00:00If we find life on Mars, it means that life is not unique.
00:07You know, we're a great species, we're a powerful species, we're a fractious species, we're also a lonely species.
00:15You know, as soon as we began to look at the stars, we began wondering if they could host life, if there was company for us.
00:23I think the idea of a Martian comes from, almost from a place of spirituality.
00:28At the moment, we have a giant universe, and ours is the only planet with its porch light on.
00:34The hope is that we find other people, other beings are at home on other worlds.
00:42I had been covering space since, boy, since the early 1980s.
00:46As soon as I got into journalism, I got into science journalism.
00:50And as soon as I got into science journalism, I focused whenever I could on space stories.
00:55For me, this was a very big deal.
00:57It is the rover doing exactly what it was sent to Mars to do, which is to look for breakthrough clues to the origins and the evolution of that planet.
01:07And it did exactly what it's intended to do.
01:11It found tantalizing signs that Mars once hosted life.
01:16This very well could be the clearest sign of life that we've ever found on Mars.
01:21What we're looking at here are sort of fingerprints of microbes.
01:25They look like poppy seeds and they look like leopard spots.
01:28And both of those are consistent with microbes leaving chemical traces behind.
01:35We see it on Earth in a lot of watery environments, these poppy seeds and leopard spots.
01:40And they're sort of like we exhale and we produce carbon dioxide.
01:44These, we perspire and we leave salty water behind.
01:49These microbes leave these two minerals behind.
01:52When they've been there, you can sort of see their fingerprints.
01:56If the numbers change when the eighth line comes in, they will represent at least the beginnings of a picture image.
02:02Just on your preliminary analysis of this data, please describe what you see.
02:07Congratulations to you both, as a matter of fact.
02:11NASA has been looking at Mars since the early 60s when we first flew the Mariner spacecraft by Mars
02:17and got the first American close-up pictures on Mars.
02:20We first landed on Mars in 1976 with the Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers.
02:25And even then, those landers were equipped with an experiment to be able to look for byproducts of life.
02:33They didn't find it.
02:34They found some tantalizing clues, but they didn't find anything convincing.
02:38That's one of the reasons we started sending rovers in 1997, because the Vikings were stuck with landing in one place.
02:46So if you land in a desert and you scoop up the soil, and that's the only place you've explored on an entire planet,
02:53your sample area is pretty limited.
02:54These rovers are able to travel from site to site.
02:58Touchdown confirmed.
03:00Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking the sands of past life.
03:08The Perseverance rover landed on Mars in February of 2021.
03:12It is the fifth rover NASA has launched to Mars.
03:16It's covered 18 miles in a formation called the Jezero Crater, which was once the Jezero Lake.
03:24The Mars sample return mission is something that people have been talking about in NASA since the 1970s.
03:34And it involves landing on the surface, scooping up samples, taking off and flying back home, and bringing scientists small pieces of Mars.
03:44We have never been able to get this mission off the ground because it's punishingly expensive and very complicated.
03:52The current Mars sample return mission would involve Perseverance leaving samples on the surface,
03:58another rover flying up to Mars and collecting the samples,
04:01a piece of that rover taking off of Mars and linking up with an orbiter, and then coming home.
04:07So you have at least three missions, three spacecraft.
04:10It's going to be a long time before it happens, but the hope is there that it will happen.
04:14In early May, the President proposed cutting 24% out of NASA's budget,
04:35and among the projects that were set to be eliminated is the Mars sample return mission.
04:41Now, NASA still has hope because under the Constitution, it's the House and the Senate that allocate funding,
04:48and NASA has a lot of friends in Congress, especially from big, powerful space states like Florida and Texas and California.
04:58So the betting is those cuts will not go through.
05:00If we find life on another world without even having to leave our own solar system,
05:07it means life is extremely common.
05:10One exobiologist I talked to said the formula is one, two, or infinity.
05:16If you can find life on one world, you don't know if that's a knockoff, if it's a one-off.
05:21If you find it on two worlds, there's no reason it couldn't be on 22 and 52 and 2.2 trillion.
05:30So it will be one, two, or you won't know if it's a knockoff, if it's a knockoff, if it's a knockoff.
05:38Maybe there's no reason it must have been mentioned near you.
05:50All the things you might like on this board have done...
05:53if you offer from Woof Sports in the stack
Comments