’s a balancing act, and that’s where my job ultimately comes down to is making sure that we do the most we can without hurting ourselves, and believing in ourselves so we can do more tomorrow.

(suspenseful music) - [Narrator] The team works feverishly attempting to deliver an icy soil sample to TEGA.

The best chance to find organics on Mars lies inside the ice.

During summer, the only ice to be found is under the soil, and at -90 degrees Celsius, it is as hard as a sidewalk.

When exposed to the sun it sublimates, or directly vaporizes soon after it’s dug up.

Phoenix’s study of Martian water includes looking for ice not only in the soil and below the surface, but sometimes on the surface and in the atmosphere.

- We’ve been able to take humidity measurements for the first time, and we were measuring humidity near the ground and then up in the atmosphere with our robotic arm, an instrument that’s placed on the robotic arm.

So, we can measure from the ground up to about two meters above the ground, and we can see that it changes the further up that you go.

And that’s really interesting, because that’s probably telling us something about how that water is exchanging with the surface.

We’ve also been able to see some frost formation day by day and even perhaps following the shadows of rocks.

- [Narrator] These shadows lengthen near the end of the 90 day mission as the Sun drops lower in the horizon.

The Robotic Arm and TEGA Team scramble to refine soil delivery techniques.

The Climate Team continues to measure temperatures, clouds, wind, and moisture.

The imaging teams shoot and analyze thousands of pictures near and far.

After a week of practice, all eyes focus on TEGA when the lander phones home.

- [William] We got dirt in the oven.

- [Man] Yeah!

- [William] Oven is closed.

(man speaks indistinctly) - Six.

- So we’re 80.

- [Man] Current or voltage?

- [Man] Come on.

- Oh, here we go, here we go, here we go.

It’s just starting to come in.

- [Woman] Stop it.

- We went and did some scraping and then use the scoop mode, kind of a grab and go.

We got that material and then poised it above TEGA and sprinkled it in.

And they have an oven full signature.

So, they’re in the process now of analyzing the data and looking for what phase changes have taken place.

- Yeah, it looks like we did close on the first shake.

- So we’re on our way.

We’re beyond the whole issue of the TEGA delivery and now looking at the rest of the mission.

- [Man] We did get the oven closed.

- You did?

- Yep.

- Or the oven full.

- Full?

- Full.

- But the important thing is after the third try in the last week you get a sample into this TEGA oven.

We have succeeded today.

- Green.

- There we go.

- Something there.

- We got a water signal.

- [Man] Water.

- [Woman] (mumbles), you discovered water again.

- Yep.

Water on Mars.

- [Woman] Okay, can we be happy now?

- [Man] We can be happy now.

- This is a stellar day for us.

We have waited so long, actually a full month, to get a sample into the TEGA that would show that we have H2O in the ice, and today is the day that we can prove that.

And now we start several days of activity to really flesh out all the impurities that are associated with this ice, including minerals that have been created in a water rich environment, a liquid water rich environment.

And perhaps an organic signature, who knows.

That’s kind of the holy grail for us.

Let’s offer a toast to the TEGA Team who makes sampling Mars look easy.

(cheering) - [Narrator] Not all discoveries are so immediately confirmed or celebrated.

Last month’s MECA experiment identified an especially unexpected substance, one that on Earth can be toxic.

Its detection took the team by surprise.

- Get excited guys.

- We’re speechless.

- In our first wet chem experiment we actually detected, one of the very strong signals was a signal which we at first couldn’t identify.

It narrowed it down to pretty much being a perchlorate signal.

At this point we’re reasonably sure it is.

It changes the chemistry of Mars in some ways.

There are organisms on Earth, microbes, that utilize perchlorate as an energy.

It’s a high energy food.

There are plants that take up perchlorate and store it in fact.

It doesn’t have a negative impact in terms of that.

- [Narrator] Just before the scheduled end of the mission, because of the momentous discoveries NASA offers a 30 day extension.

A valuable TEGA oven then tries to confirm the same material though from a different trench.

- Perchlorate is essentially a mixture of chlorine with a large number of oxygen molecules, or oxygen atoms.

And so when you heat it up it decomposes and gives off oxygen and chlorine as decomposition products.

No oxygen or chlorine.

Unfortunately, we didn’t see the chlorine come out this time.

Well, I’ll go tell (mumbles) the news.

We wanted to get a confirmation if we could, but it’s the way science works sometimes, and sometimes you get questions answered, sometimes you just have to ask more questions.

- [Narrator] Phoenix is trying to answer questions raised by previous Mars missions, all of which landed in the equatorial region.

They discovered the mineral that on Earth is used to make epsom salt.

Phoenix by contrast landed in the polar region atop debris ejected from an impact crater.

- The difference in the aqueous chemistry for the soils that we have at the Phoenix site as opposed to the other five places where there were clearly magnesium sulfates, we don’t seem to have that here.

So that gets again to the unique geologic setting being on top of a partially eroded ejected deposit and places of debris flow or a mud flow, and then being in a zone where the ice table moves up and down dramatically as the orbit of Mars changes.

And that’s fluxing a lot of water in and out and probably changing the salt chemistry of the soil.

- [Narrator] Even with the mission extended and the delivery technique refined, Phoenix’s days are numbered, but it was designed as a terminal mission.

From the outset it was known the Sun would vanish and carbon dioxide ice several feet thick would encase the lander during the winter.

Every day the team anxiously waits for the data confirming that TEGA has filled another oven.

- So I’ll know the moment it starts coming.

It’s less than 10 minutes between the time that they actually acquire the sample form the soil and deliver it to TEGA.

We’ve got to keep that time as low as we can, too.

- They were able to do a practice delivery to Cell Zero by shading the inside of the scoop the entire time.

And then they collected the ice find and it delivered successfully out of the scoop onto our screen using the shadow from the SSI instrument that passes across TEGA for a short period early in the morning.

- Any minute, any minute.

Oh, data.

- [William] Okay.

- Data, data.

- [William] It’s coming.

Come on baby.

- [Man] Channelize.

We didn’t ...

Safe is false.

We’re not safe yet.

- We’re not yet, hang on.

Wait for it.

- The goal for the next 10 days is to fill as much of the remaining ovens as possible, and then do the science and ramping on them end of September, October.

- [Michael] This is going to torture us and make us wait.

Oh, there’s stuff.

Hang on, it’s coming.

Alright, let’s see here.

- [Man] You got something?

- [Man] We have a channelize that’s been coming.

- And we did not safe and we did not fill.

- That’s can’t be.

- Okay.

- Yeah, we’re not seeing it.

- It isn’t there.

- [William] We’re not sure we turned on.

Looks almost like we ... - [Michael] So this is not a failure.

- [Man] That’s right.

- [Narrator] The ever sinking sun compounds attempts to successfully fill TEGA ovens.

It’s one sign of the rapidly approaching end of the mission.

As the days get shorter there’s less power and time to fill ovens, to bake samples, and to find signs of life.

- [Michael] Yep, it’s coming.

Ah, we safed.

TEGA safed.

- [William] Alright, but I better go tell Carl.

We got to go Plan B to that.

- [Man] Yeah, yeah.

- [William] Got a little bit, not very much.

- It’s similar to the first, some of the first ones we had.

- Alright, well I’ll give Heather a call.

Maybe she knows already.

Hi Heather, it’s Bill.

Well, we didn’t get an oven full.

There was a fair amount of stuff on the screen, so it looks like the problems that are in ... - [Man] Alright, should have gap report.

- [Man] What was Plan B?

- [Man] Plan B, no one is really sure.

- [Narrator] In late September a tantalizing glimpse of the looming arctic winter is seen for the first time ever, snow falling on Mars.

In mid October, TEGA’s luck changes and it successfully fills and bakes another oven.

- So far we’ve found that we definitely have calcium carbonate.

There’s a phase in there that releases carbon dioxide at very high temperatures greater than about 700 Celsius, and really calcium carbonate is the only phase that can do that.

- [Narrator] On Earth, calcium carbonates like chalk and marble are formed by the deposition of fossilized seashells and coral, past organic life.

- We have other data that we’re collecting at low temperatures, and we see a release of carbon dioxide at low temperature.

That’s really kind of interesting, because it could be one of two things.

It could either be other forms of carbonates that will release carbon dioxide at very low temperatures, or it might actually be organic molecules that are actually converted to carbon dioxide because the Mars soil is actually a strong oxidizing agent.

- [Narrator] As the search continues for organics amid the toxic perchlorate, daylight and therefore power levels fall to new lows and the mission itself changes.

Though granted a second extension by NASA, the majority of team members return home to trim expenses and to tend to other commitments.

Housed at the University of Arizona, the TEGA Team already is home.

- [William] We’re planning something we haven’t done yet on the surface, and that’s to enrich the rare gases in what we call a gas enrichment.

Did we get data?

- Not yet.

- It’s not done yet?

And so today we’re actually running a test in the laboratory to make sure we’ve got the parameters for controlling the temperatures down just right so when we uplink it to Mars things have a high probability of working well.

We’re gonna be doing this on Monday when it’s not clear there’s even gonna be enough power left for us, so we know we’re not gonna get a second chance on Mars.

We don’t know for sure we’re even gonna get the first chance, but we want to make sure we test things out in the lab to give us a better chance of making it work.

- [Man Over Mic] Okay Doug, if you would bring up the historical and strategic plan for me, please.

Welcome to Sol 147 planning for Sol 148.

Well yesterday we had a very busy day in light of our current power state.

We did a whole lot yesterday.

- [Narrator] On November 2nd, all communication from the lander abruptly ceases.

Though expected, the death of Phoenix due to insufficient solar power is hastened by the cold, by cloud skies, and by dust storms, the very soil Phoenix has studied for months.

- We’ve declared the end of mission.

It’s a bittersweet experience for me.

We were calling it the hospice mode as were getting towards the end, and that’s the way it felt.

You’re losing a loved one.

When we wrote our proposal we asked for a 90 day mission plus a 60 day extended mission, 150 days.

We lost our spacecraft on day 151.

So we got 100% of what we asked for.

Scientists are a little greedy.

We wanted 110%.

- [Narrator] The landed phase of the mission is over, but the real science discovery is just beginning.

- We’ve collected all the data we’re gonna get, and now it’s time to do a complete analysis.

We haven’t quite plumbed the depths of what we’ve learned, but by gosh, we’re after the truth of the northern plains of Mars, and whether it’s what we hoped to find or didn’t hope to find, we’ll find what’s there.

- [Narrator] It’s not only finding what’s there.

It’s also sharing the discoveries with the world.

In mid December, the team of scientists gathers in San Francisco to officially present its preliminary findings.

Gathered at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union are more than 10,000 prestigious international planetary and Earth scientists, and the press.

Before they present their findings, they must first figure out what they have found.

- Perchlorate.

What in the world is perchlorate doing to everything?

- Nobody knows what a magnesium sulfate is in the press world.

- Well, they can’t eat organic compounds on Mars, because there aren’t organic compounds there.

- How do we put this together for tomorrow’s presentations?

- It’s certainly provocative.

- [Man] No.

- What?

- [Man] No, we don’t know if they lack sulfur or not.

- So I put 80% confidence here so that we don’t have to feel like this is being written in the history books.

- Maybe the ice cap is less important than we thought.

- I don’t want to get to the end of my presentation and have deleted every single one of my conclusions so that I can’t say anything at the press conference.

I would like to have some conclusions.

We’re gonna try another slide.

Next slide.

(people laughing) - We found that the soil was laced with perchlorate like some of the most arid soils on Earth.

- I mean it’s not 100% certainty.

I said 80% confidence.

- I think Bill’s point was probably not.

Mike’s point was we need snow.

Aaron had some point and I forget what it is.

(people laughing) And Carol is saying yes.

So what are we actually saying?

- Hope you brought your sleeping bag, Ray.

We’re gonna be here all night.

- I would say as unequivocally as one ever does in this business I’ve determine that we’ve got calcium carbonate.

(siren whirring) - And what we found is that 5% of the soil material is calcium carbonate.

- [Man] Well the other big discovery was snow of course coming down to the surface.

- We see frost on the ground.

We see snow falling that sometimes doesn’t get to the ground and sometimes does.

- There’s a lot of lab work to be done here still.

- We’re really needing to do more lab work.

We’re really presenting preliminary results.

- We found largely a wind blown soil.

A land form is paraglacial and differentially eroded, but the bulk of the soil that we’re looking at has come in from the sky.

- [Peter] Perchlorate identified at the 1% level.

- [Man] Well I don’t wanna quibble, but I think it’s more like .7%.

(people laughing) - And we now know that there are tiny amounts of salt, and a large amount of something called perchlorate.

Phoenix is really a stepping stone in the pathway of finding evidence for habitable zones and perhaps later life on Mars.

What we’re trying to do over the next few months in our future work will be to try and get that last piece in this puzzle clicked into place.

- [Narrator] Now one year after Phoenix landed, pieces of the scientific puzzle that is Mars exploration are rapidly starting to fit together.

Time to reflect on the success of the Phoenix mission.

- Since we’ve completed our mission in November, there’s been two very interesting discoveries about Mars.

One is that the ice apparently still exists near the surface down to much lower latitudes.

The second thing is finding methane coming out of the ground on Mars and trying to understand the implications of that.

Our mission is now in the throws of winter.

We certainly never tested our equipment at those temperatures, so it’s very likely it’ll fail, but on the other hand there’s some chance it won’t.

And because of that we’ll be listening in October to see if we can hear any attempts from the spacecraft to communicate with the orbiters that are currently orbiting Mars.

If we are lucky enough to recover the spacecraft we still have one oven left that has not been used.

We can potentially use one of the chemistry cells.

We can use some of our microscopic cells.

And our cameras work and the weather station works.

And finally, there’s no reason why the arm wouldn’t work either.

So, we can still dig.

So we’re probably got 75% of our capability left if it all comes back in a functional form.

That’s really that’s my greatest hope that we do get to see it again.

Rise yet again, it’s a good name, isn’t it, Phoenix?

(suspenseful music) - [Woman] Alright, alright, (mumbles).

- [Man] In that case, I’m gonna sit on the other side of the table so I can see more of the faces I’m harping.

(people laughing) - The biggest surprise?

Well, I can’t talk about that.

(laughs) - [Man] We’ll hear about it at some point.

And then (mumbles).

- It’s a big surprise.

(triumphant orchestral music) Do you understand what they want to do?

Does it scare the hell out of you?

- [Man] Not that badly.

- Evil scientists have worked for years on this problem.

(uplifting orchestral music)