SETI Talks: The search for Life on Mars with Perseverance

NASA, together with its partners, has landed a new robotic rover on Mars. Perseverance’s safe landing is just the beginning of an ambitious effort to find past or even existing life on the Red Planet.

Perseverance carries scientific instruments such as cameras and lasers. Some instruments can analyze the chemical makeup of Martian rocks and identify potential signatures of fossilized microbial life that may have existed in Jezero crater, an area once flooded with water and home to an ancient river delta.

Several rovers have landed on Mars since the 1990s. What do we expect for this new $2.7 billion robotic explorer? How will Perseverance search for complex carbon-based molecules, remnants of past microbes? What can we expect from the experimental helicopter called Ingenuity? Will Perseverance find irrefutable proof of the existence of past or present life on Mars?

To answer these questions, we invited two scientists whose research and work are directly related to the study of Mars using robotic missions and who are involved with the rover or one of its instruments. Elena Amador-French is a science systems engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and a Science Operation Coordinator for the Curiosity rover. Pablo Sobron is a planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute and an expert on Raman spectroscopy, a technique used to detect organics on Mars.

Janice Bishop, a chemist and planetary scientist at the SETI Institute who has explored the planet Mars for more than 20 years, will moderate this SETI Talk.

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