The first interplanetary campaign to return samples of humanity is already underway.
The size of a NASA car Perseverance Mars rover launched yesterday (July 30), starting a nearly seven-month cruise to the Red Planet.
Perseverance will look for signs of antiquity Life on Mars after his February 2021 touchdown on the floor of Jezero Crater, which housed a lake and a river delta billions of years ago. But the nuclear power robot will also collect and cache at least 20 samples of rock and earth from the Red Planet for its future return to Earth, so that scientists can examine things in much more detail than Perseverance could handle by If only.
Returned samples have the potential to “change our understanding of the origin, evolution and distribution of Life on earth and elsewhere in the solar system, “said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Scientific Mission Directorate, during a pre-launch press conference on Tuesday (July 28).
Live updates: NASA Mars Rover Perseverance Mission in Real Time
Plus: NASA Perseverance Rover from Mars to the Red Planet (photos)
A pioneering campaign
NASA has conducted sample return missions before. Apollo astronauts brought 842 pounds home. (382 kilograms) of moon rocks between 1969 and 1972, for example, and the agency Stardust mission returned comet dust spots to Earth in January 2006.
Also, NASA OSIRIS-REx mission It is preparing to collect samples from the asteroid Bennu, which will arrive here in September 2023 if everything goes according to plan. And NASA is not alone in the sample return game. From Japan Hayabusa2 probe Pieces of the asteroid Ryugu will land this December, and the original Hayabusa returned the grains of the stony asteroid Itokawa to Earth in 2010.
But no one has successfully executed an interplanetary sample return mission yet, and it’s not difficult to understand why. Such an effort is incredibly complex, time consuming, and costly, especially when material returning to Earth may have signatures of extraterrestrial life. (Russia attempted to send a sample return mission called Phobos-Grunt to the moon of Mars Phobos in 2011, but the spacecraft crashed back to Earth after a launch failure.)
Consider the campaign that has just started launching Perseverance. The nuclear powered rover will take a few dozen carefully selected samples, storing the precious material in sterile tubes that will be stored somewhere in the Jezero crater. (Perseverance can also preserve some of the samples, mission team members have said.)
The next step, if everything goes according to the current (tentative) plan, comes with two launches in 2026. One launch will send the NASA-led Lander Sample Recovery Mission (SRL) mission to Mars, and the second will raise the Orbiter Return from Earth (ERO), led by the European Space Agency (ESA).
The SRL includes a rocket and a small “search finder” provided by ESA, which will do exactly what its name says: search for the cached samples and bring them back to the lander. The samples will then be loaded into a soccer ball-sized boat aboard the rocket, which will launch into Martian orbit.
Once there, the rocket will deploy the sample container, which the ERO will extract from the vacuum and transport it back to Earth. When it approaches our planet, the ERO will launch the boat, which will land in the Utah desert in 2031.
The samples from Mars will then be transported to a receiving facility in a location that has yet to be determined, where scientists will begin to take inventory of their newly delivered cosmic treasure.
A large part of the initial assessment will involve ensuring that the Mars material does not pose a threat to life on Earth. This is not an idle concern, since the Red Planet was probably habitable in the ancient past and parts of it, for example, underground aquifers, may still be able to support life as we know it today.
Therefore, the design of the receiving facility will be based on laboratories that manage and study the most dangerous contagious pathogens on Earth, said NASA Planetary Protection Officer Lisa Pratt.
“It’s not that we really think there will be anything pathogenic or highly dangerous on Mars,” Pratt said at the July 28 press conference. “But we are going to be extremely cautious.”
Again, the NASA-ESA recovery plan has yet to be finalized; dates or other details may change. But a major architectural reform is unlikely.
Related: The search for life on Mars (a photo timeline)
Better than meteorites
Scientists have been studying pieces of Mars here on Earth for decades: rocks from the red planet that came to Earth after being launched into space by powerful impacts. In fact, one of those Mars meteorites, known as Allan Hills 84001, carries what some scientists have interpreted as probable signs of life on the Red Planet. (However, most other researchers consider the evidence to be inconclusive and the debate continues to this day.)
The samples of perseverance will be scientifically superior to these previously examined Red Planet rocks, mission team members said.
For starters, the meteorites on Mars are barely pristine; They have endured travel through two planetary atmospheres and millions of miles of deep space, as well as long stays on the disordered and life-like surface of our planet. But the material selected by Perseverance, the centerpiece of NASA’s $ 2.7 billion. Mars Mission 2020, will be hermetically sealed immediately after collection.
Furthermore, Mars meteorites are random fragments that tend to be volcanic and young. The rocks of Jezero Crater, on the other hand, are billions of years old and preserve the history of a potentially habitable environment. And the mobile team will be able to choose the most interesting samples from this already promising lot.
“The best thing about Perseverance is that instead of nature choosing us, we will be able to choose which rocks return to Earth, along with our careful documentation of where and why they were collected,” said Chris Herd of the University of Alberta in Canada. , a scientist for the returned Mars 2020 sample, said during the July 28 press conference.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
