Life at Jezero Crater

As for any consensus among scientists that signs of past or present life have been seen by Perseverance, once again, don't wait for a slam dunk observation.

Depiction shows Jezero Crater — the landing locale of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover — as it might have appeared billions of years ago when it was perhaps a life-sustaining lake. An inlet and outlet are also visible on either side of the lake. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Since its wheels-down landing in February of last year, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has been busily at work, on the prowl steering itself across the Jezero Crater landscape.


A key duty of the robot is to search for signs of ancient microbial life. The Mars machinery is industriously gathering up samples of Martian rock and soil that could help tease out an answer concerning the past habitability of the Red Planet.


Perseverance is on a roll, a collectible outing to stash core samples in sealed tubes that are to eventually find their way to Earth via the Mars Sample Return program.

But how tough is it to spot and sample potential past life on Mars? Perhaps the rover already has? Then there's the question of whether we need the samples back on Earth to find signs of past life, or can Perseverance, on-location, detect past or even present life with its suite of instruments?


Above all, just how hard might it be to have a consensus among scientists that, yes, signs of life, be it past or present has been observed by the rover? What's a slam dunk finding look like?  READ MORE...

NASA's Rover

WHAT’S A MARS ROBOT to do with its downtime? The hard-working Perseverance rover takes a break from searching for signs of habitability on Mars every once in a while to just stare at the sky. But in a fortuitous turn of events, something stared back: Deimos, the smaller of the planet’s two moons.

NASA’s Perseverance rover captured the gorgeous footage of the moon sparkling in the sky earlier this year — and NASA did us all a favor and released the video via the rover’s Twitter account.

“Sky watching is fun no matter where you are,” the Perseverance team writes on Twitter. “I took this short time lapse movie to watch for clouds, and caught something else: look closely and you’ll see Deimos, one of two moons of Mars.”

“Perseverance was busying capturing images of Mars’ clouds when it caught something else: Deimos,” Inverse’s Passant Rabie wrote in August. “This is the smaller of the two Martian moons and is shaped a bit like a potato.”

DEIMOS: A BRIEF HISTORY
Deimos, named for the Roman god of panic, is one of the smallest moons in the Solar System, measuring a mere seven miles in diameter. That is smaller than the length of Manhattan.


Deimos orbits Mars once every 30 hours and has a sibling moon, Phobos, that’s somewhat closer to Mars. American astronomer Asaph Hall spotted both the moons in 1877.

The moons seem to be made of the same materials, but their origin remains murky. They could be captured asteroids, but other evidence suggests that they could be pieces of Mars kicked up by an impact. Some scenarios even suggest that Deimos formed from a larger former moon.  READ MORE...