When scientists’ latest robbery mission is looking for fossilized microscopic life on the Red Planet, how will scientists know if they have found it?
NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover will be the agency’s ninth mission to land on the Red Planet. In addition to characterizing the planet’s geology and climate, paving the way for human exploration beyond the moon, the rover is focused on astrobiology, or the study of life in the universe. Perseverance has the task of looking for signs that microbial lives lived on Mars billions of years ago. It will collect stone core samples in metal tubes, and future missions will bring these samples back to Earth for deeper investigation.
“To quote Carl Sagan,” said Gentry Lee, chief engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Planetary Science Directorate: “If we were to stare at a camera, we would know that there is currently a current and certainly old life is on Mars, but based on according to our experiences from the past, such an event is highly unlikely. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the discovery that life exists elsewhere in the universe would certainly be extraordinary. ”
Mission 2020 mission scientists believe that Jezero Crater, the landing site for perseverance, could be home to such evidence. They know that Jezero was the site of a large lake 3.5 billion years ago, complete with its own river delta. They believe that although the water has long since disappeared, somewhere within the 28-kilometer (45-kilometer-wide) crater, or perhaps along the edge of 2,000 meters (610 meters), biotech drawings (proof that life once existed there) could wait.
“We expect the best places to look for bio-signatures will be in Jezero’s lake or in coastal deposits covered with carbonate minerals, which are especially good for preserving certain types of fossilized life on earth,” said Ken Williford, deputy project scientist for the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover mission at JPL. “But if we’re looking for evidence of ancient microbes in an ancient foreign world, it’s important to keep an open mind.”
NASA’s fifth rover to the fourth planet from the sun carries a new set of scientific tools to build on the discoveries of NASA’s Curiosity rover, which found that parts of Mars could support microbial life billions of years ago.
Hunting for biotechnology
Any hunt for bio-signatures will include the cameras of the Rover, especially Mastcam-Z (on the mast of the Rover), which can zoom in to explore scientifically interesting targets. The mission’s scientific team can instruct Perseverance’s SuperCam instrument – also on the mast – to fire a laser at a promising target and generate a small plasma cloud that can be analyzed to determine its chemical composition. determined. If the information is interesting, the team can order the robotic arm of the Rover to take a closer look.
To do this, Perseverance will rely on one of the two instruments on the revolver at the end of the arm. PIXL, the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry), will use its small but powerful X-ray to search for potential chemical fingerprints of past life. The SHERLOC (the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) instrument has its own laser and can detect concentrations of organic molecules and minerals formed in aqueous environments. Together, SHERLOC and PIXL will provide high-resolution maps of elements, minerals, and molecules in the rocks and sediments of Mars, enabling astrobiologists to assess their composition and determine the most promising nucleus they can collect.
A firm lasting hope of the science team is to find a surface mark that can be attributed to nothing but the ancient microbial life. One such feature may be something like a stromatolite. On Earth, stromatolites are undulating, rocky hills formed long ago by microbial life along ancient shorelines and in other environments where metabolic energy and water were abundant. Such a striking feature would be difficult to obtain geological processes.
“Yes, there are certain shapes that form in rocks, where it is very difficult to imagine an environment without life that can cause the shape to form,” Williford said. “But there are chemical or geological mechanisms that can cause dome-shaped rock layers, as we usually consider a stromatolite.”
Enter Perseverance’s sample cache system. The collection of steamboat-sized planetary gearboxes, planetary gearboxes and sensors is one of the most intricate, capable and cleanest mechanisms ever sent into space. With this, the scientific team will collect the most intriguing samples they can find, store in sample tubes and later deposit so that future missions can collect the sample tubes and fly back to earth for analysis.
“The instrumentation needed to finally prove microbial life definitively on Mars is too large and complicated to bring to Mars,” said Bobby Braun, the Mars Sample Return program manager at JPL. “That’s why NASA is working with the European Space Agency on a multi-mission effort, called Mars Sample Return, to retrieve the samples that gather perseverance and bring them back to Earth for study in laboratories around the world.”
And if that happens, monsters from Mars’ Perseverance Rover can tell us that life existed elsewhere in the universe billions of years ago. But it can also indicate the opposite. And what then?
‘We have strong evidence that Jezero Crater once had the ingredients for life. “Even if we come to the conclusion after the retrospective sample analysis that the lake was uninhabited, we will have learned something important about the scope of life in the cosmos,” said Williford. “Whether Mars was ever a living planet or not, it is essential to understand how rocky planets like us form and evolve. Why did our own planet remain hospitable when Mars became a desolate wasteland? ‘
Perseverance may not be the last word on whether the Red Planet ever contained life, but the data it collects and the discoveries it makes will play a key role in achieving the result.
Mankind has been focusing on Mars since Galileo became the first person to see it through a telescope in 1609. Did it ever have life? The answer may be waiting for us somewhere in the Jezero crater. NASA’s Perseverance Rover will start figuring out tomorrow.
More about the mission
An important goal of Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the geology and climate of the planet, pave the way for the exploration of the Red Planet by man, and be the first mission to collect Mars rock and regolith and place it in the closet.
Subsequent missions by NASA in collaboration with ESA (European Space Agency) would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 mission is part of a larger program that includes missions to the moon as a way to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. After NASA returns to the moon by 2024, NASA will establish a sustained human presence on and around the moon by 2028 through NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration plans.
JPL, which is run for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and managed the operations of the Perseverance Rover.
For more information on perseverance:
mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/
nasa.gov/perseverance
For more information on NASA’s Mars missions, go to:
https://www.nasa.gov/mars
News Media Contacts
DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
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Alana Johnson / Gray Hautaluoma
NASA Headquarters, Washington
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