Has there ever been life on Mars?
No.
Probably not.
Maybe?
I don't know.
There is no greater hero,
in our search for life on mars, than a little robot named,
*Opportunity*
15 years after it's mission began
57 times longer than it signed up for
Opportunity has gone silent.
Has we wait and hope
on NASA (?) to re-establish contact
we thought we would reflect, on the greater quest
for Opportunity has contributed so much to,
the search for life on mars.
MARS, the red planet, fourth rock from the sun
it's currently just passed it's closest approach to heart
making it an angry red eye in the early night sky
this is a planet that as far as we know
is inhabited entirely by robots
but at the end of july
something remarkable was announced that may prove the possibility
of life on mars
there is a giant underground lake of liquid water
right now, under the south pole
and in 2020 the race to find life on mars
will intensify, whit both ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA
launching missions, they will shift the focus from the search for water
because we now know there is water
to the search for life (past or present)
NASA's also planning a mission to take a sample of Martian soil
and rocket it back to Earth.
Applying our best earth bound technologies
to an uncontamined sample
they provide the proof of martian life we have always been hoping for
But as good scientists, we have to suggest caution
because people have been searching for life on Mars
and believing they found it for over 300 years.
So today, we're going to look back at the long history of life on Mars
or at least of our hunt for it.
We begin our story at the end of the 17th century,
When dutsch polymath Christiaan Huygens
made amazing advances
on Galileo's astronomical telescope
this allowed him to observe a dark patch on martian surface
and so mesure mars's 24h rotation rate
as well as a white spot on its south pole
He guessed that both of these resulted
from surface water, clouds and ice.
Huygens saw this is evidences
that Mars was habitable, and so perhaps,
inhabited
infact, he was the first to postulate
that liquid water is necessary for life
a few centuries of extra science
has only conviced us further of this
as we discussed before