by While the clamoring to return bits and pieces of Mars to Earth for intensive study continues, scientists are also devising instruments and techniques that can be sent to the Red Planet to make on-site probes a lifetime. . Could these low-cost approaches obviate the need for samples shot directly from Mars?
That choice brings to mind the commentary by Marcel Proust — a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist who wrote the novel In Search of Lost Time: “The true journey of discovery is not to seek new landscapes, but to have new eyes.” To find past life on Mars, a sample return program would work best, but if we want to discover present-day life on the Red Planet, that’s the way to do it with instruments directly on Mars.
That’s the view of Dirk Schulze-Makuch, professor of astrobiology and planetary habitability at the Technical University of Berlin in Germany. In addition, he thinks that the currently available methodologies are suitable and developed enough to determine if there is life on Mars.
“To get unambiguous results, however, we would have to combine a series of several of these methodologies,” Schulze-Makuch told Space.com.
Related: Scientists are seeing red on NASA’s troubled Mars reporting mission
Enigmatic chemical activity
Schulze-Makuch points back in time to two NASA Viking landing missions in the 1970s. It was a crucial time to try to answer a provocative question: Is Mars home to life?
Although biological experiments detected an unexpected and enigmatic chemical activity in the Martian soil, the majority of the Scandinavian Mars investigators leaned towards any clear proof, slam dunk for the presence of living microorganisms in the soil near the landing sites.
Arguably, the few Scandinavian Landers did answer the question of life on Mars by answering: Can you ask the question again?
“In principle the Scandinavian approach was correct,” said Schulze-Makuch. “The problem at that time, almost 50 years ago, was that our methods were not yet so sophisticated. We did not have a good understanding of the Martian environments. We have made great progress in both respects,” said the an astrologer.
Difficult to interpret
Schulze-Makuch said that it is true that scientists can apply even more of our most sophisticated methods, including those not yet available for a space mission, giving the example of Mars back.
But because of the long period of time that a soil sample is placed in boxes — on the surface of Mars and during the long distance from Mars to Earth, “we would probably only find organic remains of possible life, which would be difficult to interpretation. approach would work well for past life on Mars,” Schulze-Makuch said, “but if our goal is to find extant life, an in-situ mission is the way to go. “
Scandinavian fruits
“There are inevitable tensions in the return of the Mars sample and the search for life,” said Chris McKay, a space scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California.
“It’s clear the case that the best search for life would be done on samples in laboratories on Earth,” McKay told Space.com. “But the prospect of bringing back an example where Marthach’s life could exist gives many people pause and indeed it is being controlled, some might say prohibited. [United Nations] Outer Space Treaty.”
Can we assume based on the Viking results that there is no life on the surface of Mars?
“My answer to this is yes and no,” McKay replied. The Mars researcher highlights data collected by the Vikings in 1976, NASA’s Phoenix superchlorite discovery in 2007, as well as the analysis from the still-cranking Curiosity Mars rover that showed low levels of organics since it landed in 2012.
“Most Mars scientists claim that the reactivity seen in the Martian soil is chemical and that there is no surface biology now. So yes,” McKay said. “But no. This view is not unanimous,” he said, citing the case for life surviving on Mars and its possible detection by a Scandinavian labeled release experiment.
Public opinion
NASA and the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR), an interdisciplinary scientific body, consider any sample return from Mars a potential biological risk, McKay said.
McKay said he argued in print that “the standard of evidence for reaching a scientific consensus is clearly lower than the standard that must be applied to the precautionary protection of the Earth. Perhaps life is not the best explanation that scientific to the world). [Viking Labeled Release] results but it cannot be ruled out yet.”
Public opinion may be a legal procedure, McKay said “will not support an assumption that there is no life on Mars for sample purposes or an astronaut returning to Earth without further analysis of Mars, regardless of the consensus scientific,” he said.
A mature pipeline
One potential NASA mission that has been supported is the Mars Life Explorer (MLE). This deep digging lander would focus on searching for signs of current life on the Red Planet.
MLE received a hearty endorsement from the latest decennial planetary science survey, a report from the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released in April 2022.
The suite of instruments on MLE is designed to be “instrument agnostic,” said astronomer and “science champion” of MLE, Amy Williams, assistant professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
There are already existing sets of instruments that could fly with the proposed MLE, or new instruments and technologies currently in the maturing pipeline that could be swapped out, Williams told Space.com. “There are real opportunities for alternative and novel instruments to be involved in the mission.”
Life screening
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Meanwhile, research teams are leading SOLID (“Signals of Vitality Detector”), work carried out by the Spanish Center for Astrobiology. There is also a Microfluidic Life Analyzer, or MILA, developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Or how about building an instrument to use during robotic ice mining missions, a high-tech device to look for Martian life flourishing today?
That approach is pioneered by Steven Benner, founder of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution and Firebird Biomolecular Sciences LLC.
In fact, the Agnostic Life Finder Association (ALFA) has been founded, with both Benner and Jan Špaček, the inventor of the Agnostic Life Finder (ALF), as leading members.
“The only way to achieve the ALFA Mars goal is to screen for life on Mars before the first humans land there,” the society’s website declares.
So, in the end, the “whether or not” prediction of life on Mars appears to be clouded with patches of uncertainty.
Echoing Carl Sagan’s famous words that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” astronomer Schulze-Makuch believes that “based on our current understanding of Mars, I think extraordinary demand that is, there is no life on Mars and there has never been any life. We should finally go and find out!”
