What a decade of Curiosity has taught us about life on Mars

Ten years in the past, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab celebrated the profitable touchdown of its fourth robotic on Mars, the Curiosity rover.

Now sufficiently old to enter its fifth 12 months, the Curiosity rover was placed on a mission in 2012 to find out if the Purple Planet might ever have supported life.

The robotic is in regards to the dimension of a automotive and is supplied with scientific devices used to check the planet’s local weather and geology. So how was the mission? And what can the Curiosity rover inform us in regards to the previous and potential way forward for house exploration?

Clear indicators of life

Dr Ashwin Vasavada is the chief scientist of the Curiosity workforce and says the mission was an enormous success.

“[We learned] it was not solely liveable at one level in Mars’ historical past, however most likely liveable for tens of millions, if not tens of tens of millions of years,” he stated.

Whereas the rover had the flexibility to detect indicators of life, that did not essentially imply that Mars itself harbored life. Vasavada stated their preliminary objective was to search out out if life was even potential there.

“We have explored Mars sufficient to know that there aren’t any dinosaur footprints, no massive life kinds at present,” he stated. “So if life ever took maintain, it most likely by no means bought previous some form of microbial stage.”

A brutal change

So what sort of life was there on Mars? And was there any particular occasion that made it uninhabitable for all times?

Vasavada thinks it is most likely a mixture of occasions.

“You may see proof that rivers as soon as flowed on the floor, that possibly even an ocean existed at one time. So at first of Mars, we’re speaking about three or 4 billion years in the past, was a way more Earth-like place than Mars is at present,” he stated.

And it appears that evidently the scale of the planet was the principle issue that put an finish to the event of life.

“On the finish of the day, it is a planet smaller than Earth, [so] which allowed it to chill sooner. As soon as it cooled sooner, it misplaced its capacity to generate a magnetic discipline,” he stated. “As soon as the magnetic discipline stopped, the environment was stripped by radiation in house. And that led to his incapacity, at the moment, to remain heat and get liquid water.”

From that second, the planet turned the chilly and inhospitable desert that we all know at present.

A single touchdown level

Even the place the Curiosity rover landed 10 years in the past could have supplied new data to the workforce working to know Mars.

The rover landed in an space referred to as Gale Crater. Referred to as the affect crater, the cavity shaped when a big house rock hit the planet’s floor. Later it was crammed with sediments deposited in lakes and shaped layers of mud that accrued over time on the edges of a mountain.

“That meant we might land there and see if these sediments had been actually being deposited in liquid aquatic environments, like lakes and streams,” Vasavada stated. “We might learn the traditional historical past of Mars by going up these rock layers and figuring out if any of these intervals of Mars time had these liveable situations.”

After 10 years, the success of the mission nonetheless surprises the scientist.

“We now have now traveled over 2,000 vertical ft up the mountain, and for probably the most half each layer we have now examined shaped in a moist setting and had situations that might have been favorable for all times.”

This story was tailored for the online by Manuela Lopez Restrepo.