AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Nasa mars rover finds aliens12/27/2023 ![]() Several billion years ago, Mars was likely warm and sloshing with water. Our corner of the solar system would seem less lonely, but the only neighbors we spotted would have turned out the lights long before we started knocking on their door. Such a discovery would certainly be bittersweet, even depressing. “Our best chance of identifying life on Mars would be going into the past,” says Lori Glaze, the director of NASA’s planetary-science division. Read: What makes a good landing site on Mars?įinding live aliens, even microbial ones, would force NASA to confront questions about interference and contamination ancient life has the advantage of being both more likely to exist and inert. The mission is designed to look for signs of only ancient microbes-extinct, fossilized, hollowed out-not present life, squirming away at this very moment. ![]() And so this search for life comes with a twist. Should the Perseverance rover find it, this time there will be no premature celebration: The evidence will come back to Earth for examination first. This new rover is the biggest and most technologically sophisticated spacecraft NASA has ever sent to Mars to answer one of the oldest questions: Does life exist anywhere but Earth? By the mid-1970s, when the Viking mission launched, the only aliens Earthlings thought of encountering were microbes, which scientists had found could survive in Mars-like conditions simulated in labs. Others thought they saw dark swaths of vegetation, even a seasonal bloom-until orbiters revealed that the shadows were just shifting dust. Some imagined a landscape shaped by an intelligent civilization-until telescopes became sophisticated enough to detail the planet’s surface. ![]() The thought of the red planet bustling with alien beings has fascinated scientists for centuries. Nearly half a century after that mission, its latest successor, a rover called Perseverance, left Earth this morning to scour Mars’s surface for signs of alien microbes. But the data turned out to be muddled, and one experiment designed to detect organic molecules found none, not even simple ones that astronauts had found on the moon. They were convinced they’d discovered proof, quietly metabolizing, in the soil. When scientists examined the mission’s early findings, they sent for champagne. The very first time NASA put a robot on Mars, it was looking for one thing: life.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |