The question we all want to know is
"Are we alone?"
Now we have eyes on the ground,
Perseverance is ready to answer
that question for us.
Touchdown confirmed.
Perseverance safely...
For the last four years, I've been recreating the surface of Mars in my
lab at the University of Oxford.
What I've most been interested in is whether I could recreate
lakes and other liquid water environments that might have existed
on the surface of Mars about three and a half billion years ago.
Where it gets really interesting is that now NASA has landed a rover,
the Perseverence Rover, right in a crater that might have once hosted a lake.
Although there's no water on the surface of Mars today, there is
inescapable evidence that it was once present.
When you look at it from space, you'll see certain features that
jump out at you as being quite similar to those we have on Earth.
You'll see sweeping valleys that look like they were carved from
liquid water.
These actually pebbles that are a few centimetres in diameter.
What you can see when you look at the pebble outlines is that they
have rounded shapes.
So they've been basically rounded during a transport process, and they're
too large to have been moved and rounded by wind processes.
And so the only way we can actually get this rounding is by
water flow.
You'll see gigantic canyons.
This one here is the Valles Marineris, and this thing would
stretch from Los Angeles to New York.
This thing is truly colossal.
And I remember when this image first came up and we were all huddled
around a giant screen looking at this and actually took us a while
to really hit home.
Oh, gosh! Actually, this is the first evidence from on the ground
of water flow on Mars.
We see great big ice caps at the poles, much like we do on Earth as
well. We see signs from space that are immediately recognisable as
great big channels, enormous flood plains, the largest in the solar
system that would have excoriated their way across plains as large as
the continent of North America.
We see chemical signatures.
We see minerals that have water locked in their structures that
could have only formed when that water was freely available.
And we also see both of these coming together in the form of
certain features that we know from studying them on Earth only form
where there's bodies of water.
Where Perseverance is set is a crater called Jezero.
And why Jezero Crater was selected is that it combines these
two key indicators of water in one site.
And how deltas form is where you have a river flowing across the
surface of a planet and in its water its containing all kinds of
churned up sediments.
And then as soon as that river reaches an open body of water like
a lake or an ocean, it dumps all of that sediment load.
Why the Perseverance mission is so exciting to me is that for the past
four years, it was those carbonates that were found in its delta
that I was trying to recreate in my lab.
Perseverance has been in the making
for a very long time.
And it's a roving scientific suite of instruments.
It's a moving laboratory.
And it's absolutely incredible the things it can do.
So to finally get to hear the sounds of grains of sand being
turned over and the sounds of that very thin atmosphere being
blustered around in this crater, it's absolutely incredible.
The first time I saw the pictures from the surface, it was like being
in Star Wars and learning about whole new places.
I couldn't believe it. And here, five, six years later, I am with
my PhD on the surface of Mars.
I feel very, very fortunate.
Altimeter data confirms that Ingenuity has performed its first flight,
the first flight of a powered aircraft on another planet.
What's incredible about the Ingenuity craft that this is the first time
anything has been airborne on another planet at all, not just Mars.
So the image we're looking at on the screen is the image from our onboard
navigation camera showing us hovering above the surface of Mars.
How incredible!
The idea is that it might be able to scout ahead to places of interest
for future astronauts and look for any hazards.
Perseverence has four main scientific goals, first is to
search for habitable conditions.
The second is its interested in searching for bio signatures.
The third mission goal is to harvest and then cache together
samples of interest to return to Earth.
The absolute dream is to one day have a sample of Martian soil
returned from Jezero Crater, from those carbonates that you can
see from orbit. And to compare that to the kinds of crystals that
I was forming in my lab and just see how similar are they.
What do they look like?
And the final goal of the Perseverence mission is to
prepare for humans to come and live there one day.
People who are fit!
People who are top in their fields!
People who are experts!
People who have a spirit of adventure!
But I would say most critically, you need people who have the right
temperament.
Think about a mission to Mars.
What is it? Is it an outdoor stuff or is it confinement?
And then I see somebody who says, I have a stamp collection, I do a
lot of reading, I enjoy watching movies, and I'm thinking that might
be good for confinement.
Artemis is a key step in getting humans to Mars.
Right now, launching humans from Earth is extremely expensive
because we're just so heavy getting off this gigantic rock.
Instead, if we can have a base set up on the moon, we can have
supplies ready to go from there manufactured on the moon that can
then be launched straight to Mars.
And so this makes it cheaper and easier to be launching things not
just to Mars, but perhaps around the solar system as well.
Once you've got to Mars, there are a whole host of problems that you
wouldn't even think about based on life on Earth.
So you need something to protect you from essentially exploding or
at least having your skin all stretched out, and the blood boiling
and getting the bends, things like that.
The way space suits are designed now, they're mostly pressurised
spacecraft. Essentially, they're almost like a mini spaceship.
Things like, how do you maintain water?
How do you recycle your water supply?
How do you recycle waste?
Here we are
at the throne.
Number two – right here.
It's pretty small, so you have to have pretty good aim.
How do you keep making the best of effort you've got without
throwing things away?
And they're all problems that we're going to have to overcome if
we're ever going to be a space faring interplanetary species.
I've had a very long time to think about whether I would go to Mars,
and so I'm not being flippant when I say yes, absolutely, I would
absolutely love to go.
It would be the most fabulous adventure.
There'd be so much to do and explore and so many questions.
Endless questions.
So, yes, absolutely.