A Bold Mission

NEVADA GUIANCE On the 18th of February 2021, a rover fittingly named “Perseverance” landed on our closest planetary relative. But it was more than just a feat of engineering and another step in the space race. This rover is the next step into the bold search for signs of living creatures on other worlds - the search for life.

However, Perseverance’s mission didn’t end at touchdown - it is still browsing through the red, dusty Martian surface of what was once home to a river delta and lake. Why? Well, liquid water is life’s most essential ingredient, and scientists want to know if water was once present on Mars. But how does a car-sized space vehicle know what to look for?

Perseverance is equipped with stateof-the-art scientific equipment and will collect rock and soil samples that will be sent back to Earth. The thing is, life is most probably a part of Mars’ past - this is why the rover is carefully scanning through Martian geology. Think microscopic palaeontology - small signs of life could very well be preserved in the rocky structures covering the red planet. However, if signs of life are found, it won’t be the microorganisms themselves, and instead the organic materials they synthesised -known as a biosignature- may be hidden within the rock.

Rocks aren’t the only niche where life will lurk - scientists have discovered what they think to be a subglacial lake about 1.5km underneath the surface of Mars after scanning with ground penetrating radar. Scientists scanned the area, and in the region of the lake, a very bright signal was coming from the subsurface - liquid water! Even the possibility of water is all it takes for a sign of life on Mars.

Life on another planet is just as exciting as it sounds - even if it’s not aliens we’re talking about, finding any sort of organism would be an amazing achievement! But why do we want to find life? After all, it’s pretty plentiful here on Earth. But finding life somewhere else brings up an infinite amount of questions - did life on Earth originate from Mars? How did the life on Mars come into existence? Was Mars once an Earth-like world thriving with organisms of its own kind?

If we want to continue this search for interplanetary life, ‘perseverance’ is all it will take.