60 Minutes - 5/31/2020: The Promise of Plasma, Spilling Across The Border, Perseverance

Episode Date: June 1, 2020

Until a vaccine is found, plasma therapy has been helping COVID-19 victims get better. Bill Whitaker has the story. Raw sewage from Tijuana is appearing on southern California's coasts. Lesley Stahl reports. And NASA is attempting to find signs of ancient life on Mars with the launch of Perseverance. Anderson Cooper has the story on this week's "60 Minutes." To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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you can count on the PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard to help you earn the most PC Optimum points everywhere you shop. The PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard, the card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit pcfinancial.ca for details. A steady stream of plasma donors has been rolling up to Dr. Donato's clinic. One by one, they're hooked up to a machine that spins and separates their blood cells in a process called plasmapheresis. What's left is this gold-colored liquid, plasma. It's mostly water and, in this case, millions of antibodies. How quickly do you expect patients to respond to this therapy?

A few days. A few days. Three, four, five days. This is where the Tijuana River crosses the border into the United States. This cement structure was built to contain flooding from rainfall. But this isn't just rainwater. It's a toxic mix of raw sewage from neighboring Tijuana, draining into Southern California on lower ground, eventually emptying into the Pacific Ocean. So effectively, it's like a toilet flushing straight into this

river valley. Has anyone ever brought back something from Mars? No. It'll be the first round-trip adventure to any other planet. Four previous Mars rovers have paved the way for this mission. The last rover, named Curiosity, has been exploring and sending back images like this for eight years. But Perseverance is the first rover that will be able to look for evidence of ancient life and collect samples that NASA plans to bring back to Earth. That does not sound possible. Totally possible. I'm Leslie Stahl.

I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill.

When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer groceries that over-deliver. This past week, America passed a grim marker. More than 100,000 people have now died of COVID-19. Until there are new drugs available to treat it, experimental therapies remain the only option.

One currently being tested at numerous hospitals is actually very old, more than 100 years old. It's called convalescent plasma therapy. It relies on blood plasma from people who have recovered from disease whose immune systems have produced virus-killing antibodies. The plasma is given to ill patients and has been shown to speed their recovery. At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in New Jersey, Hackensack University Medical Center rushed to stand up a distinct plasma study of its own, zeroing in on donors with the most potent antibodies. It began April 4th, and we joined them just days later to witness their breakneck battle against this deadly disease with the promise of plasma.

It's early evening in Hackensack, New Jersey, just a 30-minute drive from midtown Manhattan. Medical oncologist Michelle Donato, the principal investigator of the therapeutic study, is armed with an arsenal of donated blood plasma loaded with potent antibodies. That is convalescent for SARS-CoV-2. Dr. Donato is engaged in an all-out battle to save patients who have been flooding the hospital for two months now. He's really, really, really sick. From the relentless onslaught of the killer virus. We're going to give you the plasma, okay? You're going to be fine.

This is what hope looks like in the depths of despair. You're watching this unfold in real time. What's that like for you? It's really terrible. I mean, we want to get out of this. And maybe there's fewer patients coming into the hospital, but they're still suffering, they're still dying. We have to find a solution. I think we're just a piece of that puzzle. Until we have an effective vaccine,

we're going to take the position that we need drugs. And right now, our best drug is the one that's manufactured by those patients and those individuals who've recovered from this disease. David Perlin is a biomedical researcher and chief scientific officer at Hackensack Meridian Health Center for Discovery and Innovation. Have you done any more dilutions? He has traveled to hot zones around the world responding to infectious disease outbreaks, including SARS-1 and pandemic flus. He's also Dr. Donato's partner in this search for something to fight this virus. There are other therapies being tested out there. Why did you decide to focus on plasma therapy? If you're looking for something that you know is antiviral, antibodies we know are antiviral. It's just a question of how do we

identify those individuals who are producing high quality antibodies that either kill or neutralize the virus. In early April, David Perlin and Dr. Donato got expedited approval from the Food and Drug Administration to start their study to collect and test the most powerful antibodies against the virus. What makes what you're doing here unique? So what we wanted to see is can we handpick the best donor? See, in transplant, we handpick the best donors for leukemia all the time. So let's do the same thing for plasma. So we select donors who appear to have had the best immune response. As chief of stem cell transplantation and cellular immunotherapy

at Hackensack's John Thurer Cancer Center, Dr. Michelle Donato has spent her career matching donors to recipients for stem cell transplants, years of experience fighting cancer she's now using to combat this novel coronavirus. Who are the best donors? It looks like about 20 percent of people have really, really an extraordinarily good immune response. And what we're looking at is if giving a quantity of neutralizing antibodies is the best way to approach it. But that's what this study will tell us.

So far, thousands of COVID-19 survivors have offered to donate plasma for the Hackensack University Medical Center study. Yeah, we can do a donation at like 4, 430, absolutely. But fewer than one-third of them have qualified. Each donor must meet the threshold of having no remaining trace of the virus, and they must produce an extraordinary number of antibodies that kill the virus. You call this the hot zone. It's like finding a needle in a haystack. And David Perlin is finding and testing those antibodies here in a secure level three biocontainment lab designed to work with highly contagious pathogens. Are you working with other

viruses now or is this just for COVID-19? Just COVID-19 right now. Down the hall, we were able to see what the research scientists saw, but without having to don spacesuits. In the first slide are healthy cells. In the second, those cells have been ravaged by the coronavirus. The third shows what happens when the potent antibodies are introduced. The virus appears to be vanquished. So what does that tell you? This tells me I have an antiviral. Antibodies that have the potential to be protective,

this is what I want. I want these antibodies at a high level that we can then use for our therapy. David Perlin's lab delivers a list of potential donors to Dr. Donato's inbox. She huddles with staff to review possible recruits. DR. PAULA DONATO, He's a four-star A.B. DR. PAUL SOLMAN, I know.

I'm looking here. DR. PAULA DONATO, He's very important. Yeah. Let's bring him in. DR. PAUL SOLMAN, So, right here. PAUL SOLMAN, A steady stream of plasma donors has been rolling up to Dr. Donato's

clinic. One by one, they're hooked up to a machine that spins and separates their blood cells in a process called plasmapheresis. What's left is this gold-colored liquid, plasma. It's mostly water, and in this case, millions of antibodies. Donors are rated on a scale of one to four stars. The small number of recovered COVID-19 patients who produce antibodies 10, 30, even 50 times more than others are called super donors. No, breathing wasn't bad. We watched as Dr. Donato's team drew the precious fluid they call liquid gold from one super donor at a time. What was going through your mind?

Gosh, I hope his vein is good enough. The basics. The basics. We met some of her super donors. Each had different COVID-19 symptoms, but they all wanted the same thing, to help. Hey, Bill. Hello there. Dan Walsh is a retired currency broker. Oh, it's great. It gives me bragging rights to my friends.

Say, I saved a life. You didn't do anything today. Rick Lociavo is an investment manager. I mean, there's nothing I've done in my life to have these antibodies. But the fact that I have them, maybe I was blessed with them to help somebody. Christopher Jordan is a civil engineer. I just feel like we should do this. Like we should be giving back during these kind of times. Like if you can help your neighbor, help your neighbor. Walter DiMattea is a fabricator. It'd be a great feeling to know that I helped someone. Absolutely.

I hope it does. Each donor provides one half liter of plasma to go to one COVID-19 patient. Dr. Donato is testing whether the best chance of recovery depends on timing. So let's see if we can help you out. When the patient receives the powerful antibodies, she's focused on a crucial window, the gap between infection and the virus taking over the body. It's during that gap that the virus causes damage.

The virus invades the cells, it invades the lungs, and it causes tissue damage. From tissue damage, there's a cascade of inflammation that then follows, and that's what makes the patient so sick. So by preventing the virus from invading the tissues, invading the lungs, you help prevent that second wave of inflammation. How quickly do you expect patients to respond to this therapy? A few days. A few days? Three, four, five days. Segundo, we have your plasma, okay? The 15th patient in the study was a gravely ill 37-year-old construction worker and father of five, Segundo Huaman.

Get it prepared and he can give it to you. Dr. Donato told us she administered the plasma, hoping to keep him off a ventilator, often the hospital's last tool. We agreed not to show the faces of ill patients. This footage was shot by the hospital's staff photographer. All right, you hang it there, okay? The next day, Dr. Donato delivered the promise of plasma to Jose Ramirez, a 49-year-old father of three who manages a New Jersey bagel factory.

He had been in the COVID unit for a week. We'll come check on you tomorrow, okay? All right, high five. No one knows better what these patients are going through than Robert Robinson, a 44-year-old nursing director in the hospital's emergency department. He described the virus washing over New Jersey like a tsunami and patients flooding his ER. In the beginning, they would trickle in, but it started to build like 10, 20. There was one point we would get 25 in an hour that were coming in. He was felled by the virus in March

and ended up in his own hospital. He told us he was close to death. They told me, you're lucky that you were able to pull through. It was close. Before the plasma therapy study was up and running, Robert Robinson recovered and was welcomed back by his colleagues. He offered to donate his plasma because he believes in the value of this therapy. What do you hope to happen? I hope we start to get patients discharged sooner and healthier. I hope it works. I pray it works. I'm going to go right in here. And it's showing early promise for many of Dr. Donato's patients.

Remember Segundo Huaman? Hello. How are you? How are you feeling? I don't even recognize you. He was one of Dr. Donato's critically ill patients. He was close to being put on a ventilator before he got an infusion of antibodies. She was amazed at how he responded.

Pain in your chest or your mark? No. You look good. Then we got to witness this. Jose Ramirez, the bagel factory manager, spent 11 days in the COVID unit. Four days after receiving the antibodies, he was reunited with his daughter.

I feel much better. I can feel my lungs opening. If you were to meet the donor, what would you say to him or her? So far, 31 of the 46 patients who received plasma in this study appear to have recovered more quickly than those who didn't. David Perlin cautions the study is a first step and more rigorous trials are needed, but he is encouraged by the early results. You're not seeing that with the general population? Oh, definitely not.

I mean, to go from being critically ill to going home is pretty dramatic. We don't typically see that now. Based on what you have seen so far, what does your gut tell you? My gut says that this is going to work. The initial response of the patients is incredibly encouraging. But as a scientist, I'm trained to be cautious. And so right now, this is our best approach. We're going to take it. We'll be aggressive with it. But we'll see how patients respond.

There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history.

I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. The term crisis on the border typically refers to immigration issues or drugs being smuggled into the country. But it has one more meaning,

as we discovered when we went to the border in early February. Tens of millions of gallons of raw sewage spill every year into the Tijuana River on the Mexican side and flow across the border right into Southern California, polluting the land, air, and sea. Mexico and the United States each thinks the other should be doing more to clean it up, with no effective solution found on either side of the border for decades. This is where the Tijuana River crosses the border into the United States.

This cement structure was built to contain flooding from rainfall. But this isn't just rainwater. It's a toxic mix of raw sewage from neighboring Tijuana, draining into Southern California on lower ground, eventually emptying into the Pacific Ocean. So effectively, it's like a toilet flushing straight into this river valley. Border Patrol agent Amber Craig took us on a tour of the sewage infiltration, showing us that what doesn't flush out to sea washes up on land. Mountains of plastic bottles, furniture, and tires. And this is a concern for us too, not just because it's debris and waste, but because

the mosquitoes love to nest in it. So it's a health concern and eyesore and it's hindering the Border Patrol's main mission. She took us to see President Trump's newly erected wall along the border. Just this six mile stretch cost an estimated $50 million. What we found is that under the wall, there's a network of basins and tunnels built 30 years ago to try to capture the sewage from Tijuana. The red dot is me next to Agent Amber Craig inside one of those concrete sewage collection basins. It's connected on either end to tunnels from Mexico to California that were constructed

right under the wall. So you think of the smugglers and the migrants building tunnels to go under the wall, but the U.S. government built this tunnel that goes under the wall. Yes, we built this so that the water would flow freely into the United States. It has to flow freely because four decades ago, the U.S. signed an agreement with Mexico not to cause backup flooding at this area of the border. These metal grates at the ends of the tunnel

let the water in while keeping the rubbish out. It typically works fine during dry weather, but not when it storms. The amount of water that comes through here comes through like a torrent. It is very, very dangerous. It is a raging river when it rains. With the tires and the barrels and everything. Full of debris and garbage, that's correct. It's very dangerous. The debris and garbage can hurtle down here with such force that Border Patrol agents have to open the grates to prevent the system from clogging.

That means trash flows into California unobstructed. It's also an opening for migrants. The purpose of the wall is being totally defeated by this obligation of yours to lift the grates. Well, yep, it does make it a little more challenging to have to have that open. Of course, we don't want to have it open. If they go through that tunnel, they're in the United States. If the grates have to be opened,

then we have to have a personnel, an agent, on the other side keeping an eye on the other side. That's correct. How do the smugglers know that the grates are lifted? They watch. They watch? Sure. There are smugglers watching us probably right now.

Migrants are routinely caught risking their lives crossing in the sewage. Some need to be rescued and decontaminated. Let me read you a list that we found of stuff that is in this water. Fecal coliforms, drug-resistant bacteria, benzene, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, medical waste, and DDT, which has been banned for years in the United States. Yes, ma'am. I hear that sometimes the water turns funny colors. It does.

We've had bright, bright purple, a bright pink, neon green, dark black. So the migrants are going into this. Yes, ma'am. And the patrol agents are going into this. And are they getting sick? Agents have reported various health injuries. Rashes are very common. Stomach issues.

We've had one agent who had a flesh-eating bacteria and he almost lost his arm. How angry are you and the other agents? We're frustrated, very frustrated. Agents know our job is dangerous. We've signed up for a job where we could be shot at, where we could die in a car accident, and we accept that. Nobody thought that they were going to come here and be exposed to this, to the sewage and the chemicals and the smell. Congress just allocated $300 million to address the sewage issue all along the border, a fraction of what's needed, especially here,

because of the rapidly growing population of Tijuana. It is a difficult situation. We're having to deal with another country. And the city of Tijuana is just a huge city. It's overpopulated. Their infrastructure isn't prepared to handle this kind of flow. So it just comes right over the border. The local Mexican sewage authority invited us to one of the main

treatment pumps in Tijuana. It often breaks down due to mechanical failures, so workers have to wade underground in black sludge to repair the buckling facility. While we were there, one worker got so overwhelmed by toxic fumes, he required medical attention. According to the Mexican authority, the last line of defense keeping the sewage out of the U.S. here is a small crew of sanitation workers who unclog drains by hand along the border. We found one of them, a man named Abel, clearing trash with a rake. Some of the wastewater that does get collected is pumped into these giant pools six miles south of the border, where the sewage is supposed to be treated and discharged through this massive pipe

as clean water into the ocean. But the facility hasn't worked for years. So what you're looking at is untreated sewage emptying directly into the Pacific. We stood by the torrent with Faye Crevichet, an environmentalist with Wild Coast, a watchdog group of concerned citizens from both sides of the border. How much sewage are we talking about? The local authorities say that it's 25 million gallons a day. We think it's 40 million gallons. And it's just gushing, gushing, gushing out.

That's what we have here. Making matters worse, entire shanty towns have popped up in Tijuana's canyons along the border. Many of these makeshift shacks were thrown up by people who moved here for jobs at factories created by the North American Free Trade Agreement. These factories are dumping their chemicals. Sure, we have laws, but there is no enforcement. So why spend money? The problem is this. These factories come here because it's cheap. They're going to pay the workers $8 a day. And this is the result. This is where the workers

live. These houses have no services, no electricity, no plumbing. No plumbing. Nothing. This stream, this entire stream, is just raw sewage. Sewage. When it rains, what happens to this stream? It grows. They have a whole river. You see all the lying garbage all around it? Yeah. Well, it takes it with.

We saw tires everywhere, a lot of them from California that were sold to Mexican car owners secondhand. When the tires wear out, many are used to prop up homes on the hillside or just get dumped and then get swept by the sewage right back to Southern California. We wondered where all the untreated sewage that emptied into the ocean goes. Well, we learned that it can flow right by a U.S. military training base. Hard to believe, but the Navy SEALs

are training right in the path of the sludge. Let me ask the SEALs, how many of you have gone swimming in that? All of us. All of you. Retired Naval Officer Mark West and four retired SEALs, Alex Lopez, Kyle Buckett, Bill Lyman, and Steve Viola, told us how the sewage impacts those training here. It wreaks havoc on your system.

Stomach aches, throwing up, I mean coming out both ends, fever, and you just have to suck it up and keep going. We've had classes of, you know, 38 to 42 guys contract it during their training cycle, and it's a very, it's a big challenge for us to deal with that. I contracted cellulitis, which is a bacterial staph infection. It just took off, and it started eating flesh on both my legs. They say that the most vulnerable are seal buds, those trying out to be seals, especially during hell week, five and a half days immersed in the ocean testing their endurance. Have you heard that during Hell Week, the buds now take prophylactic antibiotics?

Yes, I have heard that. You were a trainer. Do you ever say, these kids can't go in this today? I can smell it. I can see it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we have. We have. And then we have to transition to the bay or to a pool. There's no waves in the bay, and there's no waves in the pool. Are you seeing any reason for us to worry about your readiness?

I think that our readiness is being impacted. It is being impacted. Yeah, it is. The SEALs say the Navy, aware of the sewage issue, is monitoring the water quality. So we found it odd that it is spending a billion dollars to expand the SEALs training base much closer to the source of the pollution. We had outgrown the capacity of the buildings that we had, so that's why we moved down there. But were they taking the pollution into account? No. The Navy did do an environmental impact study. Yes. The Navy's main focus was to see how much we were going to impact the environment. It wasn't focused on

what the environment was going to impact on the Navy SEAL community. The Navy turned down our request for an interview, but recently told Congress in this report that the runoff is a concern, yet its impact has been infrequent and short-term, concluding that it is easily mitigated. Serge Daddina, mayor of Imperial Beach, the city on the south edge of the new base, doesn't buy it. They've ignored the health and safety of their own national security staff, and that's absolutely unacceptable. Did you ever get any health problems from the water? Yes. I have a tube in my ear because I had so many ear infections.

My kids have gotten sick. Our lifeguards have gotten sick. Pretty much every one of our council members have gotten sick. So it's devastated our city. In more ways than one, Imperial Beach is a surfing town, but its beaches are closed a third of the year or more due to the toxic sludge. I've got to spend my time hammering people in power to make sure they understand that dumping toxic waste on Navy SEALs and Border Patrol agents is a bad idea, and getting them to acknowledge that it's actually happening. If the Navy weighed in, do you think things would begin to happen?

Think if the Navy brass weighed in, this would be fixed tomorrow. Meanwhile, the Niagara of sewage keeps gushing, the grates keep opening, and Abel keeps at it with his rake. If you're tired of being cooped up and yearning for a getaway, have we got an adventure for you. It's a new mission to Mars, NASA's most ambitious one yet. The goal is to land a new vehicle, a high-tech rover, to search for signs of ancient life on the red planet and eventually bring that evidence back to Earth. Unmanned spacecraft have been exploring and photographing Mars for decades, but no one's ever discovered clear signs of life there or anywhere

else in the universe. NASA scientists now believe they've found a perfect place to look. Coronavirus could have derailed the whole mission, but so far the launch is still on schedule. Blastoff is less than two months away. Given all that's already happened, this new rover's name seems particularly appropriate. Perseverance. It'll take seven months and a journey of hundreds of millions of miles for Perseverance to get to Mars, the planet whose reddish hue, caused by rust particles in the rocks and soil, led the Romans to name it after their god of war.

Today, the surface of Mars is a radiation-filled desert. It's freezing, minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit on average. There are windswept sand dunes and outcroppings of rock that could easily be mistaken for parts of Arizona. Some of those rocks hold clues that suggest Mars may have been a lot like Earth billions of years ago, with lakes and rivers of water and the building blocks of life. Perseverance is really our first astrobiology mission to Mars, where we're actually searching not just for environments that may have once been habitable, but for evidence of the life that may have existed there in the past. Bobby Braun, the director of solar system exploration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says Perseverance is designed to be the first of three missions

that will be required in order to bring samples from Mars back to Earth. Has anyone ever brought back something from Mars? No. It'll be the first round-trip adventure to any other planet. Nearly eight years and $2.5 billion have been spent building Perseverance. Bobby Braun told us that if NASA misses a narrow three-week window to launch that begins on July 17th, it could cost half a billion dollars more and years of work. Because of the motion of the Earth and Mars about the sun, you can only send a spacecraft from Earth to Mars once every 26 months. And if we miss that window, we would have to wait till 2022 to try again.

You'd have to wait that long? Wow. I mean, there's not only a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of very smart people dedicating their lives to this. There's a lot of eyes on this. Yeah, the stakes are high from a number of vantage points. Four previous Mars rovers have paved the way for this mission. The last rover, named Curiosity, has been on Mars for eight years, of vantage points. Four previous Mars rovers have paved the way for this mission. The last rover, named Curiosity,

has been on Mars for eight years, sending back images like these while exploring an area known as the Gale Crater. But Perseverance is the first rover specifically outfitted to collect retrievable samples. Can I just do one more very small little bug? In early January, before there were any known cases of coronavirus in the U.S., NASA invited us to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where it's been

building Perseverance and the vehicles that will bring it to Mars. They were in what's called a clean room to keep them free of any dust particles or other contaminants that might jeopardize their mission. You can feel a little bit of metallic wire along the top. Deputy Project Manager Matt Wallace showed us how to put on the layers of protective equipment required before entering the clean room. Her cameras were wiped down thoroughly, and we got what's called an air shower. So that's the rover right there. It's bigger than you think it's going to be usually when you get close.

It's the heaviest, it's the most sophisticated, most capable vehicle that we've ever actually put on the surface of Mars. Perseverance is equipped with 25 cameras, 2 audio mics and 7 scientific instruments, many of them specifically designed to detect faint traces of ancient life on the surface of Mars. But the rover will also be testing out new technologies that astronauts may someday need to explore Mars and return back to Earth. One of them sits right inside this vehicle. It actually makes oxygen on Mars from the atmosphere for life support, obviously, but also that oxygen is useful as an oxidizer for fuel for the return trip for those astronauts.

Do you know that it is possible to make oxygen on Mars? We know that it is theoretically possible. We have simulated the conditions here, but we're going to take it to Mars and show that we can do it. I know this isn't the most important thing, but the hubcaps are really cool. Thank you, yeah. The rover also has this small helicopter, which it can drop on the surface of Mars. If it works, it would be the first vehicle ever to fly in the atmosphere of another planet. One of the most important parts of the rover is

its powerful robotic arm, seen here in time-lapse video taken during a test. As this NASA animation shows, if Perseverance finds fossils or other signs of ancient life, that robotic arm will be able to drill into the rock, collect core samples, and place them in specially designed super-sterilized tubes. And this is what the tube looks like, actually. It's a titanium tube, and we're hoping to bring back 20, 30 samples.

We're able to keep the sample very clean because this is really the only part of the spacecraft that the sample will touch, which is very important for the science of the mission. So you don't want any dirt or anything that would compromise the sample? That's exactly right. For that reason, the actual tubes that will go to Mars were being kept in restricted areas nearby. These are even cleaner clean rooms, where workers wearing double layers of protective gear

were repeatedly sterilizing the tubes with heat and chemicals. The insides of those tubes, NASA says, are some of the cleanest things on Earth. A team of NASA scientists will decide where Perseverance goes and what kind of rock samples it'll collect. You only have 20 or 30 samples that you'll be able to get. I mean, you've got to pick some good ones. That's right. Is that scary? No, it's exciting. Katie Stack Morgan worked as a geologist on the Curiosity rover mission and is a deputy project scientist for Perseverance. If there was life on Mars, how long ago was it? So we think it was probably at least three billion years ago on the surface.

You're talking about not actual Martians, but organisms. We're thinking microbial life. Very simple, single-cell organisms, that kind of thing. What would that look like? Well, it can take all kinds of forms, you know, small tubes and little circular fossils, microfossils. You know, we have examples of this from Earth. Most rocks are layers, very flat, horizontal layers, but sometimes you get very interesting shapes like this,

and these microbes were responsible for the interesting shapes that we think formed that rock. So something like this, you wouldn't be surprised to actually see? We would be absolutely delighted to discover something that looked like that. Here's where NASA thinks it has the best chance of finding signs of life on Mars. It's called the Jezero Crater. No rover has ever been there before. It doesn't look like much today, but 3.5 billion years ago,

scientists believe it had the makings of a microbial Eden, a 30-mile-wide lake with a river flowing in, a river flowing out, and a rich river delta. To know that in this particular spot on Mars we had water here, enough water and for long enough to fill this 30-mile diameter crater, is a big deal for us and says that this is a special place. If all goes according to plan, Perseverance will arrive at the Jezero crater in February 2021. It'll explore the area for at least two years. As this NASA animation shows, the rock samples Perseverance collects

will most likely be left on the surface of Mars. But that's just the beginning of what one NASA official has described as probably the most complex scientific mission the agency has ever undertaken. Years later, a new rover will arrive to fetch the tubes, put them on a small rocket ship, and launch them into orbit around the red planet. Another spacecraft will already be waiting there in orbit, and the samples will be passed to it in a container the size of a soccer ball. The samples will then be transported back to our atmosphere and dropped off on Earth.

That does not sound possible. Totally possible. I guarantee you. So listen, many of these pieces we've done in Peace Part before. The return part of the mission is conceived as a joint venture with the European Space Agency and is yet to be fully approved or funded. Is there an estimate of the cost? We're working on that, but there's not a final number today. We're in the midst of a pandemic, obviously an economic crisis. Is sending a rover to Mars, is that a good idea at this time? I would say this is precisely the right time to make that investment. If there's anything that this pandemic has taught us is the importance of science and technology.

In March, as Perseverance was being prepared for launch at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA went into lockdown, along with much of the rest of the country because of coronavirus. Was there a time when you thought maybe you would have to cancel the launch? Well, certainly. You know, when it was first starting up here in the U.S., we were all naturally very concerned, first and foremost, about the safety of our team. So we took time to kind of regroup and put forward a new plan. Under that new plan, 90 percent of NASA employees are working from home, including Matt Gildner, who's driving the Curiosity rover on Mars right now

from his apartment in Los Angeles. Is it a little weird driving the rover from your one-bedroom apartment? Oh, yeah, it's definitely weird. I mean, normally I'm used to being inside a room with about 25 people, and we're all, you know, we have kind of the work hats on, and you don't have a distraction like a dump truck picking up trash outside or your dog barking. Can I see your dog? Yeah, where's Kylie at? Oh, she's sleeping on the couch right now.

If Kylie jumped on your lap or hit one of the keys, would the rover fly off a cliff? No. Our process involves developing a plan throughout the whole day. After everything is complete and integrated and checked, we will bundle it up and send it to the spacecraft. So that's the point in time where we will be able to catch any paw prints on our commands. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would imagine you're spending a good amount of your mind every day on Mars and not in this pandemic. In a sense, every day you're journeying to Mars. That's true. Yeah, we get to have our own little escape on another planet. The team working on Perseverance is persevering as well.

About 80 people are on site at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida getting the rover ready for launch. The competition, though, is heating up. The U.S. isn't the only country getting ready to go to Mars this summer. China is preparing to send its first orbiter and rover, and the United Arab Emirates plans to send an orbiter as well. The European and Russian space agencies have created this rover that they plan to launch in two years. Do you see this as a race to find evidence of life? I see it more as we're all working together to answer this question,

and we're doing it in slightly different ways. I think it really is a human endeavor. It's a human question that we're after. If, in fact, ultimately it turns out that there was microbial life on Mars billions of years ago, that's cool, but why does it actually matter? The idea that we would find evidence of life that wasn't on our own planet, alien life, would show that it can occur in other places and that there are other forms of life.

If there's microbial life, there's no reason there couldn't be a higher form of life or a different form of life. That's right. I think the doors swing wide open to the possibilities for how life could have evolved elsewhere in the universe. And it may take us some time before we're able to find that, but if we find life on another planet, we'll know that it can happen elsewhere. It's not just here. I think it'd be a real paradigm shift in terms of how we think about our place in the universe. This past week, Americans made their first tentative steps from beneath the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, only to be confronted by a much older toxic threat to life

in this country, racial injustice. This time, it began with the death of George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police officers. The image of a man begging for breath as an officer presses a knee to his neck and the life out of him is indelible. As the week continued, the rage sparked by Monday's death on a Minnesota street, ignited protests and in some cases violence in cities across the country. This virus of racism and injustice has threatened and infected America for 400 years. There is no antidote, but we desperately need to heal from it.

I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.