The quest to find signs of ancient lifestyle on Mars
Mars may now certainly be a barren, icy desert but did Earth's nearest neighbor once harbor life?
This is a question which has preoccupied scientists for years and years and thrilled sci-fi imaginings.
Now three space exploration projects are gearing up to start some of the most ambitious bids yet to find a remedy.
Scientists assume that four billion years back both planets both had the potential to nurture life -- but a lot of Mars' intervening record is an enigma.
The brand new Mars probes from america, United Arab Emirates and China will release this summer.
Their goal isn't to find Martian life -- scientists believe nothing would survive there now -- but to search for possible traces of earlier lifeforms.
These vast and high priced programs could prove futile. But astrobiologists say the red planet is still our best expect finding an archive of life on additional planets.
Mars is "the only world with concrete likelihood of finding traces of extraterrestrial lifestyle because we know that billions of years back it had been inhabitable," said Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of French space organization CNES in a meeting phone with journalists this week.
Le Gall is probably the architects of NASA's Mars 2020 exploratory probe, which is scheduled for launch by the end of July when Earth and Mars will be the closest for a lot more than two years.
The a lot more than $2.5 billion project is the latest -- & most technologically advanced -- try to uncover Mars' deep buried secrets.
But it isn't alone, as enthusiasm for space exploration has reignited.
'News from Mars'
Scientific inquiry of the reddish planet commenced in earnest on the 17th Century.
In 1609 Italian Galileo Galilei noticed Mars with a primitive telescope and on doing so became the initial person to use the latest technology for astronomical purposes.
Fifty years down the road Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens employed a far more advanced telescope of his individual design to make the first ever topographical drawing of the planet.
Mars -- when compared to "desolate, empty" moon -- offers long seemed promising for probable inhabitability by microorganisms, wrote astrophysicist Francis Rocard found in his recent essay "Current News from Mars".
However the 20th century presented setbacks.
In the 1960s, as the race to place a man on the moon was accelerating towards its dazzling "Giant Leap", Dian Hitchcock and James Lovelock were putting a dampener on hopes of locating life on Mars.
Their research analysed the planet's atmosphere buying a chemical imbalance, gases reacting with each other, which would hint at life.
"When there is no response, then there is most likely no lifestyle there," Lovelock told AFP.
"And that was the circumstance -- Mars comes with an atmosphere that is completely inactive as far as chemistry can be involved."
Their conclusion was confirmed a decade later, when the Viking landers took atmospheric and soil samples that showed the planet was no more inhabitable.
This discovery was a "real tanker" for Mars research, Rocard told AFP.
Mars courses essentially paused for 20 years.
In that case in 2000 scientists made a game-changing discovery: they found that normal water had once flowed more than its surface.
Follow the water
This tantalizing finding helped rekindle the latent interest in Mars exploration.
Scientists pored over photos of gullies, ravines, scouring the Martian area for proof liquid water.
More than a decade later, in 2011, they definitively found it.
The "follow the water, follow the carbon, follow the light" strategy has paid, Rocard said.
Every mission because the discovery of water has taken "an increasing number of evidence to light that Mars is not quite as lifeless as we thought," Michel Viso, an astrobiologist at CNES, told AFP.
The most recent US rover to help make the journey -- aptly named Perseverance -- is scheduled to touch down in February of next year after a six-month journey from launch time.
The probe could very well be the virtually all highly-awaited yet. Its landing location, the Jezero Crater, may contain once been a wide, 45-kilometer river delta.
Abundant with sedimentary rocks, such as for example clay and carbonates -- the same types of rocks that hold fossil traces on the planet -- Jezero is actually a treasure trove.
Or perhaps not.
"We know that normal water once flowed, however the dilemma remains: for how very long?" asked Rocard. "We don't even understand how prolonged it took for life to appear on Earth."
If the mission may bring these rocks back again to Earth they could yield answers to the questions which may have long confounded scientists.
But they must wait at least a decade for the analysis to be available.
Viso said the benefits is going to be "a good bundle of clues" rather than a clear answer.
In the beginning
Scientists are also considering perhaps a far more profound question.
If life by no means existed on Mars, after that why not?
The answer to this may enrich our understanding of how life developed on our own planet, Jorge Vago, the spokesperson of the European Space Agency said.
Because of shifting plate tectonics below the Earth's core, it is exceedingly difficult to acquire any traces of life here before 3.5 billion years back.
Mars does not have any tectonic plates therefore there is a probability that four-billion-year-old signals of life that "you can never find on the planet" may be preserved there, Vago said.
And if the most recent Mars programs neglect to find signals of ancient Martian lifestyle, there are usually further frontiers to explore.
Encelade and Europe, several of Saturn's and Jupiter's moons, respectively are believed promising contenders.
Although reaching them remains more science fiction than reality.
Source: www.thejakartapost.com
