Expedition Mars

NGC
Expedition Mars

Synopsis

EXPEDITION MARS brings to life one of the greatest sagas of the Space Age - the epic struggle to get the Spirit and Opportunity rovers safely to Mars, and their astounding journeys of exploration once they finally got there. When they landed on Mars in January 2004, they were expected to last at least ninety days, but not much more. The solar powered robots would almost certainly freeze to death if they lasted long enough to see their first Martian winter, or even sooner if dust coated their solar panels and robbed them of energy. Instead, Spirit lasted six years, and Opportunity is still rolling almost thirteen years later. Their unprecedented record of discovery, longevity, and resilience opened the Martian frontier for good and launched the modern age of Mars exploration. Largely forgotten now is the fact that the mission began as a last ditch effort to prove that NASA could still handle Mars after a string of embarrassing failures in the 1990's. The engineering challenge of building and delivering these two robot geologists safely to Mars was a nerve-wracking ordeal that flirted with disaster from the very beginning to the final seconds of countdown when they were launched from Cape Canaveral. On Mars the rovers continued beating the odds, cheating death many times as they turned their modest three-month mission into the first great overland expeditions on another planet. EXPEDITION MARS brings all the drama to life with never before seen footage from the archives of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, first person recollections by mission scientists and engineers, and vivid, realistic animation of the rovers in the actual terrain they explored on Mars