At the moment, NASA’s Perseverance rover is flying through space after landing on Mars in February, and no one is looking closer than Dr. Caleb Fassett of Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Fassett wrote the scientific paper almost 20 years ago that gave Perseverance its destination.
Fassett’s research found evidence that the crater – since the name Jezero Crater – once held a lake and had good chances of keeping signs of ancient life on the Red Planet. NASA has paid the $ 3 billion mission cost that Fassett and the scientists who share his view are equal. And NASA put the ante up. For the first time, a rover will attempt to send monsters from the planet back to Earth.
“This particular place on Mars was something I had detected in 2003, 2004, in very low resolution data,” Fassett said last week. “In that data, it was really clear that there were these valleys in this crater.” What Fassett saw in images of the Mars Odyssey spacecraft still orbiting Mars were signs of sedimentary deposits on one side of the crater and “an outlet” on the other. “To have an outlet form, you have to fill the whole (crater) and flood it,” Fassett said. “That basically requires the existence of a lake.”
“That was exciting when I first found it,” Fassett said. “Since then it’s gotten cooler.”
This map shows regions in and around Jezero Crater on Mars, the landing site of NASA’s Perseverance rover. The green circle represents the landing ellipse of the rover. Jezero held a lake and river delta billions of years ago; scientists want to capture samples of rock in these regions that may contain evidence of ancient microscopic life, which will be returned to Earth by a future mission for extensive study.
Fassett and colleagues also discovered carbonate in the crater, a mineral that requires “relatively moderate conditions” to form. “A lot of the carbonates on Earth, the reason they (form) are due to organisms,” Fassett said. “You can also get them to precipitate inorganically without biology, and that may very well be the case with these Mars.”
Scientists have seen this before. Carbonates were found in a rock sample from a Martian meteorite that struck Earth, Fassett said, “and that was one of the things that resumed the Mars program in the 1980s, because humans claimed that it was biology. “
Scientists do not think so now, he said, and Fassett believes that proving life next year on Mars is “unlikely.” The robber is “very capable,” he said, “but we have a hard time on Earth identifying the signatures of life in 3 million year old rocks. You have to be very lucky, and people will be arguing about it for decades to come. it’s in the literature. That, the idea that we send a robot that will solve this problem, I actually do not think likely. “
That’s why NASA is seeking the big step of “displaying samples” to Earth. ‘Scientists are skeptical,’ said Fassett, ‘and if we scientists are convinced, it will be (with) samples that are back. I could be wrong. There could be fossils … I just don’t think it’s likely. “
The plan is that if Perseverance finds “interesting samples”, they will be collected and stored in the rover until a Mars Ascent Vehicle arrives later in the 2020s.
his illustration shows a concept of how the NASA Mars Ascent Vehicle, with tubes containing rock and soil samples, from the surface of Mars could be launched in one step from the view of the sample for Mars.
The return mission will be a partnership with the European Space Agency. It includes a ‘lift rover’ to land on Mars and pick up the examples of Perseverance and then transfer them to a ‘return’ rocket which it launches into Mars orbit. Another spaceship in orbit will collect the samples and bring them back to Earth.
All of this will be expensive, complicated and time consuming, but it will be cheaper by billions of dollars, much faster and less complicated than the first flight of humans to the planet. And it could answer the fundamental question of life outside of Earth. ‘We have not found life in the Universe other than Earth,’ said Fassett, ‘so the first time we have to be very conscious to make a case for it. That would be a paradigm shift. “
Fassett’s discovery and the long wait to test it are part of the story of space exploration. “One of the things you get used to when you explore other planets is the possibility that your findings will be difficult to test further,” he said. “There was no guarantee when I worked this out in 2004, 2005 that we would ever go to this place on Mars. Mars has compiled the land of all the continents of the Earth. So, the chances are that you just choose one particular place and that is where you are going to go, you should be pretty lucky to follow up your observations to get there.
Dr. Caleb Fassett is a planetary scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Originally from Maryland, Dr. Passed his BS at Williams College in 2002, and MS and PhD from Brown University in 2005 and 2008, respectively.
“It’s not just patience,” he said. “It is also fortunate that we are able to print the envelope at this particular location.”
Would he like to go to Mars to see for himself? “I think given the opportunity, I probably would,” Fassett said. ‘I have pretty risk averse, so I do not know if I am the man who would be your first choice as an astronaut. I think the reason we get the people we get is a certain tolerance for well-chosen risk. ”
“I love the fact that we can build these robots to be our explorers in the far part of the universe, without us having to be there to breathe and feed and hopefully return,” he said. “So, yes, I hope 50 years from now space travel, but I personally do not go there.”
“Probably,” he added.
