NASA officials announced Tuesday (July 9) that the agency's new Mars rover, which is slated to launch in 2020, and collect samples for eventual return to Earth. The scientists who drew up goals for the mission considered recommending life-detection gear, which NASA's twin Viking landers carried in the 1970s, but the planners ultimately decided against it.
"To date, the evidence that we have from observations of Mars and Martian samples is that we don't have the clear indication that life is at such an abundance on the planet that we could go there with a simple experiment like Viking [had] and detect that [life] there," Brown University professor Jack Mustard, chairman of the 2020 rover mission's Science Definition Team (SDT), told reporters Tuesday. []
"To go and look for simple organisms, or not-so-simple organisms, that are living within that toxic, harsh environment we just think is a foolish investment of the technology at this time," Mustard added.
It makes more sense right now to look for signs of past life, scientists said, for Mars was much warmer and wetter in the ancient past than it is today. Indeed, observations by NASA's led scientists to announce this past March that the Red Planet could have supported microbial life billions of years ago.
"It's not just the instrumentation and the basis of the science, but it's also a matter of maximizing potential return," said SDT member Lindy Elkins-Tanton, director of the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism.
"If we were only looking for what microbes could be found on the surface in this place right now, that's like a tiny snapshot of the history of and the possibility of life," Elkins-Tanton added. "But if we look back through the rock record, we're basically integrating over time and maximizing our chances of finding results."
NASA announced the 2020 Mars rover mission this past December, and the agency formed the SDT a month later. The rover will bear a strong resemblance to the car-sized, six-wheeled Curiosity, featuring the same chassis and employing the same "sky crane" landing system that delivered Curiosity to the Martian surface last August.
Curiosity is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), which converts the heat produced by the radioactive decay of plutonium-238 into electricity. The 2020 rover may utilize the same power system, but it may also rely on solar panels, NASA officials said.
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