The Search for Extinct Life on Planet Mars

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NASA safely landed a new robotic rover on Mars on Thursday, beginning its most ambitious effort in decades to directly study whether there was ever life on the red planet. While the agency has completed other missions to Mars, the $2.7 billion robotic explorers, named Perseverance, carry scientific tools that will bring advanced capabilities to the search for life beyond Earth. The rover, about the size of a car, can use its sophisticated cameras, lasers that can analyze the chemical makeup of Martian rocks, and ground-penetrating radar to identify the chemical signatures of fossilized microbial life that may have developed on Mars when it was a planet full of flowing water.

NASA’s earlier missions showed that in the distant past some places were warm, wet, and habitable. Mars has been the focus of more and more interest from explorers on Earth. The United Arab Emirates and China both began orbiting the planet last month, joining an armada of European and American spacecraft already studying it from space. And private entrepreneurs are looking toward the neighboring world imagining that one day perhaps humans could live there. The rover will set in motion a NASA plan that is to be carried out over the next decade, and it could bring samples from Mars back to Earth, where scientists will have even more capabilities to find something signaling that our planet is not the only place where life has ever been found.

Perseverance has the tools that can search for complex carbon-based molecules that could be the remnants of past microbes. The setting for the mission’s studies is Jezero, a 30-mile-wide crater that was once a large lake filled with a river delta. The rover will crawl along the ancient delta, poring over its piles of sediments in search of those chemical signals of microbes that were extinguished as Mars turned cold and barren.