Feb. 18, NASA’s ambitious robotic explorer, Perseverance, landed on Mars in an effort to renew the search for extraterrestrial life on the red planet. The explorer holds advanced scientific tools meant to look for complex molecules that would signal the existence of past species.
The rover lifted off from Earth last July, alongside rockets from both China and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as countries took advantage of the close alignment of Earth and Mars during that month. After a journey of 300 million miles, Perseverance landed safely on the Jezero Crater in Mars.
Scientists are looking for evidence of life that existed about 3-4 billion years ago, when the planet still had water flowing on it. Percy, the rover’s nickname, will extract rock samples from below the surface using a seven-foot arm. Three to four dozen samples are expected to be sent back to Earth.
The tubes are to be collected by another rover sent by the European Space Agency, which will retrace Perseverance’s path, pick up the tubes and transfer them to a small rocket that will blast off into space. This is expected to happen sometime in the early 2030s.
With the help of data obtained by Hope, the UAE’s spacecraft, and Tianwen-1, China’s spacecraft, scientists expect a large amount of data to become available for further studies in the future.
Perseverance comes after the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which landed in 2004, had found unmistakable signs of water flowing several billion years ago on the red planet. It also follows its famous counterpart, the Curiosity rover, which arrived in 2012. However, the goal this time is to look for carbon-complex molecules, which would almost unmistakably signal that life had previously existed on Mars.
“We’re looking for lifelike shapes, and lifelike compositions,” deputy project scientist for the Mars mission Dr. Williford said. “Chemical compositions – so the elements, the minerals, the organic molecules that we know are associated with life – we’re looking for all those things occurring together.”
Another ambitious project associated with Perseverance is Ingenuity, a small experimental helicopter that is set to take flight in the red planet’s thin atmosphere. Nothing similar has been attempted before, and if the flight succeeds, it will set a new path for planetary exploration.
U.S. President Joe Biden was quick to congratulate the team on their historic achievement. “About an hour after the landing, I got a phone call from the president of the United States,” acting administrator of NASA Steve Jurczyk recalled, “And his first words were, ‘Congratulations, man.’”
The coming events to keep track of would be NASA’s testing of Perseverance’s equipment, before turning to testing their helicopter on Mars in the coming weeks. This taking is far from easy, as Mars’s atmosphere is just 1/100th as dense as Earth’s and has about a third of Earth’s gravity too.
A New York Times article equated Ingenuity’s flight to being the “equivalent of Sojourner, NASA’s first Martian rover, which landed on the red planet in 1997.” In other words, this is a first step towards implementing technological advances that seemed unimaginable not long ago.
Everyone should read about the Mars landing with a feeling of awe. Not long ago, the entire world stood still, watching as the first spacecraft landed on the moon. Dozens of space missions later, we must make sure that we do not become numb to the greatness of human achievement, and the limitless opportunities science provides us.
