Original subtitles

In today's impossible engineering.

Welcome to Mars.

This is where we test the future robotic rovers.

We're on a mission to Mars.

It is a wonderful feat of engineering that these spacecraft come together.

With engineering that's out of this world.

Wheel walking is such an incredibly important feature, but this will be

the first time it's ever been flown on a rover.

And the pioneering historic innovations.

Oh, it's like something out of Star Wars.

It always feels so mysterious.

It's like another planet.

It may be impossible.

Possible.

For millennia, we've looked up at the stars in wonder.

questioning whether we're alone in the vast expand.

I think exploration is always important.

It is important for humankind.

This is really a wild place up here.

Everybody is fascinated about exploration, in particular, Mars.

With eyes set on Earth's cosmic neighbor,

scientists are aiming to answer the ultimate question.

The early telescopes was showing rivers or canals or channels

which might have also taken water.

That's, of course, something absolutely interesting to see if there may be life,

even on Mars.

To finally find out if there is life on Mars,

engineers at the European Space Agency have created a machine like no other.

Enter the ExoMars rover.

An interplanetary explorer.

Built to boldly go where no man or machine has gone before.

This is one of the most incredible engineering projects that's going on in

world right now.

There's something very different about engineering something for another

It requires a level of thinking, a level of...

practicality, a level of innovation that you just don't get when you're

designing things for Earth.

What we are doing feels like science fiction.

This extraordinary project marks the dawn of a new age of space exploration.

This project will be the culmination of about 15 to 20 years of development.

It's a big effort that it costs a billion euros.

It is a wonderful feat of engineering.

An ambitious mission to make the first -ever confirmed discovery of life on

another planet.

There is no project in the world that compares to this one.

Costing over $1 .2 billion, the European Space Agency's ExoMars rover weighs in

at almost 700 pounds.

This game -changing robot has six sprung alloy wheels designed to compress for

maximum traction on the Martian soil, while 3D imaging cameras sit atop a six

-foot -tall mast to survey the landscape.

A revolutionary core sampling drill can reach over six and a half feet below

ground, and a host of onboard instruments will execute the first -ever

biological experiments on another planet.

This collaborative effort among over 20 countries is overseen by mission manager

Pia Michdofer.

Which model did you last use today?

So today we drove around with this one. Okay.

I think you know this one already. Yes, I do.

But we are waiting for our autonomous navigation to be delivered for ExoMars.

Every component is modeled and tested. But there's one feature that sets this

Martian explorer apart from any other.

You see here the heart of it. This is our drill.

This is very unique.

There is no other rover on Mars that can drill as deep as two meters.

So this is really special in our ExoMars mission.

We expect to find traces of life on Mars, but we have the biggest chance to

any if we go deep in the subsurface of Mars.

This is where we expect to find preserved.

biomarkers or biomaterial, and that's what we are looking for.

We are not there yet.

Once we arrive and touch down, the real work will begin for ExoMars.

But the team faces huge engineering challenges in their mission to land on

surface of another planet.

At a secure clean room facility in southern France, engineers are fine

the spacecraft that will travel to Mars, overseen by Chief Engineer Albert

Haldeman.

To get things into space, you need to fight the Earth's gravity. So you need

have a lot of thrust to push against that gravity.

One of the Russian contributions to the cooperation is the rockets to launch.

And we will use a Proton M to launch the ExoMars 2022 spacecraft composite.

The upper stage of the Proton M is capable of accelerating the

spacecraft from Earth orbit towards Mars.

The colossal Proton M rocket will launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

the world's largest operational space launch facility.

The 4 .7 -ton missile burns an enormous 660 gallons of rocket fuel to escape

Earth's gravity and ejects three stages to lighten the load.

The final stage sends the spacecraft on its nine -month voyage to Mars.

But what comes next poses an astronomical hazard.

The most ambitious part is the entry, descent and landing.

Landing on Mars presents a huge challenge because you have to go from an

interplanetary velocity of 10 kilometers per second to a velocity of zero in a

period of about six or seven minutes.

If ExoMars 2022 crashes, it will be catastrophic.

This spacecraft will be making the 350 million mile journey to another world.

where an arsenal of onboard instruments will fight their way through the Martian

atmosphere.

You need a heat shield to protect that initial ballistic entry and to slow you

down. But then you need some other systems to slow yourself further.

We have the biggest parachute ever used on Mars.

You're going almost as fast on a parachute on Mars as the human skydiver

with no parachute on Earth.

So you need something else to stop you when you get to the ground, and we use

rockets for that. We use a controlled rocket thrust to make a soft landing on

the surface.

With half of all previous missions to Mars ending in disaster... Failure for

ExoMars 2022 is not an option.

This time, we really, really, really will make it.

But on a mission of this scale, the challenges are relentless.

Landing on Mars is just the beginning.

If you land in one place and only have a panorama, it's very limited what you

can do and how much you can interact with that environment.

The scientific ambition requires mobility.

To find a solution, the team must turn to history's great space exploration

pioneers.

At the U .S. Space and Rocket Center in Alabama, aerospace engineer Kimberly

Robinson is searching for an interplanetary engineering innovation.

Landing on the surface of the moon for the first time ever was a great

accomplishment, probably one of the greatest of human achievements.

We soon learned that we were limited by how far the astronauts could explore on

the lunar surface.

But we understood that if we needed to explore further, we were going to need

transportation to help us get to points of interest.

As the first Apollo astronauts realized that moonwalking wasn't going to cut it,

engineers Ferenc Pavlich and Sam Romano of the Lunar Roving Task Team stepped in

with a solution.

This is the Lunar Rover.

This is a replica that was built with some of the original lunar rover design

team, and I am going to get to drive it. So I am very excited. So let's give it

a test drive, shall we?

All right.

And we're off.

The lunar rover marks the beginning of a new chapter of space exploration.

So this was the world's first off -planet, off -road vehicle.

It drives like a dream.

Powered by two 36 -volt non -rechargeable batteries, and with each

its own dedicated electric motor, the Lunar Rover was a four -wheel drive

vehicle designed to enable lunar exploration.

I can only imagine how much fun it must have been on the lunar surface, going

through craters, around rock.

It's a marvel of engineering.

So what made this rover such a runaway success? And how can today's engineers

use a vehicle from the past?

We built the rover to rove in order to expand the access to the Martian

To inspire a futuristic rover destined for a whole new world.

Welcome to Mars.

The lunar rover was a groundbreaking piece of engineering.

It changed the way astronauts explored the moon's surface and proved invaluable

on the last three Apollo missions.

To make this moon buggy possible, engineers used some key design elements.

Ultra -lightweight components kept the rover's weight down to only 680 pounds

and allowed it to be folded and stowed for its 240 ,000 -mile journey to the

moon.

While the wheels on the replica are rubber wheels, the wheels on the real

rover were made of a steel wire mesh to get better traction on the surface.

A very important feature of the lunar rover were these fenders.

They kept off the dust from the lunar surface to keep everything working and

the right temperature.

And these fender guards here were actually made with the original molds

lunar rover.

A host of onboard equipment, like a reconnaissance camera.

and a communications antenna enabled widespread scientific exploration.

It could go about 8 miles per hour generally, but got up to 11 .2 miles per

on Apollo 17.

It drives with a joystick. As you can see, my hand, I turn it left or right to

go in the direction I want to go.

Astronauts on Apollo missions 15, 16, and 17 used this cosmic car to explore

further than ever before, expanding the .6 -mile exploration distance of Apollo

11 to an enormous 19 miles on the Apollo 17 mission, allowing

astronauts to collect over five times the amount of rock samples for

examination.

Although the original lunar rovers are left behind on the lunar surface, The

legacy of the lunar rover is that we still have the engineering technology

know -how to create this wonderful vehicle that we can use as we return the

man and the first woman to the lunar surface in the near future.

In Europe, engineers have adapted the rover concept for the 21st century.

But instead of a crude buggy, it's an autonomous robotic rover

that the Apollo engineers could have only dreamed of.

We built the rover to rove in order to expand the access to the Martian surface

in order to find the evidence that it hopes to achieve.

Behind me, you have the spacecraft that will go to Mars.

And inside it, the lander is actually all folded up in the middle of the

module.

After a successful touchdown, the landing platform and the rover will

just like the lunar roving vehicle.

Once the solar array and mast are deployed, ExoMars is ready to embark on

adventure.

Leaving the landing platform behind, the rover will embark on a mission lasting

211 Martian souls, the equivalent of seven Earth months.

Roaming on its inorganic sprung alloy wheels, specifically designed to prevent

microbial contamination between planets millions of miles apart.

When you can drive on Mars... Every day is like a new landing site. You discover

through a new panorama of images every day a new place on another planet.

Building on the lunar rover concept, the team has created one of the most

advanced machines to ever roam another planet.

We imagine that spacecraft are somehow built by robots and built by other

machines because they're so high -tech.

But one of the fascinating secrets I find is that spacecraft are the epitome

handmade engineering.

All of the structural panels are laid out, the glues are all painted on by

artisans, frankly.

The technicians and engineers who make these things, they have artistic

competence to make perfect assemblies every time. It is a wonderful feat of

engineering to see spacecraft come together.

The first stage of this mega -mission is complete.

But exploring uncharted territory presents enormous engineering

Because where the distance between worlds is immense, so are the risks.

For aerospace engineer Paul Meacham, interplanetary contact is the top

The problem with communicating with a spacecraft on Mars is that even

at the speed of light... A radio signal will take up to 20 minutes to make the

journey from Earth to Mars, and another 20 minutes to come from Mars back to

Earth. So if you're trying to drive something by remote control, like a

20 minutes later, that signal finally makes it to Mars, and of course, in

time, it's already crashed into whatever the object was.

To find a solution,

Paul must step into another world.

Welcome to Mars.

Hidden away in the UK is a highly detailed 4 ,000 square foot facility

to imitate the Martian surface.

This is our Mars Yard facility here in Stevenage and it's where we test the

future robotic rovers.

This extraterrestrial environment is the perfect place to test and develop the

ExoMars navigation system.

This Mars Yard is similar to Mars in a lot of different ways. Firstly, the sand

is very similar.

We also have representative lighting in here that give us the right light levels

that we'll expect to encounter on Mars.

It's also inhabited by its very own resident rover.

This is Bruno.

He is one of our earliest prototypes.

One of the key features of Bruno is his autonomous navigation system, which is

really, really pivotal for the way the rover will drive across the surface

without humans needing to constantly monitor and remote control it.

It starts with these two cameras at the top of the mast here, and they see in 3D

in much the same way we do. Our brains are extremely good at combining the

images from each eye into one consistent flowing 3D image of what's in front of

us. Every time the rover stops, it will take a new set of images.

And it will analyze those to figure out where on the terrain in front of it it

can and can't go.

So if there's a rock that's too big or a slope that's too steep, it will

automatically mark that area as forbidden and it will not go anywhere

So you end up with what we call a navigation map.

Using state -of -the -art 3D imaging, ExoMars builds a detailed topographical

map.

Thinking for itself.

It's up to the rover to autonomously navigate a successful path.

We're going to put this autonomous navigation system to the test by using

rock here. We can put that directly in front of the rover.

And what we'll do is we'll give the rover a target the other side of the

The rover should identify this as something that is too big, and we should

the rover taking an alternate path.

Here we go.

The rover's just effectively determined the height of that rock, and it's

determined that that height is beyond its locomotion capability.

So it's immediately turned to the right to drive around that rock.

such that it doesn't in any way endanger itself.

The rover's done that entirely by itself. All I have had to have done as

operator is to give it the target, the end point I want it to reach. I've told

it nothing about the best route to take, or the terrain, or the fact that rock

was even there.

But when the goal is to explore the most likely habitats for alien life, some

hazards must be tackled head -on.

One of the real challenges is that the places on Mars that are most

scientifically interesting are often the least accessible.

And that means that rather than just going around these rocks, we do need to

through rock fields.

And on the red planet's varied terrain, rocks aren't the only obstacle.

Some of the sand on Mars can have the consistency of talcum powder. So when

drive into that, it's very easy for the rover to dig itself in, and that causes

major problems.

In 2009, NASA's Mars rover Spirit became buried in a sand trap.

Despite a concerted effort from the team back on Earth, Spirit was unable to

move. NASA's $800 million mission was stopped in its tracks.

To avoid losing another rover to the Martian sands, engineers will turn to

pioneers of the past.

The engineers behind the latest Mars rover must plan for every possible

challenge their vehicle could encounter as it explores the red planet.

Getting out of a situation where the rover has got stuck is absolutely

If the rover is unable to free itself, the consequences are disastrous.

In essence, you'd have spent nearly billions of euros and years of

launching this thing to Mars only for it to get stuck. So that would pretty much

be the end of the mission.

When rocks and sandpits must be tackled head -on, the rover team must look to

the innovators of the past.

Robotics engineer Tel Garin is trekking through the back roads of Ohio.

Oh, yeah, this is getting very rough.

Oh, man, here we go.

In search of a groundbreaking locomotive innovation.

There's some pretty serious, like, dips and sort of rocky areas here.

Oh, yeah.

This is a four -wheel drive car. It's doing okay over this terrain.

But there are places even vehicles like this can't go.

Tackling tricky terrain is a challenge that the U .S. military has faced since

the early days of mechanized warfare.

In World War I and II, the military was developing a lot of different vehicles.

Most of them had wheels and tracks.

There's a lot of areas on the planet that are mountainous or sandy that

vehicles or even tracked vehicles.

really can't go.

It just gets too steep or too rough.

In 1981,

engineers Kenneth Waldron, Robert McGee, and Vincent Vonout were contracted by

the military to develop a vehicle that could go where no other could.

This tarp is massive. It might be huge.

Their contraption seemed to disappear off the face of the earth.

Oh, my gosh.

But Kel has tracked it down.

All right, let's see how the front of this looks.

This is the ASV.

Oh, it's incredible.

An assisted suspension vehicle that doesn't roll, but walks.

It's like something out of Star Wars.

This extraordinary six -legged beast hasn't seen the light of day for almost

years.

Taking its first steps in 1985, the ASV could stride across eight -foot -wide

ditches and over six -and -a -half -foot -tall walls.

This 16 -foot -long giant weighed in at 5 ,900 pounds with the ability to carry

another 485 pounds of cargo, all thanks to its six -limbed structure.

Because it was this hexapod design, it had an incredible amount of

maneuverability. Each of the legs could move to the side.

They could move forward and back. The vehicle could crab walk sideways if it

needed to. It can sidestep across a river.

Like, that's something that you don't get with any other type of vehicle.

It must have been incredible to be in control of this.

This marching monster has long since retired.

But to demonstrate the secret behind its locomotion, Kel has scaled it down.

So I wanted to show you how the ASV works. And this little robot that we

here is a perfect analog for that.

You see, both the ASV and this robot have six legs. So when we command this

forward, the robot does just fine. It's able to navigate this area really well.

And the reason for that is because it has this alternating tripod gate. You

that only three of its legs are off the ground at any time, leaving the other

three to be firmly planted on the ground in a very stable place. And that allows

the robot to move with a lot of dexterity and confidence through really

terrain.

Synchronizing two sets of tripods to alternate creates the ant -like hexapod

locomotion.

And upscaling nature's design meant that the ASV could go virtually anywhere.

This is such an unconventional vehicle, and it really shows that it was designed

to be as mobile as possible and be able to move over any terrain.

At the time, in the 80s, this was considered the world's most advanced

machine. This was pioneering technology.

All of those walking robots that we see now that are going to go and explore

other planets and that are able to because they can walk and because they

navigate over really challenging terrain, it all started here. It all

with this.

For the next generation interplanetary explorer, Engineers have equipped the

ExoMars rover with the best of both worlds.

It's designed to drive across the Martian surface on six wheels. But when

going gets tough, it's time to start walking.

What wheel walking allows us to do is to move each wheel or a set of wheels

individually while keeping the other ones stable.

The front wheel and the back wheel on one side and the middle wheel on the

side move forward, and then the reverse will happen, and that sequence will

repeat over and over again.

This particular wheel -walking gait is actually called a tripod gait and is

influenced by the way insects walk.

This form of locomotion may not be fast,

but by adapting the hexapod walking technology, the team has created a way

traverse even the most perilous Martian sandpit.

The normal way of driving the rover, we do expect that to be able to handle 95 %

of what we encounter on Mars.

That 5%, the 5 % that can strand the rover and end the mission, that's just

much of a risk to take.

Wheel walking is such an incredibly important feature, but this will be

the first time it's ever been flown on a rover.

And even more revolutionary systems keep this explorer trekking in the hunt for

Martian life.

All six wheels are individually controlled, and that allows us to

different geometries that wouldn't be possible if we had an axle system like a

car. So, for example, he can follow a curve, he can crab sideways, and he can

even spin on the spot if we need him to by individually controlling those

motors.

By pushing the limits of locomotion.

This monumental machine will one day be able to roam Mars without restriction.

When you have a mission like ExoMars, it's costing over a billion euros. The

benefit of being able to escape from situations that would otherwise surround

the rover is so important.

In simple terms, we can save the mission when otherwise it would be lost.

With a mission to discover the extraordinary, ExoMars dares to wander

other rover has before.

But to realize their dreams of encountering alien life, engineers face

challenge.

We think the best opportunity to find organics well -preserved is to go in the

subsurface up to two meters depth.

To create more impossible engineering, the team will have to turn to innovators

of the past.

On its mission to unveil the secrets of the Red Planet, this hardy robot, named

for the chemist Rosalind Franklin, is designed to withstand a bombardment of

solar radiation and endure temperature swings from 80 degrees Fahrenheit to a

frosty minus 200.

But to make the whole mission worthwhile, rover project manager Bruno

his team have one last challenge to conquer.

We are in the clean room facility of Thales Salenia Space, Turin.

This is the clean room where the elements that go on Mars are integrated.

This is currently the cleanest facility available in the world for space

application.

To eliminate biological contamination on the rover, the team runs tests on an

exact replica.

In this area here, we have the ground test model of the rover.

There is some activity that cannot be performed on the flight model due to the

constraints linked to the cleanlet.

It is essential that we have another model where we can try everything in

advance of the real operation.

But contamination from Earth is only part of the problem.

In 2023, the real Mars rover will touch down in Oxia Planum, an

81 ,800 square mile plateau flagged as a potential hotbed for Martian life.

But in the hunt for answers, searching above ground will barely scratch the

surface.

While the Earth's magnetic field protects us from harmful solar

dead husk of Mars has no such luxury.

and its surface has been under attack for billions of years.

The first one meter, one meter and a half of subsurface has been sterilized

by radiation.

We think the best opportunity to find organics well -preserved is to go in the

subsurface up to two meters depth.

To find a way to extract pristine rock samples for analysis.

Could the solution lie buried in the past?

Archaeologist Cassie Newland is heading underground in the UK.

It always feels so mysterious.

It's like another planet.

She's on the hunt for buried treasure that sparked a mining frenzy.

So this is South Crofty mine.

And South Crofty has been open since medieval times.

If you look around the walls, you'll see all the minerals leaching out. And it's

those minerals that we're interested in here.

They're the reason the mine is here.

This is what we're looking for.

As you can see, this beautiful stripe running from the top here right down to

the bottom.

That is a vein that's been exposed in the face here.

The 19th century saw a wave of new mineral and ore discoveries, but

deep deposits was an enormous task.

So at the beginning in Cornwall, mining is very easy.

It's right on the surface. You can see it's all sparkly and shiny because the

copper is above the tin.

You can literally fall over it when you're walking across the moors.

But the deeper you get, the more expensive a business it is.

At some point, you don't know if it's worth doing all that expensive mining

because you don't know how far down that particular vein goes. You need to know

what's under the ground before you dig it.

But in 1863, French railroad engineer Rodolphe Lachaud invented a genius

solution that changed the face of mining forever.

This is the diamond core drill.

An incredible tool allowing rock samples to be extracted more efficiently than

past mechanisms.

To design a vehicle capable of drilling deeper into the Martian surface than

ever before, the engineers behind the Mars rover will need to take Le Chaux's

19th century innovation.

Here it comes. So this is our new core.

And bring it into the future.

It's a rather complicated mechanism, but it's rather inactive.

When Rodolphe Le Chaux designed the diamond core drill in 1863, he likely

imagined it would provide inspiration for a 21st century Mars rover.

But his revolutionary invention will be vital to future space science, and it's

still in use on Earth today.

So it's practically the same as that 19th century drill, but just done in

machinery.

And what they're doing here is they're drilling down into the earth, trying to

discover whether there's enough tin and copper in the Cornish hills to open up

Cornish mining again.

What makes this such a fascinating... innovation it is like a magical

to look beneath the ground what it does is it sends a hollow drill down into the

earth to form a column of rock and it takes the column out in its entirety so

you can see exactly what is happening every meter under the ground if you want

to know to the nearest centimeter it can tell you and here you can see where

they're actually drilling so this is spinning around around around And on the

end of it, it's one of these.

This is a diamond bit.

And this is spinning around and around, and it's biting through the rock,

creating a core that's this size.

These drills were the first to produce an intact core that could be extracted

and examined.

But drilling close to the surface and drilling at depth are very different

propositions.

Another innovation is necessary to make the diamond core drill useful over a

mile underground.

When you're prospecting for ore, you need to drill really deep, like two and

half kilometers deep. And that poses a lot of challenges.

You need to keep that hole open so you can keep bringing those cores up and

inspect them and see what you've got. So you do it like this. Put your drill bit

on the end, goes in here, and then all of this spins to drill out a core.

And as it goes further and further down, the rods disappear into the ground. You

add the next one.

There you go.

Connecting up.

By the time they finish, they're going to have an unbroken chain of these

stretching down thousands of meters.

With this incredible combination of technique, miners were able to retrieve

pristine samples from unprecedented depth.

Okay, this is the moment of truth.

Here it comes. So this is our new port.

There could be ore in there. Could be the secret for the universe.

Perfect.

Woo! So now it's time to get the core sample out and we'll see what we've got.

Beautiful.

So what you've got here is a beautiful cylinder that is a record of everything

the drill has cut through.

And when you put them all together, you've basically got a vision of the

beneath your feet. So this is absolutely essential when prospecting for

minerals. So this is still at the cutting edge of mining today.

It's pretty ingenious.

Back in Turin's clean room, engineers have created a drilling system worthy of

the space age. But before it can extract samples, it needs to reach further down

into the subsurface than any rover before.

The drill is able to reach two meter depth using three extension rods.

All the rods are screwed one together with the other.

by the internal mechanism such to reach the required length.

It's a rather complicated mechanism, and it's rather an achievement.

And this revolutionary drill apparatus might just make the ExoMars rover the

to finding alien life.

In this aspect, our mission is more significant than any other engineering

project on Earth.

Inspired by Le Chaux's 19th century drilling innovation, a box mounted on

ExoMars Rover houses a revolutionary drilling tool, as well as three

extension rods.

Once the drill box has rotated to the downward drilling position, excavation

will commence.

And as it descends through the soil, each extension piece will be

screwed to the top, creating a six -and -a -half -foot -long chain.

This drill is able to dig deeper on Mars than any rover before.

And once the target depth has been reached, Le Sho's core sampling

comes into play.

The drill has not only the capability of drilling, but the capability of

acquiring the sample.

The drill is scoring the sample in the rock.

And then when the current is completed, the shutter is closed, such that the

sample can be retrieved.

On its quest, the rover's super -tough diamond -encrusted drill tip will

excavate 22 samples before the cutting edge is worn down.

Each one will be analyzed internally for signs of organic material by an array

of high -tech onboard instruments.

and the results will be beamed directly to mission control on Earth.

Experiments can be run on Mars without sending samples to Earth.

Having the possibility to have a laboratory working for the search of

outer planet, that is really incredible.

The ExoMars team has driven drill engineering deeper than ever, and they

be the very first to discover something extraordinary.

Nobody has ever attempted to reach the surface of Mars in search of life. So in

this aspect, our mission is more significant than any other engineering

on Earth.

By daring to explore and innovate more than ever before,

the ExoMars rover is set to change the course of scientific history forever.

To be part of a mission, finding life outside the Earth for the very first

as a scientist, as an engineer, I think that's a wonderful achievement, and it's

been my great privilege to be part of it.

By enhancing the work of the pioneers of the past.

Overcoming huge challenges.

And pushing the boundaries of innovation.

We can take our curiosity beyond Earth.

And that ambition for scientists, for exploration, for human beings, it's

exhilarating.

Engineers are succeeding in making the impossible possible.

For me, this mission is so important because it is bringing so much knowledge

humanity. This is incredible.

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