Mars rover may have found signs of life
I’ve written before about NASA’S new rover on Mars, called Perseverance, and its potential to learn whether ancient life once existed on another planet. Fast forward many months, and that potential is becoming a reality.
On Sept. 1, Perseverance extended its robotic arm, with a rotary drill at the end, and collected its first rock core sample. The core is about the size of a piece of chalk and comes from a rock that appears to be hardened lava. This sample can be dated using radioactive elements, including uranium and thorium which exist in trace amounts in lava rocks.
Of course, Perseverance doesn’t have the advanced equipment necessary to detect and characterize the radioactivity – that would need to be done here on Earth. So, NASA is working with the European Space Agency on the Mars Sample Return campaign, which would collect these core samples from the surface of Mars and transport them back to Earth.
In order to preserve the core sample, it was transferred to a titanium tube with an airtight seal. Over time, Perseverance will return to the location where it landed and deposit the sample tubes for pickup by a future mission (still being planned).
To make this sample retrieval program successful, a lot of things will need to go right. First, NASA needs to land a retrieval station that will likely have a small rocket to transport the sample into space above Mars.
This may sound simple in concept, but technically it’s very challenging. The transport rocket would need to come with its own launch pad and fuel, which can burn in the oxygen-deficient atmosphere of Mars.
Next, you need to have a satellite orbiting Mars that can catch the transported samples autonomously. In other words, engineers need to build a smart satellite that can react to any slight change in the trajectory of the samples and catch them before they fall back to the surface of Mars.
Remote control by humans is not possible due to the many minutes of lag time of transmitting information backand-forth from Earth to Mars.
Finally, there needs to be a way to get the samples back to Earth, which might entail a rocket fly-by. Parking a rocket in orbit around Mars would require a lot of extra fuel to break out of Mars orbit.
Are there any rocket scientists out there (reading this column) willing to calculate the trajectory of a fly-by mission that could return to Earth, or an engineer with a great idea to build a mechanism for the fly-by pick up of the sample container?
The Mars Sample Return will test the limits of human ingenuity. But isn’t that what the space program is all about?
Kenneth Hicks is a professor of physics and astronomy at Ohio University in Athens.hicks@ohio.edu