LIFE ON MARS?
Mission lifts off to solve mystery ... but answer is still a decade away
THE best hope of answering the elusive question – is there life on Mars? – blasted off yesterday.
Nasa’s Mars rover, Perseverance, was launched not just to look for signs of water or the ‘building blocks’ of existence – but for life itself, in the form of Martian microbes.
Armed with state of the art cameras and instruments, the rover will pore over Martian rock and soil for fossilised bacteria, or organic material they have left behind.
Sadly, the answer to the big question is still a decade away, with the mission to retrieve the samples collected by the rover not expected to return to Earth until 2031.
But Perseverance will also help pave the way for the first people to make the trek to Mars – a minimum of 33.9million miles – which experts hope will happen by 2050.
The rover will carry material from space suits to see how it holds up against radiation, and will try to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. The mission, launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida, is the first to look directly for alien life on Mars since Nasa’s Viking landers in 1976.
The Viking project was the first US mission to successfully land on the planet and send images of its surface back to earth.
In this latest mission, up to 36 precious soil and rock samples collected from the surface of Mars can only be analysed in depth if they are returned safely to Earth.
And a separate mission, with British involvement, to fetch the samples from Mars will launch in 2026 and land there in 2028. A ‘fetch rover’ developed in Stevenage by British company Airbus will meet Perseverance to collect the samples before they are transferred to a European Space Agency spacecraft.
If, as is planned, the ‘fetch rover’ returns to earth by 2031, it would make history – as no spacecraft has ever successfully returned from Mars. Nasa has only managed to get a handful of functioning probes and rovers on the Martian surface – and more than half of all spacecraft sent there have blown up or crashed.
Beagle 2, a British mission in 2003, landed on the planet but was unable to send data back to Earth. And Nasa’s Curiosity rover, which launched in 2011, has found some of the key chemical ingredients for life, including oxygen, carbon and hydrogen on Mars.
Perseverance faces a sevenmonth journey to the Red Planet and the ‘seven minutes of terror’ it will take to land in February.
Landing on Mars is notoriously difficult because of its thin and dynamic atmosphere and dust storms that rage on its surface.
Nasa chief Jim Bridenstine said: ‘There’s a reason we call the robot Perseverance – because going to Mars is hard. We have a history of doing amazing things in the most challenging times, and this is this is no different.’
Sue Horne, head of exploration at the UK Space Agency, said: ‘This mission could be more complicated than the moon landings in some ways.’ She said landing on the planet ‘is not easy, as we can see from the craters left by spacecraft which have crashed into it and been lost,’ and that radiation, overnight temperatures of minus 125C can cause further problems.
Perseverance is the third flight to Mars this month, after China last week launched Tianwen-1, and a United Arab Emirates orbiter blasted off on a rocket from Japan last Monday. The rover, which has 19 cameras, two microphones and a two-metre robotic arm, will look for primitive life as it investigates the 28-mile wide Jezero crater – where fossilised microbes may be preserved.
The mission will also trial a battery-powered helicopter called Ingenuity, which could guide future rovers and access remote areas.
‘More complex than moon landing’