Mars rover begins search for alien life on Red Planet

 

News Hub: NASA has just successfully landed its most ambitious ever mission to Mars after a seven-month journey through space the rover called perseverance survived a perilous high-speed plunge through the martian atmosphere and made it safely onto the surface of the red planet confirming its arrival an hour ago with a tweet these images the first sent back within moments.

it's existed billions of years ago tonight's landing is all the more impressive given how much could have gone wrong here's our science correspondent Rebecca Morell and a warning her report contains some flashing images perseverance is going about one kilometer per second a nerve-wracking weight at mission control then celebrations as a signal is received from mars its touchdown for NASA's perseverance rover and these are its.

first images a view of its landing site before it starts to explore the rovers even started tweeting too I'm safe on mars perseverance will get you anywhere what an amazing team to work through all the adversity that goes and all the challenges to go with landing rover on mars plus the challenges of covid and um and just an amazing accomplishment it survived a fiendishly difficult landing.

burning through the atmosphere at 12 000 miles an hour before a complex landing system brought it down in an area with some of the oldest rocks on mars it's amongst the most ancient uh crust on the surface of mars capturing that period of time between three and a half and four billion years old which isn't a period of time that's particularly well preserved in rocks here on earth so we have a chance to find out about a period of the solar system.

that we've never studied before this mission is all about finding signs of life and the best place to do that is here the zero crater today it's dry and dusty but billions of years ago it was a huge crater were once beaches on the lakeshore and the hope is any microscopic creatures that once lived there are still preserved perseverance is the most advanced rover that NASA's ever built and it's jam-packed with instruments.

its robotic arm is equipped with a drill to collect rock samples so what forms of life could they contain I am not talking about martian little green men probably not even fish we're looking for microbial life or maybe microbes that have made a little mat or a slime of sorts that you might find on the bottom of a pond those are the types of things that are likely to well they did exist on earth three and a half billion years ago.

the question is did they exist on mars at the bottom of lakes for the first time NASA will also be testing a mini mars helicopter to provide a new bird's eye view of the planet and back on the ground the rover will store some of the rocks a future mission will bring them back to earth and some will be heading to the UK there will be the most precious samples that we have on earth the most exciting and scientists around the world will be absolutely fighting and clamoring to study them getting to the red planet is just the start now the hard work begins this is NASA's most ambitious mission and our best ever chance to know whether life ever existed on Mars.