Mars . Signs of Life on Mars? NASA’s Perseverance Rover Begins the Hunt – Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The Science Team

While the rover has significant autonomous capabilities, such as driving itself across the Martian landscape, hundreds of earthbound scientists are still involved in analyzing results and planning further investigations.

There are almost 500 people on the science team, Beegle said. The number of participants in any given action by the rover is on the order of 100. Its great to see these scientists come to agreement in analyzing the clues, prioritizing each step, and putting together the pieces of the Jezero science puzzle.

That will be critical when the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover collects its first samples for eventual return to Earth. Theyll be sealed in superclean metallic tubes on the Martian surface so that a future mission could collect them and send back to the home planet for further analysis.

Despite decades of investigation on the question of potential life, the Red Planet has stubbornly kept its secrets.

Mars 2020, in my view, is the best opportunity we will have in our lifetime to address that question, said Kenneth Williford, the deputy project scientist for Perseverance.

The geological details are critical, Allwood said, to place any indication of possible life in context, and to check scientists ideas about how a second example of lifes origin could come about.

Combined with other instruments on the rover, the detectors on the arm, including SHERLOC and WATSON, could make humanitys first discovery of life beyond Earth.

More About the Mission

A key objective for Perseverances mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planets geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASAs Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

For more about Perseverance:

mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

and

nasa.gov/perseverance

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Mars . Signs of Life on Mars? NASA's Perseverance Rover Begins the Hunt - Jet Propulsion Laboratory