Credit: NASA
Missions to Mars have only scratched its surface.
To go deeper, scientists are proposing a spacecraft that can drill into the Red Planet to potentially find signs of life.
The driving goal for exploring Mars is finding signs of life, said planetary scientist Christopher McKay at NASA's Ames Research Center.
There are mountains of evidence that Mars was once home to liquid water on its surface, and virtually wherever there is water on Earth, there is life.
Some researchers have even suggested that life on Earth may have originally come from Mars, stemming from microbes in rocks blasted off the Red Planet by cosmic impacts—some 220 pounds (100 kilograms) or so of meteorites from Mars are known to have landed on Earth.
Although the cold, thin atmosphere Mars has now means that liquid water cannot last on its surface long, orbital images from NASA's Mariner 9 mission and many other findings since then suggest Mars was once covered in rivers and seas, and that water may have even flowed there recently.
Mars also has an atmosphere possessing carbon and nitrogen, essential elements for life as we know it, and organic molecules—the carbon-based compounds that building blocks of life such as proteins and DNA are made from—are expected to rain down in meteorites onto Mars, potentially once serving as the raw material for life.
Read the full article here at phys.org
More information:
online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/ast.2012.0878
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