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Three and a half billion years ago, waves splashed and streams washed over this dusty expanse on Mars now known as Jezero Crater. On a nascent Earth, the chemistry coagulated towards the exalted state we call life.
Astronomers, philosophers and science fiction writers have long questioned whether nature has conducted the same experiment there as on Earth. Was Mars another test tube for Darwinian evolution? The biology class will no longer be laughed at for speculating that life actually evolved on Mars and drifted back to Earth on a meteorite, or that both planets were seeded with microbes or proto-life from somewhere even more. far.
So humans sent their offspring through time and 300 million kilometers of space in search of long-lost relatives, ancient roots of a family tree that could be traced in the soil of the Red Planet.
The Perseverance rover and its little brother, the Ingenuity helicopter, landed in a cloud of sand on February 18, bristling with antennas and cameras. Perseverance will spend the next Martian year – the equivalent of two Earth years – prowling, pushing, and collecting rocks from Jezero Crater and the delta of the river that enters it. The rover will examine the debris chemically and geologically and take photographs, so scientists on Earth can look for any signs of ancient fossilization or other patterns that living organisms may have produced.
Perseverance and ingenuity work on really long leashes: 12 minutes of light travel time – and signal delay – through the Pasadena Aether, where their creators and bidders wait to see what they’ve accomplished these last. time. Like the teens you let out with the car keys, persistence and ingenuity are no smarter and more responsible than humans have trained them to be.
These rocks will be picked up and sent back to Earth during a five-year series of maneuvers involving relay rockets, rovers and orbital transfers starting in 2026, making recovering moon rocks as easy as sending holiday cookies to your loved ones. Rocks that return from 2031 will be scrutinized for years, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, for what they might say about the hidden story of our lost twin and, perhaps, the early days of life. in the solar system.
The generation after WWII carried out the first major reconnaissance of the solar system. It could be the fate of this generation to perform the next great reconnaissance, to find out if we have or ever had neighbors on these worlds. In Jezero Crater, the dream lives on. We may never live on Mars, but our machines already do.
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