Was there ever life on Mars?
CURRENT MISSION: PERSEVERANCE ROVER WILL LOOK FOR SIGNS OF MICROBES
Two microphones will attempt to record the Martian soundscape.
Seven months in space, a mission that was decades in the making and cost billions of dollars, all to answer the question: was there ever life on Mars?
Nasa’s Perseverance rover prepared for touchdown on the Red Planet yesterday to search for telltale signs of microbes that might have existed there billions of years ago, when conditions were warmer and wetter than they are today.
Over the course of several years, it will attempt to collect 30 rock and soil samples in sealed tubes, to be eventually sent back to Earth some time in the 2030s for lab analysis.
“It’s of course trying to make significant progress in answering one of the questions that has been with us for many centuries, namely: are we alone in the universe?” Nasa associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen said on Wednesday.
Perseverance is the largest and most sophisticated vehicle sent to Mars. About the size of an SUV, it weighs a ton, is equipped with a two metre-long robotic arm, has 19 cameras, two microphones and a suite of cutting-edge instruments to assist in its scientific goals.
Before it can embark on its lofty quest, it will first need to survive the dreaded “seven minutes of terror” – the risky landing procedure that has scuppered nearly 50% of all missions to the planet.
The spacecraft was expected to careen into the Martian atmosphere at 20 000km/h, protected by its heat shield.
It will then deploy a supersonic parachute the size of a little league baseball field, before firing up an eight-engined jetpack to slow its descent even further and then lower the rover carefully to the ground on a set of cables.
Scientists believe that 3.5 billion years ago the crater was home to a river that flowed into a lake, depositing sediment in a delta.
“We have very strong evidence that Mars could have supported life in its distant past,” Ken Williford, the mission’s deputy project scientist said.
But if past exploration has determined the planet was once habitable, Perseverance is tasked with determining whether it was actually inhabited. It will begin drilling its first samples in summer, and it will traverse first the delta, then the
ancient lake shore, and finally the edges of the crater. It will deploy new instruments to scan for organic matter, map chemical composition, and zap rocks with a laser to study the vapour.
Despite its state-of-the-art technology, bringing samples back to Earth is crucial because of anticipated ambiguities in the specimens it documents. For example, fossils from ancient microbes may look similar to patterns caused by precipitation.
Before getting to the main mission, Nasa wants to run sev
eral experiments. Tucked under Perseverance’s belly is a small helicopter drone that will attempt the first powered flight on another planet. The helicopter will have to achieve lift in an atmosphere that’s 1% the density of Earth’s.
Another experiment involves converting oxygen from Mars’ primarily carbon dioxide atmosphere, using electrolysis to produce 10 grams of oxygen an hour. Two microphones will meanwhile attempt to record the Martian soundscape. –