"Review: The Search for Life on Mars" Topic

"Over the next month the newest flotilla of Mars missions will set sail. Around the middle of July, a Japanese rocket will launch Hope, an orbiter that is the first Mars mission developed by the United Arab Emirates. Sometime in July, or perhaps early August, China will launch Tianwen-1, an ambitious mission that includes an orbiter, lander, and rover, but about which the Chinese space program has said little. Most of the attention, though, will go towards NASA's Mars 2020 mission, carrying a rover called Perseverance and currently scheduled for launch on July 22. Perseverance will land on March next February and soon start caching samples of Martian rocks, part of an overarching Mars Sample Return effort that will take at least a decade to complete.

Mars has long captured the attention of scientists, not to mention the budgets of space agencies, in large part because of its potential to have once hosted life or perhaps still host life today. Samples that Mars 2020 collects and are later brought back to Earth will be studied by scientists looking for evidence of past life, while Europe's ExoMars mission—delayed from 2020 to 2022 by technical issues exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic—will also look for signs of life, including drilling up to two meters into the surface where conditions may be more habitable. There are, of course, many other scientific questions involving Mars that have nothing to do with the search for life, but it's unlikely that the planet wouldn't be getting so much attention (too much, some scientists might complain) without that astrobiological interest…"

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