USA, Feb 20: Mars, our next-door red planet has been a focus of astronomical researches for many years. A question which has been troubling the scientists forever – Is there, or was there, ever, any life on Mars?
With an ambitious mission of finding traces of early life on Mars, NASA launched ‘Mars 2020 Perseverance’ rover atop an Atlas V rocket. Thus. began the seven-month journey to a land 300- million-miles away, which was warmer and wetter than the dusty planet it is now known to be. This first rover in the series of five was launched on 30th July 2020 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.
After cruising through space for 203 days, the rover finally touched its wheels on the martian land on 18th Feb 2021. It landed safely at its target spot, which was a four-mile-wide landing ellipse in Mars’s Jezero Crater. The chosen site was believed to be a site of an ancient crater lake and an erstwhile river delta near the western crater rim, rich in sediments that could have preserved biological material holding key information about life on Mars. During and after the descent, many high-resolution cameras installed on the rover started sending images that marveled the world. With the confirmation of the safe arrival on Mars, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California rejoiced and celebrated with relief and excitement.
Now, Perseverance would deploy a small, lightweight helicopter, called Ingenuity, which will find out whether powered flight in Mars’s thin air is humanly possible. Post which it would work upon its main purpose, that of finding signs of life. It will scrutinize crater rocks for biological fingerprints and collect and stock rock samples which would be brought to Earth by another rover sometime within the next decade. Wow! It’s so exciting to even imagine life on another planet. Would they have been aliens or just like us!!
