NASA's twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have
yielded volumes of new data about the red planet in the last year - the least of
which involves the planet's history of water. But the rovers have also amazed
their human handlers with their longevity, lasting nearly four times their
initial 90-day mission despite some early glitches that popped up after
landing.
A new one-hour documentary NOVA: Welcome to Mars (Public
Broadcasting System, Jan. 4 at 8:00 p.m. EST) chronicles the rover mission
from the early days after Spirit's landing through the arrival of
Opportunity and some following months.
The program is NOVA's sequel to its first rover feature Mars: Dead or
Alive, which aired a day after Spirit's Jan. 3, 2004 landing at Gusev
Crater (Opportunity landed at Meridiani Planum on Jan. 25). Since then, mission
scientists and engineers have helped the rovers overcome a potentially crippling
software glitch aboard Spirit, a
stuck heater on Opportunity and
found evidence that liquid water was
once plentiful in the distant Martian past.
For viewers with an interest in Mars - but perhaps not the time to track
Spirit and Opportunity's progress day after Martian day - Welcome to Mars provides a pretty clear
overview of the mission's science accomplishments to date
But the highlight of the show is its inside glimpse at the effect the rover
effort has on the people behind the mission, such as one
married couple's effort to both live on "Mars time," a
shifting eight-hour work cycle, for their mission duties while raising two
children who live firmly on Earth's day-night schedule.
"I wanted people to come away with a sense of what an adventure it was for
the people involved in this mission," the show's producer Mark Davis
told SPACE.com. "It's not just some sort of cold-blooded science
experiment."
The anxiety of Cornell University astronomer Steven Squyres, principal
science investigator for the rover mission, during Spirit's software problems
seems to sum up his whole team's fears: "Was it something we did? Was it a
design flaw or an act of God?" he says in the documentary.
Meanwhile, other mission team members describe their feelings while covering
light-filled windows to blot out the Earth's Sun so as not to distract from
their Mars time schedule.
"We landed two rovers on Mars in three weeks," one rover team members says.
"What can match this?"
Davis's crew shot 30 hours of video with the Mars rover teams at NASA's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California - where the entire
mission was initially managed - then sifted though hundreds of hours of footage
captured by a JPL cameraman to make up the 60-minute documentary.
"It was really impossible for people not to anthropomorphize these rovers,"
Davis said. "They're pretty cute."
NOVA: Welcome to Mars will appear on PBS at 8:00 p.m. EST (Check local
listings). You can watch NOVA: Mars Dead or Alive by clicking
here.
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