Red alert – how Britons are on a mission to check out life on Mars
UK scientists have key task of returning soil samples safely while avoiding any ‘War of the Worlds’ viruses
BRITISH scientists are launching a daring mission to Mars to bring back samples of soil which could prove that life once existed on the Red Planet.
In 2020, Nasa’s new rover will land on Mars and begin drilling into the surface for core samples. But it is experts at Airbus in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, who have been tasked with getting the precious cargo back to Earth.
The team is designing a second rover which will launch in 2026 to collect Nasa’s samples, load them on to a rocket and fire them into orbit to be collected by a spacecraft and brought home.
Bringing alien samples back to Earth is fraught with risks that Martian bacteria or viruses could escape, so scientists are designing a re-entry module which can withstand crash-landing in the Utah desert at 2,000 G-force and speeds of up to 24,000mph.
Alastair Wayman, advanced projects engineer at Airbus, said: “If you design the re-entry system to rely on parachutes softening the landing and they fail, as has happened before, then it will land, it will crack, and you will ruin the samples. They are mostly worried about contamination, like when a cold killed the aliens in War of the Worlds.
“The samples will need to be in quarantine. There are new facilities that are going to have to be built which are modelled on the labs that handle dangerous diseases like anthrax, as at the minute we don’t know what these samples are going to be like; default is to be very careful with them.”
The €4.45million (£3.9million) project has been commissioned by the European Space Agency (ESA), which is working alongside Nasa on the sample return mission.
The Mars 2020 rover will break new ground, literally, by not only looking for signs of habitable conditions on Mars, but also digging down beneath the surface to search for evidence of ancient microbial life itself.
The Mars sample return lander is due to leave in 2026 carrying the retrieval rover which, once on the surface, will travel around 10 miles to collect the 36 cores.
“We’ll then bring them back to the lander and park in front of it. On board there will be a robotic arm which will grab the samples from us and transfer them to the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) which is, essentially, a big rocket,” said Mr Wayman.
“That part not only has to grab it, but it has to make sure that there is no contamination from the surface of Mars that is transferred on to parts that will come back to Earth. It is hoped the samples will be back on Earth by 2030, when they can be analysed by state-ofthe art equipment which is too big to send to Mars to carry out tests in situ.”
Neither Britain nor the ESA has successfully landed on Mars before, with both the Beagle 2 and Schiaparelli probes crashing on to the planet.
David Parker, director of human and robotic exploration at the ESA, said: “Bringing samples back from Mars is essential in more than one way. First, to understand why Mars, although it is the planet that is most similar to Earth, took a very different evolutionary path to Earth, and second, to fully comprehend the Martian environment in order to allow humans to one day work and live on the Red Planet.”