The Perseverance rover is our best bet for finding life on Mars
Sample return
Why is it so important to bring samples back from Mars? The instruments carried by Perseverance will be able to undertake fairly sophisticated chemical analyses of the rocks and soil. But even though the instruments and measurements are a tremendous achievement, they do not have the full range of equipment that we employ on Earth to squeeze every drop of information from a rock.
Tests to check for organic compounds – and whether they might have a biological origin – require a chain of different analyses that are far too elaborate and complex to be undertaken on Mars. Boiling acids, alcohol rinses, addition of chemicals, subtraction of solids, are steps in the chemistry needed to extract and separate organic molecules from their rocky hosts. This just cannot (as yet) be done on Mars.
The rocks will be weighed and measured practically on a grain-by-grain basis and analyzed, in some cases down to the individual atoms from which the material is composed. This will be an international effort – there is already amulti-national panel(called MSPG-2) which will draft the requirements for the first sets of analyses and how the samples will be stored, curated and subsequently distributed to the wider scientific community.
There is another set of reasons to bring samples back from Mars – the future of human exploration of Mars. If we send humans to Mars, we have to know how to bring them back again. We have not returned anything directly from another planetary body since the Apollo 17 astronauts left the Moon in December 1972. Yes, we havecaptured bits from a cometandan asteroidand returned them to Earth – but those missions did not land, collect and come back.
We have been investigating Mars for a long time: for over 150 years by telescope, 50 years from orbit and 20 years by rovers. Only another 12 years, then, before we can analyze Mars in our own laboratories.
Perseverance to get things done is a gift of humanity. Here’s hoping that the rover will live up to its name.
This article is republished fromThe ConversationbyMonica Grady, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences,The Open Universityunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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