These two complementary DVDs chronicle the program to deliver Mars exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity safely onto the surface of the red planet, and reveal a little of what they found when they got there.

For all the excitement of interplanetary exploration, it is the rovers themselves who become the stars of the show, receiving personalities of their own from their creators and winning our affection and indulgence as they withstand a seven-month journey and bruising landing before trundling off across the Martian landscape.

The story begins a couple of years before launch, with the development of the rovers and the ancillary technology. The viewer is taken back to 1997 and the successful Pathfinder mission (and the 1970s Viking missions), and meets many key scientists and engineers involved in the program, including Tommaso Rivellini, who chronicled his experiences in the airbag development program in Cosmos (see Issue 10, p30).

The viewer is there to see problems discovered and overcome: the faulty parachute design, the punctured airbags and Spirit's boot-up problems on Mars.

Mars Dead or Alive ends with the successful touchdown of Spirit; Welcome to Mars rejoins the story at that point and follows the two rovers in their quest to find evidence that water existed on our planetary neighbour.

The two programs, which originally screened on the PBS channel in the USA, are rich with explanatory graphics and dramatic images from Mars itself. They also convey, with a compelling sense of drama, the tension when things don't go to plan: the sleep-deprived faces, the hot, grim silences, the empty pizza boxes littering desks.

For all the resources of NASA, these two Nova specials get behind the newspaper headlines and slick press releases to reveal the people and the difficulties they face as our species takes its first hesitant steps into interplanetary exploration. They chronicle some of humanity's triumphs in a period of sustained global difficulty.