Vital samples from a dry lake bed on Mars may involve very important evidence of beyond life on the Red Planet; however, budget overruns threaten efforts to bring those samples back to Earth, where researchers can simply exploit the secrets the specimens hold.
NASA’s Perseverance rover, which has been exploring the ancient bed of Jezero Crater Lake since its landing in February 2021, displays 43 tubes in which it continues to hide Martian curtains of clinical interest.
“These samples are the explanation why our project was carried out,” planetary scientist David Shuster of the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. Shuster is a member of the NASA science team responsible for collecting and analyzing those samples.
However, while the rover’s toolset can provide superficial studies of the patterns, the extensive clinical studies needed to examine them can only be done in a laboratory on Earth. For this to be possible, a project will have to go to Mars, gather the rover patterns and bring them back. The plan was to launch this project until the end of this decade and those patterns from Earth until 2033. Still, the order for this project to transfer patterns, which is still in the design phase. , has begun to skyrocket to $11 billion, and the timeline to support those patterns has been pushed back to about 2040.
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So, earlier this year, NASA paused those projects and requested concepts for new, less expensive and faster features of the personal area industry. This has left the Mars clinical network at a dead end, aware that a smaller-scale recovery project would likely not achieve all of the goals it had in the brain, goals that were flagged as a more sensible priority through the Ten-year survey of the National Academy of Sciences. Ten proposals are currently under the attention of corporations such as Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.
The original plans for the project were complex: land a Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) on the Martian surface, recover Perseverance’s pattern tubes (perhaps using an airborne helicopter like Ingenuity), take off from the surface in the MAV (patterns in hand) and encounter Another spacecraft, built through the European Space Agency, in orbit on Mars, will bring the patterns back to Earth. However, as daunting as such a project may seem, it is essential for planetary science to be carried out with these Martian rocky objects.
Now, a new study paper presents the first studies of some samples, carried out through the rover itself, to illustrate why it is so important to bring the samples back to Earth. The study paper focuses on seven sediment samples collected from the river delta that once flowed into the lake that filled Jezero 3. 5 billion years ago. These samples, collected between July 7, 2022, and November 29, 2022, involve fine- and coarse-grained sandstone and shale sediments.
“Sedimentary rocks are because they were transported through water, deposited in a water-state framework, and then modified by chemistry involving liquid water on the surface of Mars at some point in the past,” Shuster said.
Coarse-grained sediments can tell us about the chemistry of the water that deposited them, because they contain detritus and carbonate minerals that were washed upstream.
However, it’s the fine-grained sediments that will get the most attention. In fact, this is the type of peak sediment that likely involves evidence of microbial life beyond Mars, if it ever existed. “That’s why those samples are so important,” Shuster said.
The new report describes Perseverance’s review of the sampled materials. He didn’t stumble over any biological issues, but Shuster talked him out of it.
“We obviously didn’t do biologics on those key samples,” Shuster said. “But just because this tool didn’t find biological compounds doesn’t mean they weren’t present in those samples. It just means they weren’t in a concentration that the rover’s tools could find in those specific rocks. “
That’s why it’s so important to bring them back to Earth, where more complex laboratories can dissect the samples, learn their chemistry, and discover what happened on Mars all those years ago.
“When we bring them back to Earth, they will be able to tell us a lot about when, why, and for how long Mars contained liquid water, and whether organic, prebiotic, and potentially even biological evolution may have been positioned on this planet. ” added Tanja. Bosak, a geobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and leader of the new study.
So far, Perseverance has collected 25 samples, adding duplicates and atmospheric samples, as well as 3 “control” tubes containing examples of any conceivable contaminant from the rover. Eight of the duplicate samples were stored at a location known as Three Forks, where they were left on the surface via the rover as a backup if anything prevented Perseverance from handing over its reserve to the return mission. Samples. The other samples taken so far are igneous rocks likely created when Jezero Crater was carved out by the impact that shaped it four billion years ago.
This will minimize the potential importance of the samples as the new study equipment comes out.
“Life was doing its job on Earth at that time, 3. 5 billion years ago,” said Ken Farley, a scientist assigned to the rover at Caltech. “The basic question is: was life also doing its job on Mars at that time?”
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Once we bring the samples back to Earth, we will probably still be able to answer this question, but given the difficulties involved in carrying out such a recovery project, perhaps it would be better not to rush to carry out the project properly yet. , even if it costs more and takes longer. The samples have been waiting on Mars, at rest, for 3. 5 billion years. They can wait a few more years until we are in a position to come through and pick them up.
The investigation of the river delta deposits was published August 14 in the American Geophysical Union journal AGU Advances.
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Keith Cooper is a science journalist and freelance editor in the United Kingdom. He holds degrees in physics and astrophysics from the University of Manchester. He is the author of “The Contact Paradox: Challenging Our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020) and has written articles on astronomy, space, physics, and astrobiology for a multitude of magazines and websites.
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