NASA, working with the European Space Agency, is launching a mission to Mars on July 30. The plan is to pick up samples of soil and rock from the surface of the planet and bring them home to search for signs of life from the past. Professor Caroline Smith, a planetary scientist from the Natural History Museum, spoke to Times Radio about the one problem with the mission.
She said: “One of the issues that we have is we may well find some very interesting chemical and physical signatures within those rocks that could indicate that there was life on Mars in the past where the crater is now.
“The problem is we will only be able to make that conclusive result to say that there was definitely evidence of life there with the right chemistry and the right textures when we bring those samples back to Earth.
“We have to use the full weight of the amazing instrumentation that we have in labs in the UK and around the world as well.
“That is really exciting to me, the icing on the cake for me is that this is the first stage of this very ambitious, but very doable Mars sample return campaign.”
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The expert was questioned over what she expected to see in the soil and rock samples collected that could hint at that conclusion.
Professor Smith answered: “There’ll be all sorts of analyses done so there’ll be a lot of biological analyses done.
“What we call bio hazard testing with various biological and microbiological protocols will be employed on those samples to see whether there’s anything alive in there or anything toxic that could pose a potential hazard to Earth’s biosphere.
“There are very very stringent international laws and protocols that say what you have to do for samples you return from Mars.”
It will then be up to another mission altogether to land another rover later on.
A rocket will be fired into orbit with the gathered samples.
This will then need to be collected by another satellite spaceship to get the samples back to Earth.
NASA have chosen the Jezero crater as the destination of the Perseverance rover.
It is considered to be a promising place to look for evidence of extinct Martian life.