NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has been on the prowl since it landed on Mars last year.
The robot is supposed to look for signs of ancient life. The Mars machinery is gathering up samples of Martian rock and soil to tease out an answer about the Red Planet's habitability.
Perseverance is on a roll, a collectible outing to hide core samples in sealed tubes that are to be eventually found on Earth via the Mars Sample Return program.
Mars rover takes pictures of its own landing debris.
How difficult is it to find past life on Mars? Maybe the rover has already done it. There is a question of whether we need the samples back on Earth to find signs of past life or if we can use Perseverance's suite of instruments to detect past life.
How hard will it be for scientists to agree on whether signs of life have been seen by the rover? What do you think a slam dunk finding looks like?
John Mustard is a professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Brown University.
Mustard told Space.com that the instruments are not close to being able to detect life on a planet. Scientists can't agree on the proof for the first life on Earth.
Don't expect a lot of revelations for Mustard.
There is no evidence that the rover could collect fossils. Shapes and chemical signals that have been mistaken for past life on Earth have been created by geological and chemistry.
Steve Ruff is a planetary geologist with a focus on the mineralogy of Mars.
The hit video series that is following the exploration of Jezero Crater by the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter, serves up science, engineering, and search for life on Mars using a novel in-person experience is produced by Ruff.
The life we can reasonably expect to find will be single-celled organisms that lived billions of years ago. The available instruments and capabilities of Perseverance will make it difficult to discern their traces.
The sample preparation and analytical techniques used to prove life was present at the rover's roaming site are only available on Earth, according to Ruff.
Multicellular organisms probably didn't evolve on Mars. It took billions of years for that to happen on Earth because the conditions have been more stable.
There's no expectation that the surface samples that Perseverance can acquire, even down to the several centimeters it can drill, will have living or recently dead microbes.
Perseverance has instruments that can detect and identify organic compounds. He said that it could identify present life, but it's not likely to show up.
Don't wait for a slam dunk observation to see if signs of past or present life have been spotted by Perseverance.
The experience with the Mars meteorite showed how difficult it will be to prove there was life on Mars. The combination of organic molecules in structures that likely were formed or influenced by microbes, like stromatolites, will be required to convince scientists that Martian life was present.
NASA and the European Space Agency restructured the Mars Sample Return effort in July in order to reduce the complexity of the mission while increasing the chance for success.
A part of the shift in gears was abandoning the Sample Fetch Rover. The project now includes a Sample Retrieval Lander, two sample recovery helicopter, and a new sample transfer arm.
Having that rover personally deliver them to the Mars Ascent Vehicle is a lower risk strategy since Perseverance has held up well. Mars goodies would land in Utah in the 20th century.
Mixed feelings are caused by this re-organized Mars sample return endeavor.
The University of Florida has an assistant professor named Amy Williams. Williams is both a participating scientist and a NASA Perseverance scientist.
There are certain categories of biosignatures that can be detected with the Perseverance instrument suite.
Even with a macroscale texture like that, most abiologists would need multiple lines of evidence to confirm the biogenicity assessment and refute any abiologic.
The feature is not associated with or derived from living organisms.
"Sample return is the way to get those multiple lines of evidence, as we have far greater analytical capabilities in labs here than we will be able to send on a rover," Williams said.
Williams said that the Perseverance rover instrument suite is meant to give environmental context for samples. We can ask the right questions if we think we see a biogenic stromatolite.
What a slam dunk would look like reminds me of astronomer Carl Sagan's view that to make an extraordinary claim like finding evidence for life on Mars, we need extraordinary evidence.
"That is achieved through returning those samples to Earth for a thorough laboratory assessment," Williams said. It's not possible to send every laboratory technique to Mars for this kind of corroboration because of the constraints on Rover instruments.
Williams thinks it is possible to achieve majority community consensus on a positive biosignature detection. This would be an important discovery and we need to make it right.
It makes sense to simplify the sample transfer part of the process and reduce the number of launches/landings and untested technology, said Mustard of Brown University.
By having Perseverance deliver the samples to the return capsule, the Perseverance will have to stay fixed in the landing area for sample transfer and will be unable to explore Nili Planum as originally planned. It will greatly reduce the science return from the rover and put it into the future. I am not sure if the use of copters to grab and deliver core samples is a good idea.
The new plan to exclude the fetch rover and its lander and rely on Perseverance to deliver the samples to the Mars Ascent Vehicle makes it more likely that it will happen. He said that the approach is simpler and less expensive.
NASA and the European Space Agency seem to be responding to a rapidly changing situation with creativity and flexibility, according to Williams. They are planning for success by building in redundancies, such as sample delivery to the ascent vehicle with Perseverance, and using our evolving technologies, such as the development of these helicopters based on Ingenuity heritage.
Our knowledge of the performance of the Mars craft is excellent. A decade has passed since the Curiosity Mars rover arrived on the red planet.
"We know these lifespans are doable," Williams said. The Mars Sample Return will change our understanding of both Mars and Earth.
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