Dropped into a basin called Gale Crater in 2012, Curiosity’s instruments quickly determined that the region was once a giant lake. Flowing water on Earth is perhaps the single most important ingredient for life on our planet many scientists wondered if this lush Mars of the past hosted organisms, too.ĭata from NASA’s most recent rover, Curiosity, reinvigorated the search for life. Thanks to data from these spacecraft, scientists realized that 3.5 billion years ago, liquid water lakes and rivers dotted the planet’s surface. Over time, a new portrait of Mars’ past emerged. NASA followed up the Viking landers with orbiters that studied Mars from above as well as rovers that crawled across the planet’s surface. Over time, a new portrait of Mars’ past emerged “Compared to what we know today, they did not have a very sophisticated understanding of how to actually look for life,” says Farley. But in hindsight, the Viking landers were not well-equipped to answer that ultimate question. While the pair learned a great deal about Mars, they didn’t turn up any compelling evidence that life had ever existed on the planet, putting a damper on the search for a while. In 1976, NASA sent two landers, called Viking 1 and Viking 2, to the Martian surface to actively look for signs of life. “This is really a unique - really a once-in-a-lifetime - opportunity to get samples from a known location on Mars,” Tanja Bosak, a professor of geobiology at MIT who is a participating scientist on the mission, tells The Verge. They may tell us if life existed on Mars or if it’s always been a barren planet. If successful, Perseverance will neatly package dozens of samples of the Martian surface that may one day see Earth. Perseverance is just the first - extremely complicated - step in that sample return process.
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