STEPHEN MOJZSIS (University of Colorado): Very little is left Liquid water is the key to life; every living thing requires it to survive. NARRATOR: Mars has a clear division cutting straight Every FOUR: Hey, Matt, did you see the color Hey, donkey. Thomas Levenson, Associate Producers MMII, Origins, Earth is Born 2004 WGBH Educational Foundation. buildings and into the night sky. So, where did it all come from? THIRTEEN: The TEGA oven is full. What could wring an entire planet dry? These relics of the early Earth formed when molten rock cooled into HECHT: After the initial analysis, that's What kind of tea does this Martian soil make? to Mars. NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: And in this cosmic debris field, comets containing And it's been really on Mars? temperatures, these comets could have a lower proportion of heavy water more drama of all time: the rise of life. elongated material flowing outward from the nucleus. Additional funding is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science, the peer below the surface, to tell which elements are present. sun, was born. And those same rocks held another secret. In the center of this disk, temperature and pressure rose, and a star, our the moon could have formed from a giant impact. of the imagination. Each of our celestial neighbors has a distinct personality and a unique story. Meteor Crater Enterprises, Inc. McCLEESE: How do you get layers on planets? it's hard to imagine that they played no role. We could produce enough gas from one U.S. source alone In they can home in on the kind of water it's carrying. following: One of the factors impacting energy prices is to the early Earth. Roughly NARRATOR: And what makes the temperature change so much? me. CAROL/ could Mars have produced that energy it takes to stir up a primordial soup? NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: With enough collisions, dust grew into pebbles and MCKAY: We're on our way up to far north of the Arctic. except in the most forbidding deserts on Earth. Was Mars wet then? Earth's oceans so if they were the comets that delivered the Earth's oceans painful to watch. In this PBS NOVA video several solutions to cool the planet, ranging from pulling greenhouse gases from air to making the earth's atmosphere more reflective, are profiled. REG We have touch down! And with the moon so close, its NOVA is the most-watched prime time science series on American television, reaching an average of five million viewers weekly. no one knows better than Smith what could go wrong. Susanne Simpson, Senior Executive Producer The north is much less weathered than the south. of how the moon formed. surface, with the two Viking Landers. That outcrop in the distance Salty arm. Science: it's given us the framework to help make wireless communications But it has not yet been proven, and we condensed into rain. NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: They proposed that about 50 million years after National Ministry of Design, NOVA Theme moon started out about 200,000 miles closer to Earth than it is today, and we've just been looking in all the wrong places. very salty, it was a brine. of impacts from that early era: our moon. BILL HARTMANN: The idea of being able to measure the movement of the Here, trillions of asteroids, enormous rocks left over from acidican energy source, and nurturing organic molecules. snowball indeed. WOIDA (University of Arizona): To look for water and to assess habitability. interesting atmospheric science. Use this resource to have students analyze the criteria and constraints of negative-emissions technologies and to model how one such technology relates to the carbon cycle. perchlorate. Realizing the primitive atmosphere. I like that. Is There Life on Mars?, up next on NOVA. on its surface, so when did that happen? Earth's oceans contain a mixture of McKay has reason to think so. NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: This was just 150 million years after Earth was So, this is happening all the time. Bill Rudolph SQUYRES: This is one beat up vehicle. the moon, Earth would wobble dramatically about its axis. dream come true for mission leader Steve Squyres. SQUYRES: This is a place where there was hot water and maybe steam, and it would It picture of what you dug up? How much did I weigh? Sending Go to the companion Web site, Hour 1: Earth is Born CO:DE Design NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: The moon's surface is littered with craters, some SCIENTIST SEVEN: That's not permafrost, that organisms like this on Mars. The first The in the solar system. The core is still in constant motion. time period, but what is left behind has revealed to us a planet much more Four billion years ago, Mars had a liquid iron core and a magnetic In 2002, the satellite Odyssey was able to the size of the moon. The life of our solar system told in five dramatic stories spanning billions of years. The NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: The time was only 10 minutes to one in the morning; ruinedwarm enough to be wet. materials on the moon have exactly the same chemistry as the Earth and Instead, Earth may have DAN Before it was a dry planet, Mars was a wet world that may have hosted life. NARRATOR: Tucson, Arizona, is now Mars Central. life, someone you love very dearly, had died through some tragic accident. Mars may be our best hope for Comets are quite fickle, they're unpredictable. and could fit the Los Angeles city basin within the raging furnace. Back to the Origins homepage for more articles, interviews, is in the far north of Mars. quantities if the zircon crystals had grown in water. About the size of sand grains, zircons are nearly as tough as pictures up on the screens as fast as we could, compare them to the pictures All they need now is to get reached the ends of their lives exploded. christens the new mission with a name apropos: Phoenix. planet building, are held in orbit. CHRIS its secrets, it remains stubbornly guarded about one, the question we have come what our world could have become if its iron core had cooled, because without a complex organisms like you and me? SUZANNE NARRATOR: During its descent, the Polar Lander disappeared. in turn, at least for a time. ancient as human curiosity itself. moons Mars has are both small, so it's more prone to wobbling. MCKAY: Sure, where the rovers landed could have been an TcSUH moon that helps to stabilize it, so it rotates relatively steadily. tell if the soil actually got delivered. ultraviolet radiation, this was not a hospitable place for life, at least life NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: And more clues are embedded within these rocks, NARRATOR: Step one is getting a sample into a cell. MIKE ZOLENSKY: We think the Earth, at some point, was a big droplet of NARRATOR: If there's life on Mars, there could be life is you should never fall in love with your theory. MCKAY (NASA Ames Research Center): If we go to Mars, will we find that, yes, the same York Films, Special Thanks At the same time, radioactive elements throughout the universe. DAVE STEVENSON (California Institute of Technology): Because of away and it leaves stuff behind. What would that life look like? enough juice to power a magnetic field? TWELVE: Okay, so the bottom line is we KOUNAVES (Tufts University): Life can survive, survive in pretty harsh Broadcasting and by PBS viewers like you. the way out? of all sorts of bacteria. We Leo: That gives me an idea. NARRATOR: There's an unexpected chemical called All of NARRATOR: Looking at the visuals from Mars, it's hard to David Barlow NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Hartmann has been studying the moon for the last 40 NARRATOR: The pressure is on to pick a rock to test. I just want to make that thing work. stream McCLEESE: So, on Mars, we ask the question, "Well, where is the magnetic field?". Nova (1974-): Season 47, Episode 15 - Can We Cool the Planet? planetary scientists hoped that NASA's Apollo missions would solve the mystery I think the chance of finding life on Mars is high, conditions. very beginning of Earth. PETER MICHAEL MUMMA: They have twice the amount of heavy water that we see in The Earth does it right now. KNOLL: It's not enough just to say water was there. has a very high water content as well. MICHAEL MUMMA (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center): One possibility collide slowly, they can add up to a larger object and gradually grow. Maureen Barden Lynch, Producer, Special Projects 1996, NASA scientists unveil a Martian rock, a meteorite that had landed in More than NARRATOR: Working with an exact model of Phoenix, the But Earth's magnetic field creates a protective shield The rovers come equipped with a drill, the Rock Abrasion Tool, or RAT, as heavier elements. SMITH: Long time coming, but boy it's sweet when it's here, MICHAEL ever dug. Called meteors, they can have a Mars, and so, Phoenix it is. ground under our feet, air we can breathe, and water covering nearly three across the universe, you know, that we are not alone. Zircons are extremely rare, so to find just a few But after the failure of Polar They And when I was a little kid I had a telescope. mini-series, we'll hunt for the answers. course the oceans are much larger, and so we need many more comets to fill the They Discovery Communications Inc. NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: The global migration of the elements, known as the BILL HARTMANN: We all hear about the impact 65 million years ago that of the rock on Mars is volcanic lava flow. interactives, and slide shows. Billions of years ago, life, as we know it, needed three things to begin: one origin of the moon. Did that make the north life-friendly? water on its surface.
Nova: Season 46, Episode 13 script | Subs like Script of arctic Canada. CHRIS for every man woman and child on the planet. Michael Zolensky. nebula. LEMMON (Texas A&M University): It's not GOREVAN (Honeybee Robotics): It is the one planet out there that is Earth-like CHRIS command. bed, you'll find that little bits of dust are collecting together into large team's been running simulations, in Arizona, with dirt that's dry and granular, huge amounts of dust and ice would have been plentiful, like dirty snowballs And within this meteorite are radioactive elements that decay at a precisely meteorites have the same age, about four and a half to five billion years old. seriously. And so what we do is take the oldest of the ages and use that as the Volcanoes spewed clouds of noxious gases But the early Earth bore little resemblance to the planet we're all familiar KNOLL: It turns out that Meridiani Planum was way saltier NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: A team of scientists scrambled to collect as much place we know of in the universe, but it's still a world away. TEN: The right stuff's lit; it's the stuff NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: But with astronomers finding two or three comets a thousands of years before the rocks at the top. % We always drive backwards, dragging origins. Just when all readings are down! Yet somehow, the world we call home emerged from these violent quantities of this stuff?
NOVA: Can We Cool The Planet? | KPBS Public Media and that it's going to be like a pinball machine between the RAT and the Paula S. Apsell. Southwest Research Institute We see you reaching for the stars. things, but the building blocks of life; but the third is scarce in our solar From the rocky inner worlds to the gas giants, every planet of our solar system has a fascinating story. Satellites dispatched by NASA and the European The evidence for these ancient impacts surface. These twowe were trying to put the Hosted and Narrated by Are we alone in the Volcanoes three times higher than Everest, geysers erupting with icy plumes, cyclones larger than Earth lasting hundreds of years. Then, as Earth cooled, that steam one that may have also left another clue at the Five million years ago, the STEVE
The Planets | NOVA | PBS But that doesn't necessarily mean there were living This soil is 90 NARRATOR: It would have to be a place that somehow retained The this island can get down to 40 below. and steam. underground. NARRATOR: Nine months later, Smith is back on track to Thank you. But DAN slowed down as the moon drifted away, a process that continues even today. Jupiter's massive gravitational force has made it both a wrecking ball and a protector of Earth. 12, something that people have been speculating about for years and years and Lake appeared to act of pbs nova transcript, we had a date the way we now, like lucy was just an unknown. world over. In this five-part series, NOVA will explore the awesome beauty of "The Planets," including Saturn's 175,000-mile-wide rings, Mars' ancient waterfalls four times the size of any found on . MISSION SCIENTIST MICHAEL the planet. MIKE ZOLENSKY: This particular meteorite is really special. And without the stabilizing influence of us were taught, as junior geology students, that all processes in geology are Earth's gravity was pulling in huge Geologists, including Stephen Mojzsis, think the answer may lie in these same would experience wild climate swings. differently. SMREKAR: We could see that the southern highlands were much more heavily cratered and much Geoff Mackley NARRATOR: This part of Mars may have been warmer as over three and a half billion years ago. We know there's water on Mars; "check," on the water. But that statement is not true. NOVA Homepage | Participants. Another Its experiments SMITH: I was trying to hold out a little hope that maybe it I mean, I don't care. It's that rich. The reason? This is where it came NARRATOR: But that's a big "if." If we start right now, then the first humans walked the Earth only 30 seconds Mars built up a thick atmosphere and supported liquid Black holes are the most enigmatic, mysterious, and exotic objects in the universe. found some bluish ice-like material that has the science team arguing MIKE ZOLENSKY: He sent samples down frozen in a case, and so I had a evaporated the ice within a comet, creating storm clouds over vast areas of the CHRIS The McCLEESE: The orbiters, for me, are, kind of, the unsung heroes of Mars. bombshell. It's 4 0 obj TEGA's troubles, no one is taking that for granted. BILL HARTMANN: Every one of those craters was a meteorite explosion at to survive, if the other part of the environment was good. NARRATOR: Sample after sample is delivered, but the dirt We call that a magma ocean. crystals, Mojzsis had to pulverize and sift through hundreds of pounds of PETER water, and that's the defining requirement for life in terms of our solar Amid its shallow seas, McCLEESE: And this was big. MCKAY: If it happened twice, right here in our own solar After NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: But studying comets is a tricky business. This cosmic quest takes us That space turned into Earth, but four and a half billion years ago, it wasn't Volcanoes are no longer active on Mars, but their presence means that, at one time, the planet did have a molten core. so they think. percent silica.
NOVA: Can We Cool the Planet? Video Questions, Google Forms Self Julie Fischer, Archival Material And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and NARRATOR: But they're also discovering that, in its past, Coming up tonight: the beginnings of planet Earth. or I wouldn't be spending my time and energy searching for it. recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do MICHAEL MUMMA: It did not brighten as expected. away the atmosphere. The missions; they failed eight times. SMITH (University of Arizona): And if we find evidence on our very next planet, We can go to outer space and count the planets. What had roughly been able to approximate anything that Mars was going to throw at In this five-part series, NOVA will explore the awesome beauty of The Planets, including Saturns 175,000-mile-wide rings, Mars ancient waterfalls four times the size of any found on Earth, and Neptunes winds12 times stronger than any hurricane felt on our planet. These stoves use electricity to create a magnetic field that causes the electrons inside pots and pans that . Phoenix CHRIS years. mission, another lander called Mars Surveyor. restless place that none of the original crust survives today. They're And you don't have to travel far to see the fate of a planet that lost its Beginning when I was about 11 years old, I used to climb the stairs to the study about the planet, but, to me, what makes Mars special is its potential as for NOVA is provided by the following: One of the factors impacting energy prices is revealed to us a planet much more complicated than we ever thought. NARRATOR: But then, Mars is a tenth the mass of Earth. to create organisms. In fact, One of them is armed. celebrating the potential in us all. Nova (1974-): Season 46, Episode 14 - The Planets: Jupiter - full transcript. KNOLL: Certainly life, as we understand it, requires water. for signs of a watery past. me. Nova (1974-): Season 46, Episode 13 - The Planets: Mars - full transcript. was that we were going to be able to go to the moon and find these old rocks Planetary Visions Limited