Return to Mars

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 7 September 2020

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In February 2021, three spacecraft will arrive at Mars. One is the United Arab Emirates’ Hope orbiter - the first interplanetary probe sent by the Arab world. Tianwen-1 will be China’s first mission to reach Mars – an ambitious bid to put both a probe into orbit and a small robot on the Martian surface. But the most sophisticated of all is the United States’ Mars 2020 mission. If all goes well, it will land a car-sized robotic rover on the rocky floor of a vast crater that contained a lake more than 3.7 billion years ago. The rover, named Perseverance, will spend years surveying the geology of Jerezo crater and using a battery of new instruments to examine the rocks for any evidence that life existed in the ancient lake. It will also be the first mission to extract rock samples and package them up for eventual return to Earth, sometime in the 2030s. Andrew Luck-Baker talks to NASA’s deputy project scientist Katie Stack-Morgan and mission manager Keith Comeaux, planetary scientists Melissa Rice and Sanjeev Gupta, and astrobiologist Mark Sephton.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Newscast is the unscripted chats behind the headlines.
0:05.6	It's informed, but informal.
0:07.5	We pick the day's top stories and we find experts who can really dig into them. We use our colleagues in the newsroom and
0:14.4	our contacts. Some people pick up the phone rather faster than others.
0:18.0	We sometimes literally run around the BBC building to grab the very best guests.
0:23.5	Join us for daily news chats to get you ready for today's conversations.
0:28.3	Newscast, listen on BBC Sounds. July this year saw the launch of not one, not two, but three spacecraft headed for the planet Mars.
0:44.0	The first was the United Arab Emirates Hope Orbiter.
0:48.0	Carried on a Japanese rocket it It's the first interplanetary probe sent by an Arab nation.
0:58.0	Essentially, hope will be a weather satellite, studying the red planets' atmospheric seasonal changes.
1:05.0	Next to go was Tian Wen One.
1:09.0	It'll be China's first mission to make it to Mars. Its very first attempt, nine years ago,
1:17.0	failed to get out of Earth orbit, but this new bid looks to be yet another major milestone for China's space program.
1:24.1	But on July the 30th, the most ambitious of the three
1:28.0	left the launch pad.
1:29.4	NASA's Mars 2020
1:31.8	with its robot rover named Perseverance.
1:35.0	Engine ignition 2.
1:37.0	1.0.
1:38.0	And lift off as the countdown to Mars continues, the perseverance of humanity
1:46.7	launching the next generation of robotic explorers to the red planet.
1:52.0	We could be on the cusp of something historical. We talk an awful lot about life
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.