Mars “The Quest for Life”

Mars “The Quest for Life” is a Discovery Channel documentary focusing on the Phoenix lander. The lander touched down on Mars in 2008, with the dual purpose of searching for the presence of water as well as evidence of life. While this production doesn't examine the lander's mission in comprehensive detail, it provides an interesting overview of the massive effort invested by all involved.
And as long as humans have dreamed of Mars, they have dreamed of life on the red planet. One would hope that such a thing could not occur today, but the idea of life on Mars still fascinates us. In 2004 the Bush administration announced a space exploration initiative that would see a manned expedition to the planet by 2037. Most of the missions to Mars to date have focused on searching for life, or, more precisely, the building blocks of life, like water, oxygen, carbon and methane. It all sounds grandly optimistic, but to date over half of the missions to the planet have been failures, such as the Mars Polar Lander, which crash-landed into the planet or the European Space Agency's Beagle 2 lander with which all communication was lost.
This Discovery Channel show focuses on a group of NASA scientists working in conjunction with Lockheed Martin to build and place another lander on the harsh planet to once again search for signs of life. This time, the team responsible for the failed Polar-landing attempt works diligently on the Phoenix lander, designed to land on Mars then seeks out water.+
The show is successful at capturing the tension felt by each of the scientists involved in the project, but is missing in a lot of scientific detail on the planet itself. Still, for amateur astronomers and folks fascinated by space exploration, Mars: The Quest for Life offers an interesting look behind-the-scenes at the world of astrophysicists and engineers.
This brief Discovery Channel documentary on the effort that goes into putting a probe onto an extraterrestrial body will surely be intriguing to those who have even a passing interest in this subject, but this bare-bones, less-than-reference release, like most of the other recently released Discovery shows feels like it should have been bundled together with the other releases rather than being a stand-alone product. I'd say rent this if you really want to see it.

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