JOIN USLast week’s successful landing of NASA’s Perseverance mission on the surface of Mars is an important landmark in the attempts to reach and explore the red planet. Launched from the Cape Canaveral station on July 30 last year, Perseverance travelled 472 million km to make a spectacular landing on the planet’s Jazero crater, which is a 45-km basin north of its equator. The rover is healthy and functioning well and has started sending photographs of the surface of the planet. This is NASA’s seventh mission to the cold and dry Mars, and the $2.72 billion “robotic geologist’’ made its final descent through “seven minutes of terror” with “its eyes open” to land at a very carefully chosen site. Everything about it has worked well till now.
The main aim of the mission is to find signs of ancient life on the planet. It will stay on Mars for about two years, gather data and samples which will be returned to earth on a future mission. There is a good chance that the Jazero crater has preserved signs of life because it was once home to an ancient lake and river delta that may have collected and buried microbes and preserved them within rocks. It is believed that about 3.5 billion years ago, Mars had conditions that were hospitable to life. Life may even have existed there, and its remnants or at least signs might be found now. If Perseverance proves true the hypotheses based on many scientific observations and speculations arising from imagination, then mankind will have made the greatest discovery in its history. It will change humankind’s notion of itself and will have huge implications for all areas of life and learning. The importance of Perseverance lies in this. There is a plan for a manned mission after a decade.
There is a view that among the celestial bodies in the solar system Mars may be the most suitable for habitation by human beings in scenarios in which a shift from the earth becomes necessary as an option, a refuge or a second home. Some believe that it may one day be possible to live and work on Mars by creating the conditions and requirements of life there with the use of appropriate technology. This is a very long shot, but Perseverance may show in the next two years whether there is any scope for hope on that count. NASA has taken a huge step in the search for that possibility. It is the right direction to take for public-funded national space agencies as private sector space companies such as SpaceX up the ante in space but mostly in search of commercial opportunities.