![]() ![]() ![]() “We've got to make it through a winter.” Life on the edge “The goal is for the prime mission to last for one Martian year,” said Williams. ![]() “But you also can substantially impact your power and energy usage, so it's a balance.” In the north it also gets colder for longer, which means more energy is needed to stay alive. “The further north you go, the more likely you are to have water ice within one meter of the subsurface,” said Williams. Where MLE lands on Mars is everything, not only because it has to land where there is accessible ice close to the surface, but because its location will drastically affect light levels. The mission must identify from orbit where to land in the mid-latitudes of Mars in a region where ground ice is accessible within a meter of the surface. “Mars teeters right on the edge of habitability so the idea behind Mars Life Explorer is to investigate whether there are habitats on modern Mars.” “There’s evidence for recent salt deposits, mid-latitude ices, trace gasses exchanging methane, volatiles exchanging water and gasses coming and going seasonally,” said Ehlmann. Perseverance may have ancient Mars covered, but modern Mars is becoming more interesting. “The science of astrobiology has matured to the point that we can think about searching for modern habitats and modern life on Mars – and Mars Life Explorer is explicitly focused on modern habitability.” “Perseverance looks in the ancient rock record at a time they were lakes, rivers, and hydrothermal systems,” said Bethany Ehlmann, vice chair of the Decadal Survey Mars panel, member of MLE Steering Group, and president of The Planetary Society. But if successful, it could be a landmark moment in the search for life because it would be the first mission to look for life that exists right now. It might be tempting to think that by being merely a platform and not a rover like Perseverance or a drone like Ingenuity - and a much lower-cost mission - that MLE isn’t as ambitious. It will also examine how the ice changes over a Martian year (687 Earth days). MLE will also explore what’s in the ice - such as organics, trace gasses, and isotopes - and explore its chemistry. “When the ice melts and you have liquid water present it can likely form a habitable environment if a couple other conditions are met.”Įven if the ice doesn’t contain life itself it will contain a record of what happened to the Martian climate. “Mars’ surface is pretty sterilizing to life as we know it, but just a few millimeters into the subsurface there’s protection from UV radiation and meters down there’s more protection from gamma radiation,” said Williams. TRIDENT will drill into the lowest latitude ice deposits on Mars. “Clumpy” ground meant it couldn’t get any deeper than just a few centimeters, so MLE will use Honeybee Robotics’ The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploration of New Terrains (TRIDENT) - a much larger rotary-hammer drill that will be tested on the Moon during the VIPER and PRIME-1 robotic missions in 20, respectively. InSight's “mole” - its burrowing heat probe - was designed to take temperature measurements 3 meters (10 feet) beneath the Martian surface. MLE would drill 2 meters (6.5 feet) into Mars looking for water ice to take samples and study them in situ. Do any habitable environments remain? Are they inhabited? MLE should be able to explore these questions and more.Ī fixed landing platform launching in the early-to-late 2030s, it’s a “high heritage” mission based on InSight and the Phoenix lander, which in 2008 confirmed the presence of water ice in Mars’ polar regions. But as a planet, it’s undergone profound climate change. “People are feeling more confident that we can engineer around that in the future.” What is the Mars Life Explorer? “There are discussions about ways to modify the solar array so that you can do dust clearing,” said Amy Williams, assistant professor, Geological Sciences at the University of Florida and "science champion" on the mission concept study for MLE. InSight is expected to stop responding by Dec. Since then, InSight has been using its seismometer to measure "Marsquakes," but it’s about to succumb to dust: the lander’s pair of 2.2 meter-wide (7.2 foot-wide) solar panels are caked with the stuff and by May 2022 were producing less than a tenth of the power they did when InSight landed. NASA’s InSight lander is in its death throes after being on Elysium Planitia since Nov.
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