NASA's Curiosity probe has been working for nearly a decade, and we've found that lakes, rivers, and so on have appeared in the geological history of Mars, suggesting that Mars was once habitable, but why can't we find features of life? Not even a virus. NASA sent a new messenger, Perseverance, to find out, and its main mission was to collect samples, unlike the past probes that never returned, this mission will use multiple spacecraft to bring back Mars samples.
The Perseverance rover may help us answer one of science's most significant questions.
Illustration: NASA's Mars 2020 rover Perseverance explores the Red Planet. Perseverance's launch window is three weeks and begins on July 17, 2020. Image source: NASA/Caltech- Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Roger Wiens is the principal investigator at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory ChemCam and SuperCam Instruments. The "Super Camera" was developed in cooperation with the United States and France, and was also supported by Spain. Wiens wrote this article for Space.com's Voices of the Experts: Columns and Insights.
Over the decades, a plethora of sci-fi movies have shown us fictional versions of Mars, from hurricanes (which appeared in the critically acclaimed 2015 film Martian) to plants that devoured humans (in the 1959 critical film Angry Red Planet). The truth about the surface of Mars may not be as dramatic, but I think reality is just as exciting, if not more amazing than drama, because it is real. With NASA's Mars 2020 mission, which will launch this summer, we're on the cusp of more discoveries.
Photo note: Stills from the 2015 movie "The Martian.". Image source: wallpapercave.
So far, thanks to a decade of research by NASA's Curiosity rover, we've learned that lakes, rivers, streams, and oceans that may have appeared hundreds of millions of years ago are all part of Mars' geological history. Although its era of active water bodies ended more than 3 billion years ago, those of us who study the geology of Mars have not forgotten the significance of their past existence.
After all, freshwater actives tell us that Mars was once habitable. This knowledge haunts us. So far, we haven't seen definitive evidence of life there, not even a virus. But if Mars was once a habitable planet, did it ever harbor life?
Photo note: Selfie of Curiosity on February 26, 2020. Source: NASA/Caltech-Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Marin Space Science System.
NASA is now poised to take the next step, answering this question by launching another rover, Perseverance.
The mission of this new Mars rover is multifaceted. Its main purpose, and very specific purpose, is to collect samples that future spacecraft could bring back to Earth. Every time a rover goes to Mars, it stays on Mars and has no way to fly home. So we never brought back rock or soil samples from Mars. This task proposes to change that. According to current concepts, the process of bringing back samples actually requires three different spacecraft: Perseverance collects samples over several years; the second mission is to land on Mars with a rocket and launch those samples into orbit around Mars; and then, the third spacecraft takes the samples back to interstellar space from a low-altitude orbit near Mars and then back to Earth.
These samples will tell us more about the geological history of Mars than we currently know, and we already know a lot. Since 2012, the Curiosity rover has traveled more than a dozen miles, using 10 instruments on board to make observations along the way. One of them, the ChemCam laser instrument, scans rocks, studies their chemical composition, and tells us the nature of the Great Lakes that once existed near the equator of Mars.
The instrument is alternately commanded by the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, as well as the French Space Agency in Toulouse, a partner of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Astrophysics and Planetary Institute in Toulouse, France. Every week, the operational tasks between the two places change hands. In total, the ChemCam team published nearly 100 scientific papers presenting ChemCam's findings in more than 750,000 laser scans. Other instruments study the mineralogy and weather patterns of Mars.
Image note: Curiosity's image of the surface of Mars. Image source: NASA.
In addition, thanks to data from Curiosity's Mars sample analysis instrument, we know that Mars does have organic molecules, identified as molecules containing carbon and hydrogen, and sometimes oxygen, nitrogen, or other elements. It's simply exciting because organic molecules make up our own bodies — but they can also be made through non-life processes. So the story gets even more interesting: Did the organics we see on Mars come from life?
So far, organic materials on Mars have included long-chain molecules containing up to 12 carbon atoms. This is much more complex than we would expect to be found on the surface of Mars hit by radiation. That's why we wanted to collect those interesting samples and bring them back to Earth. Over the decades, the machine instruments we send to these distant destinations have become more advanced, but they can't be compared to the amazing laboratory instruments we have on Earth. Once we get samples back from the Mars 2020 mission, we hope to learn more about Mars.
Note: These marks indicate that there was once water on Mars. Image source: scienceblogs.
Early design work on a spacecraft for bringing back samples from Mars has begun. Meanwhile, Perseverance will be looking for samples. Once again, the rover carried a laser instrument that scans rocks, this time called SuperCam (version 2.0 of ChemCam). In addition to the function of laser scanning to obtain the chemical composition of the rock, two other techniques provide supplementary information about its mineral content (the way the elements are bound together as molecules). At the same time, the microphone will receive the sound of the laser hitting the rock instantly, telling the Perseverance team how hard the rock is — an important detail that helps with the rover's operation and helps explain the geological environment. Not to mention that the microphone will give us the first-ever recording of the surface of Mars, so we can hear the sound of the wind, as well as any other sounds that the environment might have to offer.
On the arm of the Mars rover, the SHERLOC instrument also possesses some of the skills of ChemCam, notably its probes and electronics, which are from Los Alamos. SHERLOC, a delicate detector that can only observe a few microns at a time, will be used to look for organic molecules that mark signs of life.
Perseverance is now in Florida, and the team is preparing for the launch of the spacecraft. This spring, NASA has successfully and safely continued these preparations. Earth and Mars are approaching their meeting — about 39 million miles (i.e., 63 million kilometers) of close contact. Now is the perfect time to send the next mission to Mars. The launch window, the number of days during which the mission journey can begin between the two planets, will arrive on July 17. Given the current situation, I'm not sure if I'll be able to get to Cape Canaveral, but I'll be anxiously watching the launch anyway. After that, we will eagerly look forward to February 18, 2021 , the landing date. What followed was a busy period of exploration and discovery, and you can be sure I would sit like a needle in a haystack, anxiously waiting for the results.
Cape Canaveral, Florida is a well-known aviation coast, with Kennedy Space Center and Canaveral Air Force Base nearby. Image source: saltyserenityduplex.
BY: Roger Wiens
FY: Dinosaur Dinosaur
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