One of the biggest questions in science is: are we alone? Finding life on Mars
would be the defining moment of space exploration.
I've come to Swildon's hole in the Mendips to find out more about the
future of space exploration. Last episode we learned the with the surface baked by
radiation and lava tubes able to keep in an atmosphere, the caves of Mars might be
the best place for colonization. But what might already be lurking in the darkness?
As we've been exploring the cave I've noticed something quite interesting. On
the surface it was freezing ,well this is England so fair enough, however here in
the cave it's actually quite warm. That's because this huge of mass of rock helps
to regulate the flow heat; keeping the cave and around the same temperature
year-round. At the equator Mars surface temperatures can fluctuate from a
pleasant 20 degrees in the day to a freezing minus 100 degrees at night. The
more consistent temperatures below ground make it much easier for life to
survive. If we were to head down much deeper, such as in a mine,
we'd find the temperature would actually start to increase. That's because of the
heat inside the Earth's core. Although Mars' core is much cooler than the
Earth's this same effect still slots true. We might find lakes of liquid water if
we head down deep enough into Mars caves. Many stalactites such as these play host
to whole ecosystems of bacteria not seen anywhere else. There are some species
that can eat the rock itself. We think that Martian caves might support a form
of life that eat hydrogen gas and produces methane. Orbiting satellites
have even spotted this methane accumulating around cave exit points;
changing in concentration in step with the seasons.
Could this gas be being produced by an unknown geological process or is it
really life? We just don't know yet, we to explore the
Martian caves to find out. The question is do we really need to send people down or
could robots do just as good a job? While NASA's Rovers have been doing some
fantastic science and driverless cars are getting better and better, there are
some situations such as in a cave that humans are just very well adapted. As you
can see this is a pretty extreme environment. On the physical side of
things humans are a jack-of-all-trades. We can go from walking to crawling to
climbing and, in this case, even swimming.
This is one of NASA's Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robots. A LEMUR for
short. It's many dexterous limbs helped make it the world's first rock-climbing
robot. Despite this it still has one major problem; it needs to be controlled
by a human. Remote-control isn't really an option when your operator is on a
different planet with a time delay of up to 24 minutes in either direction. Not
only that but any signal that you're trying to send is going to be blocked by
hundreds of meters of rock. Going fully autonomous is the possibility, but it's
taken years to get a car that drives itself. All that has to do is drive along
a flat surface between two white lines.
While robots might want a be able to deal with this environment, that
eventuality is long off. For now route picking, problem solving and getting out
of a the tight squeeze are all things that humans can do far better than any
machine. Martian caves are the perfect place science, in a location ideal for
human colonisation. But to explore this alien world we first need to conquer the
caves here on earth.
Huge thank you to everyone from the University of Leeds Speleological Society
for helping to make this video possible and for welcoming me into one of the
coolest clubs on campus. If you're studying here at the moment I would
definitely recommend going on one of their weekend trips. If this video has
made you're interested in caving, but you're not the students at Leeds then
the website newtocaving.com is a great place to get started. Finally I'd like to
thank my incredible co-creator Brendan. If you're interested in finding out about
behind the scenes of these two videos then he's written a great article on the
topic. Link is in the description. Next episode we return to our regular series
on Engineering Europe. Until then this has been James Dingley from the Atomic Frontier.
Keeping Looking Up.