Is there Life on Mars?
Joanna Scott
Monday, 04 August 2008 13:13 UTC
Humanity has sought an answer to this question for thousands of years, but only recently has our technology become equal to the task. Mars has emerged as the most likely extraterrestrial destination to yield results in the near term, but despite multiple missions to the Red Planet, the question remains unanswered. ExoMars could change that: with its sophisticated life-detection payload and subsurface drill, the rover might just be the best hope yet to find life on Mars.
With the NASA Mars mission in the news, it could hardly be a more topical time for our next Second Life event tomorrow!
Jeff Marlow, Imperial College, is a member of the European Space Agency’s ExoMars mission and he will join us on Second Nature to talk about his work towards the ExoMars mission and his thoughts on finding life on Mars. Out of the lab, Jeff is one of our newest bloggers at Nature Network : do check out his blog for a wide range of space related stories.
During the event, Jeff will take questions from the audience: if you would like to discuss the issues or send questions in advance, please feel free to do so in this forum.
All the details on the event are on the website – all welcome!
Title: ExoMars: Europe’s Next Step in the Search for Life on Mars
Speaker: Dr Jeff Marlow
Date: Tuesday 5th August
Time: 10am PDT, 4pm NY time, 6pm London time
Location: Second Nature Island
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Replies
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I am excited about the fact that in this century, maybe even in the next 20 years, we might land a man on Mars, it’d be for us, what the moon landing was to our parents’ generation!
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I hope we don’t try to send humans to Mars until well after it has been thoroughly searched for life. It is not possible for humans to set foot on Mars and not contaminate it with Earth bacteria. If I might suggest a heuristic; that we spend n times X more in robotic missions before we spend 1 times X on a human manned mission.
The cost of a human manned mission will be extremely high because of the size and mass of the life support systems which require a very high degree of reliability. Everything that humans can do on Mars can be done cheaper, faster and safer with less risk of contamination by robotic missions. We will learn orders of magnitude more from equivalent cost unmanned missions than we will from a single manned mission.
I am not saying we should never terraform Mars, but before we do, we need to know what is there that we are irreversibly destroying. We will find the answers to those questions better with robotic missions than with a few astronaut-hero photo-ops which is all a manned mission will provide.
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