"Will We Find Life on Mars?" --The Mysteries of the Red Planet
It's been an epic week in our Homo-sapien evolutionary trajectory --we now have two ongoing robotic missions searching for the first signs of microbial life on another world --the aptly named Mars Curiosity mission and now, Perseverance, with it's breathtaking touchdown at ancient 28 mile-wide Jezero crater —the site of the remains of an ancient river delta where researchers have found deposits of hydrated silica, a mineral that’s especially good at preserving microfossils and other signs of past life.
So let's begin with summaries and links to a few stories I curated and edited (beginning with blastoff in July 2020) about NASA’s Perseverance Mission and mysteries of the Red Planet —a forbidding world described by Oliver Morton in Mapping Mars as a world with "No cities. No seas. No forests and no battlegrounds. No prairies. No nations. No histories and no legends. No memories. Just features, features and names. Argyre and Hellas and Isidis. Olympus and Alba and Pavonis. Schiaparelli and Noctis Labyrinthus, the haunting Labyrinths of Night."
“The Robot Planet” —It’s been said that Mars tugs at the human imagination like no other planet. “It’s there,” said astronaut Buzz Aldrin, “waiting to be reached” and this July, 2020, NASA is planning to launch a mission to grab its first ‘taste’ of the Red Planet –the only known planet inhabited solely by robots. On Thursday, 30 July, 2020 NASA will launch the Perseverance rover that will, hopefully, touch down at the Jezero Crater landing site in February 2021 as a robotic explorer.
Mars February 18, 2021–“May Change the Way We Think About Our Origins and Extraterrestrial Life” --Seven minutes of harrowing descent to the Red Planet will occur on February 18th when NASA’s Perseverance rover — a robotic “scientist” weighing 2,260 pounds–will parachute through the tenuous Martian air, marking a new era in red planet exploration. Once at the top of the Red Planet’s atmosphere, a science-fiction movie descent begins as it drops through temperatures equivalent to the surface of the Sun, along with a supersonic parachute inflation, and the first ever autonomous guided landing on Mars delivering the biggest, heaviest, cleanest, and most sophisticated six-wheeled robotic geologist ever launched into space north of the Martian equator.
“A NASA First” –Helicopter Will Survey Mars’ Jezero Crater for Signs of Life. The Mars Helicopter and its Mars Helicopter Delivery System were attached to the Perseverance Mars rover at Kennedy Space Center on April 6, 2020. The Perseverance rover, a robotic “scientist” weighing 2,260 pounds (1,025 kilograms), will search for signs of past microbial life, characterize the planet’s climate and geology, collect samples for future return to Earth and pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet. The helicopter will be deployed about two-and-a-half months after Perseverance touches down.
Mars’ Weird “Science-Fiction’ Moon Phobos –“Its Orbit May Unlock Billion-Year-Old Secrets” --In Century Rain, former space scientist and science-fiction author, Alastair Reynolds, has Mars’ 17-mile-wide, deeply-grooved moon, Phobos, as the location of a secret base which holds an ancient relic that opens a portal to the far side of the Milky Way–the far end of a wormhole–where mid-twentieth century Earth, rendered uninhabitable due to technological catastrophe, is preserved like a fly in amber. In science fact, Phobos has long been an object of mystery, with some scientists believing it to be an alien artifact –its dark face resembling the primitive asteroids of the outer solar system–captured in the ancient past by Mars gravitational field.
“Mystery at Mars South Pole” –Ancient Object With Enormous Implications for Climate Change. Carbon dioxide makes up more than 95 percent of Mars’s atmosphere, which has a surface pressure of only 0.6 percent that of Earth. A Caltech team has probed a mysterious feature at the south pole of Mars –a massive deposit of CO2 ice and water ice in alternating strata, like the layers of a cake, that extend to a depth of one kilometer, with a thin frosting of CO2 ice at the top,
“Early Mars was Habitable –But Was It Inhabited?” –An Ancient Global Megaflood Hints ‘Yes’ --“Early Mars was an extremely active planet from a geological point of view,” said Alberto G. Fairén, a visiting astrobiologist at Cornell University. “The planet had the conditions needed to support the presence of liquid water on the surface – and on Earth, where there’s water, there’s life. “So early Mars was a habitable planet,” he said. “Was it inhabited? That’s a question that Perseverance will help to answer.”
“Ice Age Mars” –Challenges a Once ‘Warm and Wet’ Red Planet --“Mars once was wet and fertile. It’s now bone dry,” said Cosmos host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it from happening here on Earth.”
“Toxic or Habitable?” –The Hidden Lakes at Mars South Pole--One of the myriad of unsolved mysteries about the Red Planet is why why ancient Mars had liquid water. Early in the planet’s history, Mars only received a third of the sunlight of present-day Earth, which shouldn’t be enough heat to maintain water. But in past, ancient millennia, huge rivers flowed across the planet's surface, when its atmosphere was thicker and warmer, cutting gullies and channels on the silent, desolate landscape, unchanged for millions of years that are visible today to orbiting spacecraft. Scientists have long known that water was abundant on ancient Mars, but there has been no consensus on whether liquid water was common, or whether it was largely frozen in ice.
Mars at One Billion –“Rainstorms & Huge Flowing Rivers” --“We know there were periods when the surface of Mars was frozen; we know there were periods when water flowed freely,” said Briony Horgan with Purdue University at the at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in Barcelona. “If this is so,” Horgan added, “it is important in the search for possible life on Mars. We know that the building blocks of life on Earth developed very soon after the Earth’s formation, and that flowing water is essential for life’s development. So evidence that we had early, flowing water on Mars, will increase the chances that simple life may have developed at around the same time as it did on Earth."
“The Death of Mars” –Pluto-Size Asteroid Ignited Ancient Climate Change --In the mid-1980s, a group of American archaeologists pored over satellite images trying to understand what had become of the Mayan civilization that had once ruled over Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, discovered a pattern: a near-perfect ring of sinkholes -cenotes- about 200km across,, encircling the Yucatecan capital, Merida, and port towns of Sisal and Progreso.