Perseverance, the Mars 2020 rover, which is expected to land on the red planet in February
of 2021. And one of its main jobs?
Finding signs of ancient microbial life on Mars.
But wait, haven't we already found signs?
What more evidence do we need, and how much do we actually have so far?
Now, before we get into actual life forms, we have to talk about water.
Most astrobiologists agree that liquid water, or at least some kind of liquid solvent, is
arguably the most important variable in our continued search for life everywhere, including on Mars.
For a long time, the best image we had that indicated the prior presence of water was
this picture.
It’s possible that this riverbed and canyon formation could have also resulted from wind
flow, glacial ice, volcanic lava, or liquefied CO2, but experts believe that the best explanation
for this very specific shape and pattern was repeatedly flowing water.
There are lots of other convincing geological features on the surface of Mars that make
a pretty strong case for the fact that the planet may have once had flowing, liquid water.
Plus in 2012, the Curiosity Rover phoned home to tell us it had found and examined a number
of rocks that we now know were exposed to water billions of years ago.
But what about water on Mars that’s liquid right now?
The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment or HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter took pictures that showed us something we now call recurring slope linea,
or RSL.
These dark streaks seem to fluctuate over time, appearing to flow down steep Martian slopes.
And this discovery made a huge splash at the time and was widely hailed as evidence of current
water on Mars, but there are lots of voices who push back on this, saying it’s unrealistic
to imagine that Mars could support flowing liquid water when its atmosphere is so thin
and so cold.
And new work argues that instead of water, it could be granular flow of sand and dust
that makes these marks.
So the debate about whether RSL indicate current flowing water on Mars still continues today.
There’s also super cool evidence of liquid oceans inside Mars right now, but that’s
kinda a whole separate video.
And say we put water to the side entirely...what evidence do we have of actual life forms on Mars?
The biggest and most controversial is the infamous incident in 1996 when NASA announced
they had found evidence of extraterrestrial life inside a meteorite that thudded to Earth
from Mars.
The ‘proof’?
The combination of minerals and carbon compounds inside the meteorite seemed remarkably similar
in makeup and form to what some microbes produce here on Earth.
That’s what we call a biosignature.
But in the years since, scientists have pointed out that non-living or abiotic processes are equally
likely to have produced the same clumps of minerals that we were so excited to call fossilized
evidence of life.
Plus, follow-on work did find that the meteorite had been contaminated by Earth’s bacteria once it got here.
So...eh?
Over twenty years later, the debate still rages on.
But even though it didn’t give us a particularly satisfying answer, this meteorite did ignite
a very important conversation.
See one of the issues here is that we don’t have a very standard definition of what life is.
And that makes finding definitive evidence of it...kinda hard.
Other Martian missions have found traces of methane and formaldehyde on Mars, which are
both produced by living things here on Earth...although they can be produced by non-living processes.
And again, we have a kinda philosophical dilemma here because we only know how to look for
the things we know about.
It could be that life elsewhere in the solar system or the universe is marked by biosignatures that we
don’t know about or don’t know how to look for... yet.
And then there’s the whole question of where did life on Mars come from?!
I mean...existential issues abound.
Now, given the fact that we’ve been studying Mars from home since the 1600s and from space
since the 60s, what I’ve covered in this video is certainly not exhaustive.
But it is a short summary of the most compelling evidence we currently have for
life on Mars which...even after all that, are still just tiny hints on where to start.
Nothing definite, but hopefully a good base from which to make progress.
Now when it lands, Perseverance will be happily digging around in Mars’ rocks for fossils, gathering samples
to hang onto until future missions can hopefully ferry those samples back to Earth for further
study.
And it’ll eventually be joined by the European-Russian ExoMars rover.
Some scientists are also pushing for these bots to search for genetic signs of current
life on Mars too!
But whatever we look for, from the years past it’s pretty clear that whatever we find is going
to need to be really solid evidence before we make any solid claims, and it may require
a whole re-imagining of our frameworks for—and classification of—life itself.
Because as Carl Sagan said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.
Which, it’s pretty safe to say, we haven’t quite found...yet.
If you want more info on all you could ever want to know about the Mars Rover, then check out
this video here, and make sure you subscribe to Seeker for all your space exploration news
and updates with our series Countdown to Launch.
If you have questions about specific Mars discoveries, let us know down in the comments below.
As always thanks for watching, and I’ll see next time.