NASA’s Perseverance rover, to be launched on Mars this summer, will look for symptoms beyond life in an ancient crater lake. But if biology has ever emerged on the red planet, how will scientists recognize it? Here, assignment assistant scientist Ken Williford explains what they’re for.
Today, Mars is hostile to life. It is too bloody for water to remain liquid on the surface, and the higher degrees of radiation from the thin environment can pass, potentially sterilizing the upper component of the soil.
But it wasn’t. About 3.5 billion years ago, water flowed to the surface. He dug channels that are still visible today and clustered have an effect on the craters. A denser carbon dioxide (CO2) environment would have blocked more destructive radiation.
Water is an unusual element in biology, so it is believable that ancient Mars once provided a foundation for life.
Nasa Mars Rover: Key questions about perseverance
In the 1970s, Viking missions conducted an experiment to search for existing microbes on Martian soil. But the effects would be inconclusive.
In the early 2000s, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers were assigned the task of “following the water.” Opportunity and spirit discovered enough geological from beyond the presence of liquid water.
The Curiosity rover, which landed in 2012, discovered that the lake that once filled its landing site in Gale Crater could have survived. It also detected biological molecules (containing carbon) that serve as building blocks for life.
From now on, the Perseverance rover will explore an environment with tools designed to verify the signatures of biology.
“I would say this is NASA’s first assignment since Viking to do this,” Ken Williford, deputy assignment scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
“Viking was the search for existing life, that is, life that can live on Mars today. While NASA’s most recent technique has been to explore ancient environments because the knowledge we have recommends that the oldest history on the planet tells us that Mars was the maximum habitable its first billion years.”
Perseverance’s goal is the Jezero crater, where the symptoms of an aqueous beyond are even clearer, noticed from orbit, than those of Gale Crater.
The rover will pierce Martian rocks and extract carrots from the length of a piece of chalk. These will be sealed, cached, in boxes, and left on the surface. These will be collected through the rover, sent at a later date, projected into Mars’ orbit and sent to Earth for analysis. This is all part of a collaboration with the European Space Agency (Esa) called Mars Sample Return.
But the rover will also carry out a lot of science on the surface.
Jezero presents one of the preserved Martian examples of a delta: layered structures that form when rivers enter open bodies of water and deposit rocks, sand and, potentially, biological carbon.
“There is a river channel flowing from the west, penetrating the rim of the crater; and then only the crater, at the mouth of the river, is this magnificent diversity of delta that is exposed. Our plan is to land right in front of this delta and start exploring,” Dr. Williford said.
The grains of sand from the rock delta are extracted upstream, adding a water dividing line to the northwest.
“The cement between the grains is very – tells the story of how water interacts with this sand when the delta is deposited in the lake,” Williford explains.
“It provides potential habitats for all organisms that live among these grains of sand. The pieces of biological matter of any organism upriver can disappear prospectively.”
Jezero is placed in a domain that has long been interested in science. It is on the west shoulder of a giant that has an effect on the basin called Isidis, which shows the most powerful Martian signals of olivine and carbonate minerals measured from space. “Carbonate minerals are one of the key goals that led us to explore this region,” Williford says.
An examination of the minerals in Jezero Crater through Purdue University’s Dr. Briony Horgan, Dr. Melissa Rice of Western Washington University (both project scientists) and her colleagues, revealed carbonate deposits at the western end of the old coast. These “marginal carbonates” were in a bath ring: the accumulation of soap foam that remains after draining the water.
Earth’s carbonates may contain biological evidence in their crystals. One type of design that survives is stromatolite.
These form when many millimeter layers of bacteria and sediments accumulate over time to shape larger, dome-shaped structures. On Earth, they occur along ancient shores, where sunlight and water abound.
Billions of years ago, the Coast of Jezero was precisely the kind of position where stromatolites may have formed and preserved.
Perseverance will read about the carbonate-rich bath ring with its clinical instruments, to see if structures like this have ever formed there.
A tool called Sherloc captures close-up photographs of an attractive rock and produces a detailed map of the minerals present, adding biological matter. Another tool called Pixl will give scientists the detailed chemical or elemental composition of the same area.
In this set of knowledge, scientists “will look for concentrations of biological elements, minerals and molecules, adding biological matter. In particular, [is] when those things are concentrated in the bureaucracy that potentially recommends biology,” Williford says.
It is imperative to collect a lot of data resources; Visual identifications will not be enough to convince scientists of a biological origin, given the upper bar for claims of extraterrestrial life. Unless there is a big surprise, discoveries are likely to be described only as potential biological signatures until the rocks are sent to Earth for analysis.
Referring to stromatolites, Dr. Williford explains: “The layers have a tendency to be abnormal and wrinkled, as one would expect from a group of microbes living on each other. All of this can be fossilized in a way that is visual even to the cameras.
“But that’s when we see shapes like this and maybe one layer has a different chemistry than the next, but a sure repetitive pattern, or we see biological matter concentrated in express layers; those are the definitive biological signatures we could expect.” find.”
However, Mars does not reveal its secrets easily. In 2019, project scientists traveled to Australia to learn about the fossil stromatolites that formed 348 billion years ago in the Pilbara region.
“We’ll have to look more closely [on Mars] than when we went to the PilbaraArray … our wisdom from its location comes from several decades of geologists who, year after year, map the territory,” explains Williford.
On Mars, he says, “we’re the first.”
But what if the rover doesn’t see anything as big and apparent as a stromatolite?
On Earth, we can stumble upon fossilized microbes at the point of individual cells. But to see them, scientists will have to cut a slice of rock, grind it to the thickness of a sheet of paper and examine it on a sheet of glass.
No rover can do that. But then, it probably wouldn’t be necessary.
“It’s very rare for an individual microbe that goes alone,” says Dr. Williford.
“By the time they were alive, if they looked like terrestrial microbes, they would have come in combination in small communities that are integrated into detectable cell structures or groups through the rover.
After exploring the back of the crater, scientists should push the rover to the edge. The rock cores taken here, when analyzed on Earth, can provide an age for the effect on the crater it digd and a maximum age for the lake.
But there’s an explanation for why to be interested in the rim of the crater. When a giant area object hits rocks that contain water, a great power can establish hydrothermal systems, where hot water flows through the rocks. Hot water dissolves the minerals from the rocks that supply the mandatory ingredients for life.
“If this were to happen, it would have been the first habitable environment in Jezero Crater,” Williford says. Evidence, as well as the symptoms of any life that has colonized the surroundings, can be kept out.
The current situation of the project requires the rover to move to the neighbouring northeastern region of Syrtis as an “ambitious goal”.
It is even older than Jezero and also the promise of exposed carbonates, which possibly would have formed in a different way than those of the crater.
If at the end of this mission the symptoms beyond life have not occurred, the search will not be completed. They’ll be in those nuclei, waiting for their delivery to Earth.
But there is still an interesting prospect that the project not only raises more questions, but also answers. This result can shake the planet. All that awaits courageous perseverance, we are on the verge of a new phase in our closest to the Earth’s neighbor.
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