[ad_1]
The rovers and orbiters that study Mars are tasked with answering the lingering questions that remain on the Red Planet, decades after NASA sent its first missions to the world.
Why is this important: A new spacecraft recently sent to Mars will help NASA and other space agencies fill knowledge gaps, bringing them ever closer to whether the world once welcomed life.
- But answering questions about Mars’ past and its potential for life will likely require more spaceships and maybe even human missions to solve.
Driving the news: A study published this month suggests that much of the water on Mars may have been absorbed into the ground and not wasted in space, as scientists have believed for decades.
- Thanks to this new study, scientists were able to begin to reconcile the planet’s geology with what they know of how its atmosphere was lost, painting a clearer picture of why the world is now the barren world we see today.
Yes, but: It is not possible to quickly answer all questions about Mars with the current data.
- Perhaps the most pressing question has been asked for centuries: Did life ever exist the red planet?
- NASA is only scratching the surface to answer this question with the help of its rover Perseverance – the first mission dedicated to hunting past Martian life – which traveled to Mars in February.
- However, even this rover probably won’t be able to find any signs of life on its own. Perseverance is expected to hide samples for return to Earth on a future mission that will allow scientists to use high-powered tools to analyze the samples.
The big questions: Although scientists know that Mars was once habitable – at least for microbial life – it is still not clear whether the environment could have supported diverse and abundant life as we see on Earth.
- Although the planet had lakes and rivers, researchers are not sure how hot the planet was.
- “There are a lot of basic things we still don’t know, like how hot or humid was ancient Mars? Was it a cold and icy arid world or was it this hotter, wetter… hot desert planet? Briony Horgan, planetary scientist from Purdue University, told me.
Rovers on the planet also discovered that the world is strewn with layered rocks, but no one really knows how they formed.
- Scientists’ best guess at the moment is that these layers were formed by erosion, wind, water and ice. But we don’t see rock layers like this on Earth because they’re being destroyed by plate tectonics, which doesn’t exist on Mars, Horgan added.
The plot: Sending rovers and landers to Mars has actually made it harder for scientists on the Red Planet to understand.
- “When you only have one data point, it’s easy to create a model that matches that data point, but when you have 50 data points, it’s much harder to find the right model for you. ‘adapt to that data,’ Abigail Fraeman, a NASA Mars researcher told me.
And after: Human missions to the Red Planet could one day help resolve these mismatches between the data returned by a spacecraft in orbit and the data collected by the rover from the ground.
- Having people on Mars would allow scientists to easily travel to other parts of the planet to search for interesting rocks without the planning and guesswork that goes into a rover’s roadmap, experts say.
[ad_2]
Source link