Searching for life on Mars

The search for life beyond Earth has begun in all earnest. This comes after Nasa’s Perseverance Rover managed to land successfully on Mars and immediately started sending back thousands of images. Scientists all over the world are waiting in awe for the results.

But this is only the first step in a very big venture that will last for years, says the former Deputy Director of Planetary Science at Nasa Headquarters, Jim Adams.

“The planet is a frozen desert with a thin atmosphere, which makes life on the planet not very likely at the moment. But the microbes Perseverance is collecting could give us an indication of what is possible and what is not,” Adams said.

Perseverance is Nasa’s first true astrobiology mission in the search for evidence on another planet in our solar system.
Shortly after the rover started drilling into the floor of the Jezero crater, Perseverance found evidence of fossilized bacteria.

This follows nine previous attempts to land on Mars.

While samples from Mars could reveal the planet’s past, future missions to other worlds in our solar system could illuminate something else.

In 2017, Nasa announced that ocean worlds, like Saturn’s moons of Titan and Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa, may be the most likely places to find life beyond Earth.

Two missions are scheduled to launch this decade to explore Titan and Europa in an effort to understand whether these worlds could host life within their subsurface oceans and reservoirs.

Europa Clipper is set to launch in 2024, while Dragonfly is slated for 2027.

Adams believes, together with Perseverance’s mission, this will be to the advantage of all of humanity.