Mars - Life on the Red Planet? | DW Documentary

engine ignition and liftoff As the countdown to Mars continues humanity's perseverance launching the next generation of robotic explorers to the red

planet

and Atlas Tu has transitioned to closed-loop control, we have indications that the spacecraft has confirmed separation from the cruise stage. The electric radio is on and ready to receive signals from the lander. We have confirmation that the entry interface is currently moving at 5.3 km/second at an altitude of approximately 120 km from the surface. February 2021, the lander carrying the Perserverance rover has entered the Martian atmosphere. the suspense in the control room is almost unbearable the team has no control over what will happen in the next few minutes we are beginning the maneuver of righting ourselves and flying to the right in preparation for parachute deployment report well Telemetry lock for the engine Engineers from NASA and cnes The French national space agency, this was what is known as the seven minutes of Terror.

Perseverance had to land as gently as possible on the red

planet

. Navigation has confirmed that the parachute has deployed and we are seeing a significant slowdown in speed from our current speed. Perseverance carried a dozen sophisticated instruments that would be used in one of the most ambitious space missions to search for traces of past

life

on Mars. The first advance has now slowed to subsonic speeds and the heat shield has separated, allowing both radar and cameras to get their first look at the surface here, the Rover was less than 2 km above the Martian surface. This was the last stage of the landing and probably the riskiest stage because the rear casing separated.

The ground station could only observe the signals. It took 11 minutes to reach Earth, either the maneuver had been successful or Perseverance had crashed the man started 20M from the surface, you are good to land, confirmed, Persevere, safe on the surface, ready to start taking the position of those minutes. I think they were the shortest seven minutes and the longest. In my

life

, the really special moment for me is the few minutes after landing when we obtained the first image of Mars. I'll be waiting for the images. Yeah, wow, my robot that was here 7 months ago and has been in space this whole time is on. another planet congratulations on the mission this image was one of the first sent from the martian surface the perseverance rover was apparently intact and fully operational the robot was tasked with discovering the secrets of the red planet perseverance was sent millions of miles from earth to help answer a question as simple as it is exciting: did life exist on Mars?

What would the Rover discover in its first year of exploration? Mars has long fascinated astronomers, but it was not until the 19th century, when Giovani Skelli discovered the supposed Martian canals, that the question arose. of intelligent life on our neighboring planet emerged for the first time, the American astronomer Persal Lael mapped these canals, mistaking them for artificial structures built to irrigate cities that had disappeared long ago, the myth of the Martian J Sea Invaders was born. Starting in the 1960s, They sent probes repeatedly to explore the Martian surface without success. In 1976, the Viking mission carried out three experiments looking for organic life on Mars.

They found nothing, so they lost interest in Mars for 20 years. Since then, several Rovers have been sent to explore the Martian soil. Pathfinder probe carrying the small The Sojourner robot was the first in 1996, followed by Spirit and Opportunity, the latter two proving that water must have once flowed on Mars. Curiosity, Perseverance's big brother, landed in 2012. Its mission was to discover if water could ever have facilitated the development of life on Mars. The red planet's curiosity went to Mars to establish its habitability. Was Mars habitable? 3.5 billion years ago we discovered that yes, it could have been habitable, it had the right ingredients, then perseverance takes it one step further and says, "Okay, if only it were." habitable there was life on Mars just as out of curiosity NASA commissioned the jet propulsion laboratory to build several prototypes for perseverance each with different sizes and different technological profiles perseverance was built based on the idea of ​​curiosity we took many of the systems that They existed out of curiosity and we used it as our baseline for perseverance, they may look very similar, but the internal mechanics point to a new generation of Rovers.

Sophisticated high-tech developments. Specialized cameras. Spectrometers. Lasers. Ground penetrating radar. An oxygen production instrument and a robotic arm for measuring and storing rock samples. They are extremely complex robots. There are between 200 and 300 scientists behind each vehicle. It took six years to develop, build and launch, and then another seven months to land on Mars. It takes an incredible amount of time to design everything, build it, and make it suitable for the space. Try it because we also have to test and prove that it's going to work in that Martian environment. Conditions on Mars are hostile to life. The biggest problem is the extreme temperatures and Perseverance also had to generate its own energy.

The problem with the use of solar panels on Mars. is that you are much further away from the Sun and need a much larger area to get the same energy as you would get here on Earth. Sometimes we get dust storms on Mars and that's how rovers often meet their demise on Mars. For perseverance we use a nuclear system that over time creates heat and that heat is transformed into electricity. This generator would ensure that the Rover and its instruments can operate on the Martian surface without interruption for years to come when we build missions like Perseverance, it's not just an American mission, so when we build this Rover, yes, it is built here in the laboratory jet-powered, but the parts are built throughout the United States and around the world, so the Super Cam instrument, for example, is a French instrument.

The Super Cam acts as the eyes of perseverance, one of its features is a powerful laser that vaporizes small rock particles to analyze their composition, this allows chemical particles to be identified in a radius of up to 10 m in the plasma generated by the laser. I developed it together with Roger W of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico we were thinking about how to measure the chemical composition of Martian rocks and soil. I asked him about the capabilities of his lab and he said we know how to make spectrometers and analyze light. How about you?

I told him that in France we know lasers. so we divided the work and 20 years later we had designed the super cam super cam uses a system of lasers and spectrometers with this telescope we can obtain extremely detailed images of the surface of Mars, you can see details of around 20 microns per pixel when the La Camera is close to the ground. This is the first image of Super Cam. These instruments perform precise analyzes of chemical and mineral composition and can even detect the presence of organic material. Millions of years of volcanic activity have shaped this unique landscape.

These geographical properties make it the ideal training ground for space travel, including Mars exploration. Simulations help train missions with robots and soon perhaps even with humans. Geologist Charl Flanel is an expert on Mars and has himself participated in several simulations you see that this volcanic landscape looks very similar to the Martian one, the landscape is even aligned along a fault like the red planet and the oxidation is red like on Mars. At first Mars and Earth were very similar because they had the same origin At one time there were rivers that fed the lakes and there was a magnetic field or protective shield that prevented the atmosphere from being eroded by the solar wind but it changed instantly about 3.7 billion years ago the magnetic field of the planet's core abruptly disappeared Mars was so small that its atmosphere dissipated into space the red planet became a kind of freezer The Ice Age suddenly took over and never recovered, turning it into the Dead Planet it is today.

Mars has preserved traces of its past, scientists hope that this is how the mission will begin. Teams from the French national space agency or CNES and NASA are adapting to the Martian weather. The days there are longer than on Earth. Each Martian day known as an alma lasts about 24 hours and 40 minutes, so the clocks must be synchronized. Plan finished. Thank you. The mission has begun. We have a reference period of 3 years if the rover fails earlier. then we have also failed another thorough check to ensure that all instruments on board are working. Our Rover has an automatic navigation system so it can drive itself on the surface of Mars.

Driving on Mars isn't that easy, is it? We don't have a map, we don't have a phone and we can just say "hey, send me in that direction", so what the Rover does is it takes pictures in front of it, it actually looks 5m ahead and that way it can drive 2 to 300 M One day um autonomously so that it drives itself. We can say, "Hey, at the end of the day, just drive that direction for an hour and a half and we'll see you tomorrow and you'll do it." There is a delay in communication. with perseverance, although the signals travel at the speed of light, it takes several minutes to reach the rover, an order from the control center then millions of kilometers away, perseverance begins to move at night, the rover remains stationary, transmits the information collected during the day to Earth and receives a program with tasks to complete the next day, each point is assigned coordinates, so when we tell the rover to point at a point, it knows exactly how to turn its head to lock on to the point we want and then set five points in that direction.

With the infrared laser and the camera she was very quick to do everything and I suggest we release her first. We conduct extensive testing for 3 to four months. We made sure the arm worked properly. If the wheels were good. If the head turned correctly. Then we checked if the super camera could fire its laser twice as much as the green laser and then towards the Sun and not towards the Sun, but towards the sky, we learned how to use our instrument, the super camera even captured for the first time a Martian solar eclipse produced by the moon Phobus were finally able to begin operations.

The first job was to study the Martian soil. The rover landed in the crater Yero, a huge depression created by a meteorite. NASA chose it among hundreds of other places because it was the most likely place to find fossilized traces of past lives. We chose the Yero site because it is a very old impact crater with traces of a delta. We have evidence that a river once flowed into a lake there because to have a delta you need a river and a lake. The crater is about 45 kilometers wide with a lake. several hundred deep enclosed by a delta the lake contained about 5 cubic kilometers of water and a layer of sedimentary deposit 70 M thick above all we wanted diversity of rocks from the bottom of the lake around the sides and delta so we chose a place with all this diversity in a concentrated area perseverance at work the Rover's cameras have already shown that the area consists of very different geological layers one day the cameraman pointed to a hill in the distance and we said, let's take a photo and use it as a point of reference reference, when we saw the data coming in we said that's fantastic, we're at the bottom of a lake so we got our first results.

The photos were revealing, but virtual exploration of the crater provides limited information, so the rover headed to the Delta for its own safety moved extremely slowly in 200 days we moved about 2 and 1 12 kilometers, so only one Dozen meters each day was enough to work in free time, but not enough to quickly explore the huge Yero crater. A little more speed was needed. Ingenuity, a small helicopter was brought in precisely for such tasks. Ingenuity is a technology demonstrator. There are three challenges to prove that your helicopter can work on Mars. The right atmosphere is one of them. The atmosphere of Mars is 1% the density of Earth. thin atmosphere, the other two aspects are that the temperature becomes very cold, 90°C during the night, the third aspect that is different from Earth is gravity, it is about 1/3 of Earth's gravity, the shape What we test that here at JPL is that we have a camera. approximately 5 six stories high and in that chamber we were able to balance the atmosphere the environment the temperature uh and the gravity of Mars here in Ingenuity it weighs just under 2 kilograms its two counter-rotating rotors spin 10 times faster than those of aconventional helicopter on Earth For me, one of the most difficult moments on Mars is the day we dropped the helicopter from the belly of the Rover where it was attached to the surface of Mars.

I was in charge of those activities and I can tell you incredibly. It was stressful making sure our little friend was on Mars. We carefully jumped 3m from the surface of Mars, floated for 39 seconds, and then climbed back down. We made that first flight. There were four left to make our total of five in our 30 days and thanks to the end of those 30 days Ingenuity was still healthy, the Perseverance team and NASA decided that there is value here in continuing to fly on Mars Ingenuity can act as an explorer, we can fly up a cliff face, we can dive into a cave, right?

We can go to a very high altitude and goof off or, you know, do a lawnmower pattern over a region of interest, for example, ingenuity today is already providing recognition for perseverance. The rover sent ahead as a scout. Ingenuity sent high-resolution images to help Perseverance find its way to the Delta on its 26th reconnaissance flight Ingenuity even found the burst heat shield and parachute since the rover's landing the route was clear now Perseverance was able to cope Its true mission, the search for traces of life on Mars, we were not looking for any macroscopic animals. Wandering around there would have been easy.

No, we were looking for traces of life that already existed on Earth at that time and perhaps on Mars, primitive bacteria. Michelle Viso is a veterinarian and He works as a scientific consultant for the French space agency CNES. He is one of the world's leading experts in exobiology. When we talk about extraterrestrial life, we focus on the simplest microbiological form, microbes, so if we find traces of bacteria on Mars, we will have found a new form. of life, if we find a concrete trace of life, even fossilized, that is evidence of another form of life in the universe, that is what We are looking for, even if it does not lead to the Martians, there was a period of 500 million or perhaps even a billion years in which conditions on Mars were suitable for life, but was that enough for life to actually develop?

I tend to think so because chemical traces show that 3.7 billion years ago life emerged on Earth or I would like to believe that the same thing happened on Mars and if life developed on Mars, where is it now after of a 5 km trip? Perseverance eventually reached the Yero Delta crater. If the origins of life evolved from some prebiotic chemistry, then it would most likely have been in a carbonate and clay mineral environment, so this is mainly what we are looking for. . We believe that certain organisms that live today in very particular places on Earth could also develop into certain microbes.

Lopez's environments specialize in microorganisms that thrive in extreme environments. The Dalal hydrothermal area in northern Ethiopia is undoubtedly one of the most impressive examples of a biosystem where life seems impossible, but despite extreme temperatures and acidity levels, single-celled organisms can be found in some areas. at the edges of D there are life-sustaining ecosystems, particularly AA, these are single-celled bacteria-like microorganisms particularly well adapted to very high temperatures of up to 120° and extremely fluctuating pH levels. Studying these additional files allows us to better define the conditions under which life could have appeared. and persisted in extraterrestrial systems if life arose on Mars that could survive in such conditions, it could also effectively exist in these systems, as long as there was liquid water and an energy source unlike Earth, the Martian crust has never been reshaped by the game tectonics, this allows perseverance. to examine very ancient clay minerals if there was ever life on Mars these minerals could still contain their components such as nitrogen or carbon to find intact organic molecules it is better to dig a little deeper and the core of the rover can drill holes several centimeters below the surface to penetrate rock where they have been protected for millions or even billions of years.

Perseverance took its first sample of soil that could contain traces of organic material. I'd say that sample caching system is as complex as the rest of the Rover. capable of taking sample cores from the surface of Mars, processing them, placing them in the tube and then passing that tube to another robotic arm inside the rover which then takes photographs, performs certain analyzes on those samples and seals them because the samples will remain on Mars for a long time and then has the ability to deposit those sample deposits on the surface of Mars. We hope these samples will one day return for laboratory analysis for detailed sediment analysis.

We need a laboratory with electron microscopes and high-resolution chemistry. That is not possible in a Rover. Perseverance will only store some of the tubes, not all, so instead of making a big pile with all the tubes and risk losing them all, aborted missions leave a trail of scattered piles like Hansel and grle leaving. A trail of breadcrumbs hope to eventually recover samples from Mars and bring them to Earth for analysis. It's an ambitious project, especially since it's still unclear exactly how it would work if you were to collect those samples and drop them on the surface of Mors.

It was already extraordinary and difficult enough, eventually we're going to want to bring them back, so the teams here at the Jet Ratio Laboratory and at NASA are already working to think about how we might want to do it, that's the first time we're going to launch something from another planet and then we have to bring it back to Earth and bring those samples home safely and keep them contained. There are many challenges here that dwarf anything we have ever had. done before the space flight system for the return mission is ready in a few years the researchers are already working on the new task these tubes will be covered by a rover built in Europe that will pick them up with one arm, put them in a basket and deliver them to a rocket that launches the container and its tubes into orbit around Mars.

This rocket will probably need its own lander. You will have to land very precisely near the tubes. It won't work if you land 100 km away. The sample recovery lander has a concept. what we're working on right now, which allows the rocket that's going to take those samples from the surface of Mars into space to be launched into the air, we launch the rocket into the air and then we fire it. kind of like an air launch and that's really the biggest advantage is that we don't have to deal with any kind of proper mounting system to get the rocket into some kind of position that we want the rocket to be in.

It is almost 3 m long and weighs between 400 and 500 kg. You shoot it into the air, the rocket lights up and disappears before it can come back down. Once the orbiting sample is in the orbit of Mars, we have to find it with the Earth. comes back Orbiter, remember we're looking for something the size of a basketball, which is quite difficult, right, it's not something very bright, it's not very big and we're going to have to find it from, you know, to tens or hundreds of kilometers away, a small white balloon in orbit around Mars and catching it with an Orbiter is not easy, so we start by looking for the other parts of the rocket that have arrived with it that are larger.

The upper stage of the rocket has an onboard radio. With a beacon that will shout at us from time to time, telling us where it is, the captured container is loaded into a space capsule that returns to Earth 6 months later, if all goes as planned, the Martian rocks will one day be transported to Earth . It is essential to ensure that the samples are not contaminated by organic molecules persistently brought from Earth, although the risk is low, the consequences would be devastating. The first space explorers in the 1960s remembered one thing that their own predecessors did not care for: the spread of disease.

The exploration of the new world is a dark chapter in human history and that contagion went both ways. Biological contamination of a Martian life form would be irreparable. The same thing happens in reverse. What would happen if an astronaut were contaminated by an unknown species? What to do with them, could they bring them back to Earth or leave them there forever? If they brought them back to Earth but confined them for the rest of their lives, this is the stuff of science fiction movies, a lot of questions remain unanswered, but the definitive answer remains that one day humans will fly to Mars, but how can they survive there and return to Earth?

For perseverance, in addition to establishing whether there has been life on Mars in the past, one of the other objectives is to prepare for the eventual arrival of humans. on Mars, we have some instruments on board that allow us to prepare for that. There is the metainstrument, which is a weather station that allows us to understand the weather patterns on Mars, not only the wind but also the dust pressure. There is a ground penetrating radar called Rimax that allows us to understand the structure of the soil beneath us if we are ever going to build something on Mars, understanding the Martian regolith is really important.

Jean Fran Clairo is a French engineer and astronaut. He has been involved in three NASA space missions. and you know how important remote projects are before the first humans travel to Mars, we need to be able to fly and return remotely from Mars before doing it with humans, that's why this test mission with perseverance is important to decide if we do a human flight to Mars, but to do that you need to be able to extract as many local resources as possible to eat, drink, breathe and supply the return trip, so it is not necessary to ship everything from Earth, it is impossible to land on Mars with 30 tons of material. including oxygen and stay for several months, but perseverance is already helping to solve the problem.

Perseverance is not just studying Martian geology, it is preparing Mars for humans. The Rover carries a small box the size of a car battery called the Moxy, weighs 17kg and converts. The Martian atmosphere in breathable air There is less than 1% air on the surface of Mars, but that air is made up of 95% carbon dioxide. So inside each carbon dioxide molecule is a molecule of oxygen combined with carbon, so Moxy's job is to separate them, Moxy sucks in carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and passes it through an electrolyzer that separates the oxygen and releases carbon monoxide, then the oxygen atoms combine to form respirable oxygen molecules that can be inhaled now, you or I would need 20 to 30 grams per hour just to live and go about our business so far Moxy has ran eight times on Mars and produced just over 50g of oxygen, meaning it would keep us alive for a couple of hours, we hope, with a larger version of Moxy to produce all that oxygen in situ to support a human mission on Mars humans will discover much more than robots once they land on the site artificial intelligence is quite sophisticated but it only does what it is programmed to do a robot will never shout oh Look, I long for the day when humans with robots and scientific tools of cutting edge can answer the question about extraterrestrial life.

The question of alien worlds in extraterrestrial life haunts philosophers, theologians and now scientists. We're alone. There are two clearly terrifying possibilities. One is the fear of being completely alone if we are responsible is terrifying. If life on Earth disappeared tomorrow there would never be life in the universe again, but the possibility that we are not alone is also terrifying. If we are not alone, then perhaps we are not the most vulnerable. beautiful or the most intelligent that would hurt our egos because of some philosophies and some religions that is difficult to accept and our dream is to go to Mars one day and I hope it comes true that is the challenge of the 21st century but this dream cannot be used to justify the idea that what we do to the Earth doesn't matter because there is a Planet B, no, there is only one Earth and we have to take care of it, it's just about exploring another planet and that's hard enough to do, I don't know . who called it perseverance, but I think it is one of the most important qualities of a great researcher. perseverance could be used to name basically any scientific program.

Perseverance will continue its search for life on Mars. The lone robot is not only exploring, but will also help create one. of Humanity's greatest dreams come true taking people to Mars in the CL What I do is dream in front of the stars all of them are BL thinking and I feelsoft and I love knowing that there is no