We recently looked at how and why the planet Venus could answer the long-standing question: Are we alone? Despite its hostile surface environment, its atmosphere could be hospitable to life as we know it. Here we will examine the planet Mars, aka the Red Planet and the fourth planet in our solar system, which has amazed sky watchers from ancient times to the present day.
In terms of space exploration, no planetary body has been visited more times than Mars, with NASA’s Mariner 4 becoming the first spacecraft to image the Red Planet in 1965. Today there are 3 rovers and 1 lander currently exploring Mars, as well as more than a dozen orbiters teach us something new about this mysterious world every day. But what makes Mars so fascinating to study?
“Mars fascinates me in many ways,” said Dr. Antonio Paris, who is the chief research scientist at the Center for Planetary Science and author of Mars: Your personal 3D journey to the Red Planet. “From science fiction to science, the Red Planet can serve as a lifelong research interest to unravel the mysteries of the solar system, like how life on Earth began and will our planet experience the same fate as Mars?”
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Today, Mars is both a cold and dry world, with average surface temperatures ranging from -140 degrees to 21 degrees Celsius (-220 degrees to 70 degrees Fahrenheit), and not a drop of liquid water at all. surface. This lack of water is explained by the lack of atmospheric pressure, which is a measly 1% of that of the Earth. Much like Venus, it doesn’t bode well for life as we know it. So what makes Mars so intriguing for astrobiology and the discovery of life beyond Earth?
“Before, Mars looked a lot more like Earth,” said Dr. Mackenzie Day, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences at UCLA. “There was liquid water flowing over the surface, carving out river valleys and filling craters to form lakes. Lakes in particular are great places to find life on Earth, so Mars is an intriguing astrobiological target because there were so many lakes. The Mars 2020 rover, Perseverance, is currently exploring a dry paleolake with a delta deposit inside. Deltas on Earth naturally organize sand, mud, and gravel by size, and we know the best place to find signs of life is in the smallest grains. Leveraging what we know about deltas on Earth (like the Nile Delta or the Mississippi Delta) will improve the rover’s chances of making particularly exciting discoveries.
Evidence suggests that billions of years ago Mars was a much warmer and wetter place, and current Mars missions are trying to determine if life once existed on the surface, or even just below it. Although we’ve learned a ton of science about the Red Planet over the past few decades, humans can’t directly study Mars because we don’t have any samples on Earth. But that could all change with NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission slated to launch in the late 2020s. . But how could these returned samples help improve our understanding of Mars’ habitability?
“There are so many questions that could be answered with a real piece of Mars, and the suite of samples the rover collects are carefully selected to get a bit of everything,” says Dr Day. “With real samples, we can use many tools and laboratory methods that the rover does not have on board. The samples will give us a much clearer picture of what was happening on ancient Mars and where or how life might have survived.
Was Mars able to support life, even for a short time? What will current missions continue to discover on the Red Planet, and what will we learn from the samples returned to Earth? These questions could very well be answered in the next few years.
“There is a lot of speculation as to whether or not life existed on Mars,” Dr Paris said. “If I could make a bet, I would choose lava tubes as locations to search for life on Mars. Many lava tubes on Mars remain closed, which may serve as important locations for direct observation and study of Martian geology and geomorphology, as well as potentially uncovering any evidence of the development of early microbial life. of the natural history of Mars.
And with that, we wonder if Mars will finally answer, “Are we alone?
As always, keep doing science and keep looking up!
Featured Image: A true-color image of the Red Planet taken on October 10, 2014 by India’s Mars Orbiter mission from 76,000 kilometers (47,224 miles) away. (Credit: ISRO/ISSDC/Justin Cowart) (This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.)
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