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NASA’s hunt for signs of ancient life on Mars has begun.
The six-wheeled rover Perseverance landed safely on the Red Planet in February 2021.
Now he’s finally ready to start collecting samples from Jezero Crater.
Scientists are looking at this area because they believe that the impact of the meteor that formed the crater created a favorable environment for life.
According to NASA, evidence suggests that the crater contains clays that can only form in the presence of water.
Ken Farley is a scientist working on the project.
“An interesting thing about Mars is that we don’t know if there ever was a phase where there was an ocean. It’s a matter of debate. But it’s clear that the place we’re looking at in Jezero crater was not part of a sea. It was a lake, and it was a lake about 40 kilometers in diameter. So we are not looking for things that would have grown in the sea. And the other aspect important to this is that we are looking very, very far back in the history of the solar system. And that means that life wouldn’t have had much luck to come very far. And that is why we always say that we are looking for evidence of potential microbial life. ‘
One of the questions scientists hope to answer is whether Jezero’s soil is sedimentary or volcanic.
“This shows a panorama that we took of these rocks from the bottom of the crater. These rocks are important because we think they are the lowest rocks in the sequence of rocks that we have, and therefore they are most likely the And one of the hypotheses we’re trying to test is that the lake that once filled Jezero wasn’t there just once, but went through several episodes of filling, depletion, and filling. again. “
The six-wheeled rover will take samples from the surface of the Red Planet for long-term storage.
A sophisticated system will place the samples in tubes using the rover’s robotic arm, as project manager Jennifer Trosper explains.
“The purpose of our sample caching system is to acquire samples and then transfer them through our bit carousel to the adaptive caching set, which sits on the front of the rover. ‘front of the rover then has another sample handling arm that handles these tubes and the samples inside of them, to do imaging and measure volume. And then we seal them and store them for a future return to Earth…. ”
NASA Perseverance sailed through space for nearly seven months, covering 293 million miles, to reach the Red Planet.
The $ 2.7 billion effort is the most advanced astrobiology lab ever sent to another world.
The United States and China are so far the only two countries to have successfully deployed ground vehicles to Mars.
A Chinese remote-controlled motorized rover, called Zhurong, descended to the Martian surface in May 2021.
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