IS THERE LIFE ON MARS?
MARION McMULLEN finds out more about the Red Planet
1 Nasa’s Perseverance rover, left, released the first audio recorded on the surface of Mars this week and images from the landing site show the red rocky surface with mountains and a delta visible in the distance. The car-sized robotic spacecraft successfully touched down on February 18 and it is searching for evidence of ancient life and collecting rock and soil samples for possible return to Earth.
2 America has successfully landed a spacecraft on Martian soil nine times now since 1976. Its InSight and Curiosity rovers are still operational. Perserverance was named by schoolchildren following a nationwide contest.
3 Technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, below, is keen to reach Mars and even hopes to live there himself one day. His firm, SpaceX, has been working closely with Nasa and the 49-year-old dreams of establishing a self-sustaining city, complete with iron foundries and even pizzerias.
4 The European Space Agency, along with the Russian Roscosmos, is hoping to send its first rover, named after English chemist Rosalind Franklin, to Mars. Originally planned for launch last summer, the ExoMars mission has been postponed for at least two years as a number of key tests still need to be carried out.
5 Six other spacecraft are currently observing Mars from above, including three belonging to the US, two European and one from India.
6 China tried to reach the Red Planet in 2011, sending an orbiter with a Russian mission, but the spacecraft failed to make it out of Earth’s orbit. Their robotic spacecraft Tianwen-1 mission, left, includes an orbiter and a rover and went into orbit on February 10. Its aim is to explore for underground water as well as searching for evidence of possible ancient life.
7 The United Arab Emirates sent a probe to Mars last year and it reached the planet on February 9. Amal – or Hope – is the first interplanetary mission for the Arab world and aims to look at the upper atmosphere and monitor climate change for at least two years.
8 Several movie blockbusters have been made about man’s bid to explore and live on Mars. Matt Damon, right, starred in 2015 movie The Martian about the dangers of surviving on the Red Planet. Several scenes were filmed in a desert valley in Jordan and the site was also used as a location for Mars in 2000 movie Red Planet featuring Val Kilmer.
9 Mars is seen as an ideal candidate for exploration because it is close by in our solar system and is the most similar to Earth. Evidence points to it once being full of water, warmer and with a thicker atmosphere, making it a potentially habitable environment. The dust on the planet gives Mars its reddish glow.
10 Don’t start planning a trip just yet. The Red Planet has almost no atmosphere and the average day is 37 minutes longer than a day on Earth. Gravity is only about 40% of Earth’s and one Martian year lasts nearly two Earth years because it takes longer to orbit the sun.