Mars has fascinated scientists for decades as the planet most likely to have once supported life, and this film follows the mission built to test that idea directly: the Curiosity rover. It traces the engineering behind the rover's landing, an untested sky-crane system that had to lower a car-sized vehicle onto the Martian surface with no room for error, and the tense wait at mission control as controllers watched signals arrive minutes late with no ability to intervene. Once down, Curiosity's cameras and drills go to work in Gale Crater, sampling rock layers for chemical traces of ancient water and organic compounds. Scientists and engineers explain what each instrument is looking for and why the crater was chosen as a landing site in the first place. The film keeps its focus on the practical question driving the mission: not whether Mars once had life, but whether the evidence for it can actually be found and measured. It is a straightforward account of how that search is conducted, instrument by instrument.