If life ever existed on Mars, the answer may already be at hand. In January, NASA’s Persevier Lance rover deposited 10 of his tubes on the surface of Mars. Each contains Martian rock samples carefully selected for their potential to reveal chapters in Mars’ still dark history. Mitch Schulte, a program scientist for his Perseverance at his NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., says these tubes “tell us whether Mars was habitable.” Some of these minerals indicate that there was organic matter. ”
But to know for sure, scientists will have to bring these tubes back to Earth for a detailed study. This is a bold undertaking known as the Mars Sample Return (MSR), scheduled via a tracked robotic mission in the early 2030s. These 10 tubes are just the opening course of a larger feast that awaits, a backup his cache in case Perseverance breaks down before filling and delivering his 33 additional tubes it carries. These tubes will hold samples taken from areas in and around Jezero Crater, the site of her 4-billion-year-old river delta where the rover landed on February 18, 2021. Collected for a trip to Earth several years in the future, but what was already collected stimulated the researchers’ desire to return home.
Scientists targeted Jezero for its perseverance, because on our planet, vast river systems, such as those found in Mars’ craters, accumulate huge deposits of sediment. These sediments, washed away from a good portion of the surrounding landscape, contain a variety of minerals that can be used to map Mars’ past geology. Also, water is found in most places on Earth, and life accompanies it. The same may be true for Mars. That means Jezero deposits could possibly hide biological relics. Rover Sampling his team member Imperial His College London’s Mark His Septon said:
Perseverance uses a small drill to collect most samples, producing chalk-stick sized specimens that each fit in a cigar-like tube less than 15 cm long. Of the 43 sample tubes, 38 will take surface samples, while the remaining five will capture Martian air odors and check for pollutant gases that may be emitted from the rover. It’s a “witness tube”. The rover’s first sample, collected in September 2021, is believed to be igneous rock from an ancient lava flow. By studying this material, scientists should be able to more accurately date the crater. Since then, the rover has almost half filled the remaining tube as it travels a few more kilometers down the ancient river channel towards the rim of Jezero Her Crater.
As a coincidence, 10 samples were replicated, each paired with another sample from the same location. These are tubes dropped to the surface by Perseverance as backups for potential future retrievals. In December 2022, NASA’s then-science chief Thomas Zurbuchen made one of his last decisions with the space agency before re-entering the private sector, moving its cache to a location called Three Forks. Called to drop. Dropping to the surface he completed at the end of January. This was around the same time that Perseverance officially began the “expansion” phase of its mission. After the science team agreed that only these 10 samples of him could answer the question of past habitability, if desired. MSR’s best plan calls for the rover to deliver the remaining tubes to a yet-to-be-built lander that he plans to land near Jezero around 2030. .
“We hope that the people on the rover will come back,” says Zurbuchen. “But even the surface stuff ticks all the boxes.” This includes igneous rocks up to the date of the crater and sedimentary rocks and clays that may contain traces of life, possibly microbial There is even fossilized evidence of life in “They are already worth his $10 billion investment,” Zurbuchen says, citing the estimated total cost of the MSR program. Some of the most promising samples are from a site called Wildcat Ridge, a meter-wide rock containing evidence of sulfate. Kathleen Benison of the University of Virginia West, part of the Perseverance sampling team, said: “Sulfate minerals can grow from groundwater. On Earth, these types of water tend to have many microbes, which can be buried and preserved in sulfate minerals.
In addition to sulfates, life-seeking scientists are particularly keen to sample mudstones. This is a fine-grained sedimentary rock that the Curiosity rover has seen in Gale Crater but not yet discovered by Perseviance. “Microbial cells are tiny,” says Tanja Bosak of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is also part of his sampling team. “The grain size of minerals needs to be made even finer to preserve. [fossil] Shaping instead of destroying. Roll a rock over a person and they will be crushed by something unrecognizable. For microbes all Unless you are talking about mudstone, rock. Team members are also keen to sample carbonates similar to things like chalk and limestone on Earth. “If there are microorganisms in the lake, [the carbonates] Sanjeev Gupta of Imperial College London, one of the “long-range planners” planning the rover’s course, says. On March 30, Perseverance collected the first carbonate sample from a rock named “Berea,” thought to have formed from material that was washed into Jezero by an ancient river.
Perseverance has been working hard to collect samples on Mars, but the return phase of the mission remains in flux. Originally, NASA planned to land her European-made “Fetch” rover on Mars around 2030, collect samples from Perseverance, return them to the lander’s capsule, and launch them. In orbit, Sample Her capsule will rendezvous with the European Orbiter and send Sample back to Earth for a landing in 2033. But those plans were complicated by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In response to the Russian invasion, officials at the European Space Agency (ESA) withdraw from partnership with Rosalind Franklin, his ExoMars rover, another of his long-simmering Mars missions. I chose to Russia was to provide the rover’s nuclear power source, rocket and landing platform. NASA has now agreed to supply the missing parts and asked for funds to do so in a budget request to Congress last month. But this unexpected help comes at the expense of the fetch rover. “We couldn’t do both,” he says Zurbuchen. “We couldn’t have done ExoMars by landing fetch rovers individually.”
ExoMars missions are very much worth saving, as most people would agree. The Rosalind Franklin rover carries a drill that allows him to org two meters below the surface of Mars, accessing subterranean habitats for past and present life that are much less hostile than the surface. . “Nobody has done that on Mars,” says Zurbuchen. “Our scientific community thinks it’s really important.”
Jorge Vago, an ExoMars project scientist at ESA in the Netherlands, was pleased that NASA stepped in. “American contributions are needed,” he says, to meet his 2028 target launch date set by European member states to save the mission. “It’s a great mission. If we find something very interesting that suggests a possible biological origin, we might want to conduct another sample retrieval mission to bring back samples from the subterranean.”
NASA’s current MSR program faces unique challenges. At his mid-March town hall hosted by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Jeff Gramling, his MSR program director at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said some aspects of the mission needed to be “investigated.” I said there might be. This is a precautionary measure to keep the budget under control. NASA’s nearly $1 billion annual request for his MSR is expected to grow over the next few years, and he fears the uncontrolled growth will force the space agency to siphon money from unrelated missions. Concerns are growing. Demolition options include removing one of his two “Marscopters” planned for MSR. This was included to build the hugely successful Ingenuity rotorcraft, which is nearing his 50th flight on Mars. Among other tasks, MSR’s helicopter was added as a backup option to collect his cache of 10 tubes of samples at Three Forks. “The mission is still complicated,” Gramling said at the Town Hall. “We are working towards the earliest possible release date.”
Despite the overwhelmingly complex logistics of searching for life on Mars, the scientific riches on offer never lose their luster. The cumulative samples returned by Perseverance are only about half a kilogram, but the impact is immense. Will they reveal that a second origin of cosmic life evolved on the surface of Mars? In our winding quest to determine if we are alone in the universe, the answer may actually be within reach. “We won’t know until the samples come back,” says Bosak.
