- 3061 - MARS - how to find life? NASA’s Perseverance rover is there on Mars, February 21, 2021. One part of the Perseverance rover mission is to search for fossilized microscopic life on Mars. How will scientists know whether they've found it?
-------------------------- 3061 - MARS - how to find life?
- NASA's Mars Perseverance rover will be the agency's ninth mission to land on the Red Planet. Along with characterizing the planet's geology and climate, and paving the way for human exploration beyond the Moon, the rover is focused on astrobiology, or the study of life throughout the universe.
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- Perseverance is tasked with searching for telltale signs that microbial life may have lived on Mars billions of years ago. It will collect rock core samples in metal tubes, and future missions would return these samples to Earth for deeper study.
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- Mission scientists believe that Jezero Crater, the landing site for Perseverance, could be home to such evidence. They know that 3.5 billion years ago, Jezero was the site of a large lake, complete with its own river delta. They believe that while the water may be long gone, somewhere within the 28-mile-wide crater, or perhaps along its 2,000-foot-tall rim, biosignatures could provide the evidence that life once existed there.
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- Biosignatures could be in Jezero's lakebed or in shoreline sediments that could be encrusted with carbonate minerals, which are especially good at preserving certain kinds of fossilized life on Earth.
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- NASA's fifth rover to the fourth planet from the Sun carries a new suite of scientific instruments to build on the discoveries of NASA's Curiosity rover, which has found that parts of Mars could have supported microbial life billions of years ago.
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- The hunt for biosignatures will include the rover's suite of cameras, especially Mastcam-Z (located on the rover's mast), which can zoom in to inspect scientifically interesting targets. The mission's science team can task Perseverance's SuperCam instrument - also on the mast - to fire a laser at a promising target, generating a small plasma cloud that can be analyzed to help determine its chemical composition.
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- Perseverance will rely on one of two instruments on the turret at the end of its arm. PIXL the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) will employ its tiny but powerful X-ray beam to search for potential chemical fingerprints of past life.
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- The SHERLOC (the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) instrument has its own laser and can detect concentrations of organic molecules and minerals that have been formed in watery environments.
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- Together, SHERLOC and PIXL will provide high-resolution maps of elements, minerals, and molecules in Martian rocks and sediments, enabling astrobiologists to assess their composition and determine the most promising cores to collect.
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- An enduring hope of the science team is to find a surface feature that couldn't be attributed to anything other than ancient microbial life. One such feature could be something like a stromatolite.
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- On Earth, stromatolites are wavy, rocky mounds formed long ago by microbial life along ancient shorelines and in other environments where metabolic energy and water were plentiful. Such a conspicuous feature would be difficult to chalk up to geologic processes.
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- Perseverance's sample caching system is a trunk-size collection of motors, planetary gearboxes, and sensors is among the most complex, capable, and cleanest mechanisms ever sent into space.
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- With this the science team will collect the most intriguing samples they can find, store them in samples tubes, and, later, deposit them so that future missions can collect the sample tubes and fly them back to Earth for analysis.
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- The instrumentation required to definitively prove microbial life once existed on Mars is too large and complex to bring to Mars. Samples returned from Mars' Perseverance rover may tell us that at one time billions of years ago life existed elsewhere in the universe.
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- There is strong evidence that Jezero Crater once had the ingredients for life. Whether or not Mars was ever a living planet, it's essential to understand how rocky planets like ours form and evolve. Why did our own planet remain hospitable as Mars became a desolate wasteland?
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- Perseverance may not provide the final word on if the Red Planet ever contained life, but the data it collects and the discoveries it makes will play a key role whenever that result is reached.
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- The rover will characterize the planet's geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.
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- Subsequent missions by NASA in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
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- The Mars 2020 mission is part of a larger program that includes missions to the Moon as a way to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. Charged with returning astronauts to the Moon by 2024, NASA will establish a sustained human presence on and around the Moon by 2028 through NASA's Artemis lunar exploration plans.
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February 24, 2021 MARS - how to find life? 3061
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