**The Perseverance Rover: Uncovering the Secrets of Mars**

The Perseverance rover is on a mission to explore the Martian environment, seeking biosignatures and rocks that formed in an ancient Martian environment. This mission focuses on surface-based studies of the Martian environment, with the rover's primary goal being to search for signs of past or present life. Dr. Horgan, an expert in microbiology, knows exactly what type of biosignatures the Perseverance rover may find on the Martian surface. "You can do things like search for larger-scale fossils that microbial colonies might leave behind in a rock," he explains. "These textures could look biological in origin." The rover will also search for rocks that formed in water and preserved evidence of organic materials, which are the chemical building blocks of life.

**Characterizing the Geology of Mars**

Each layer of rock on the Martian surface contains a record of the environment where it was formed, much like rings on a tree. The Perseverance rover will search for rocks that formed in water and preserved evidence of organic materials, which could potentially contain signs of how life started on Mars. These rocks are four billion years old and have been sitting on the surface since they were deposited, waiting for scientists to come and study them. It's entirely possible that some of these rocks could contain signs of how life started on Mars, which would provide valuable insights into the origins of life on our own planet.

**Analyzing the Climate of Mars**

The Martian atmosphere, wind, and weather patterns play a crucial role in analyzing whether microbial life existed in the past. The Perseverance rover carried something new to the Red Planet - an Ingenuity helicopter - designed to survive in the harsh Martian environment. The helicopter was launched on April 19th and successfully completed the first powered flight on another world, a historic moment that demonstrated what's possible on Mars. The video of the flight is fantastic, as it shows the dust lifting off and being blown away, providing valuable insights into how sedimentary rocks formed and where they came from.

**Preparing for Human Exploration**

NASA hopes to send a manned mission to Mars within the next 20 years, but human survival on Mars for an extended period comes with its own set of unique challenges. The Martian atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, with oxygen levels less than one percent compared to 21 percent in Earth's atmosphere. Fortunately, the Perseverance rover has Moxi, a Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment that draws carbon dioxide and compresses it before passing it into a Solid Oxide Electrolyzer (SOxY). SOxY takes CO2 and separates the oxygen ions, creating a new molecule O2 that humans need to breathe. On April 20th, the rover's 60th day on Mars, Moxi successfully produced five grams of oxygen from the Martian atmosphere.

**Planetary Protection**

There is a whole field at NASA called Planetary Protection that focuses on preventing us from contaminating other planets with life from Earth when we take robots to Mars and humans to Mars. This is crucial because we don't actually know for sure if there's life living on Mars today, and if we contaminate the Martian environment too much, we risk wiping out any existing unique Martian ecosystem. How likely is it that the rover will find evidence of life on Mars? It's always hard to say, but the Perseverance rover's mission could provide valuable insights into whether microbial life exists on Mars or not.

**The Ingenuity Helicopter: A Game-Changer for Mars Exploration**

The Ingenuity helicopter was designed to survive in the harsh Martian environment and fly independently without human control. Weighing less than four pounds, it was a crucial component of the Perseverance rover's mission. The helicopter's first powered flight on April 19th marked a historic moment, demonstrating what's possible on Mars. The video of the flight shows the dust lifting off and being blown away, providing valuable insights into how sedimentary rocks formed and where they came from.

**Conclusion**

The Perseverance rover is an extraordinary mission that has provided scientists with a wealth of new information about the Martian environment. From searching for biosignatures to analyzing the climate of Mars, this mission has been a game-changer in our understanding of the Red Planet. With the Ingenuity helicopter and Moxi experiment, the rover has demonstrated what's possible on Mars, paving the way for future human exploration and potential discovery of signs of life on the Red Planet.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eni think mars is it's the hot destination right now right and i think the next big big achievement is space exploration is going to be putting humans on mars even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic three unmanned spacecrafts from three different countries set off for mars in july 2020 the united arab emirates hope probe china's town one one rocket and of course nasa's perseverance rover all three took advantage of a particularly opportune launch window when objects launched from earth would have a shorter more efficient path to mars the three missions will explore the red planet's atmosphere map certain parts of its brain and collect surface samples for evidence of water and life and do it in three different ways through these missions scientists hope to understand how a planet like mars can transform from a possibly habitable system with liquid water organic material and an energy source into a dry dusty and desolate place so why the sudden race to mars life has been what is driving so much of mars exploration but there really is a lot more to mars and one of the things is that it has this fantastic rock record extending over billions of years and no other planet has that so if we want to understand even simple things about you know how do earth-like planets evolve over their first billion years mars is the place to do that dr brianni horgan is on the science team for the perseverance rover as well as a co-investigator on the mass kinsey camera system which captures the stunning images sent back from mars nasa's perseverance rover landed on mars on february 18th in gizero crater a 500 meter deep crater that was once home to a 1600 foot deep lake scientists think a network of rivers probably fed into the site making it a prime place for life to have evolved on the red planet and we can see that because when you look at jezreel from orbit you can actually see this huge river channel cutting through the crater rim flowing into the crater and creating a delta where it flowed into an ancient lake that's where organic materials can be concentrated and preserved over very long periods of time on earth since we're hoping to find the same thing on mars armed with multiple scientific instruments including a pixel x-ray spectrometer and a rimfact subsurface radar perseverance rover has four main goals goal one determine whether life ever existed on mars this mission focuses on surface-based studies of the martian environment with perseverance seeking biosignatures and rocks that formed in an ancient martian environment a biosignature is any substance that provides scientific evidence of past or present life dr horgan an expert in menurology knows exactly what type of biosignatures the perseverance rover may find on the martian surface you can do things like search for you know larger scale fossils that microbial colonies might leave behind in a rock so textures right that could be that look biological in origin they can look at things like that goal two characterize the geology of mars each layer of rock on the martian surface contains a record of the environment where it was formed like rings on a tree perseverance will search for rocks that formed in water and preserved evidence of organic materials the chemical building blocks of life on mars there are you know four billion year old rocks just sitting on the surface where they were deposited waiting for us to come look at them and it's entirely possible that some of those rocks could contain uh contain signs of how life started on mars which could then tell us about how life started on our own planet goal three analyze the climate of mars mars atmosphere wind and weather patterns also play a key role in analyzing if microbial life existed in the past so nasa's perseverance rover carried something big underneath its belly on its month-long mission to mars to accomplish this goal something new to the red planet that's never been attempted before the ingenuity helicopter there are so many questions we want to ask that are kind of like just beyond the range of a rover you know how did things in this region form or like why did mars have a magnetic field and when did it go away those kind of questions require much bigger spatial scales and so a helicopter would be an absolutely fantastic way to do that weighing less than four pounds the ingenuity helicopter was designed to survive in the harsh martian environment after landing since there is a 20-minute delay in communication from earth to mars ingenuity has to fly independently without human control out on april 19th it did ingenuity successfully completed the first powered flight on another world a historic moment and a major milestone demonstrating what's possible on mars yeah so that video is fantastic because you can see the dust lifting off and then getting blown away and it's actually getting blown away to the north which is really important for understanding you know how stuff is moving around the crater and where the the sedimentary rocks we might be seeing right now how they formed and where they came from and finally perseverance's last goal to prepare for human exploration nasa hopes to send a manned mission to mars within the next 20 years but human survival on mars for an extended period of time comes with its own set of unique challenges mars atmosphere is 96 carbon dioxide oxygen is less than one percent compared to 21 percent in earth's atmosphere fortunately the perseverance rover has moxie the mars oxygen in c2 resource utilization experiment moxie draws carbon dioxide and compresses it before passing it into what's known as the solid oxide electrolyzer or soxy soxy essentially takes co2 which is two oxygen atoms and one carbon atom and separates them the separated oxygen ions join up to create a new molecule o2 which is the oxygen that humans need to breathe the co or carbon left behind is essentially waste but could be used to potentially fuel future vehicles on mars and on april 20 the rover's 60th day on mars moxie successfully produced five grams of oxygen from the red planet's thin carbon dioxide rich atmosphere nasa's perseverance rover china's tian1 missions and the uae hope probe are equipped with some of the most advanced scientific instruments to ever explore mars but with so many missions happening at the same time is there a risk one of them could potentially harm the planet there's a whole field at nasa called planetary protection and that's about trying to prevent us from contaminating other planets with life from earth when we take robots to mars and we take humans to mars can we do it as safely as possible without contaminating the martian environment especially because we don't actually know for sure that there isn't life living on mars today right it very well could be and so we by if we contaminate mars too much we'll risk kind of wiping out that you know martian unique martian ecosystem but how likely is it that the rover will actually find evidence of life on mars it's always hard to say you know we're trying to answer a really big question that we have no idea what the answer is to um and i think if we can answer in either direction that's a really really big result if we see zero evidence for any kind of microbial life that's still a very important result that'll really help us understand you know how rare and special life is in the universe youi think mars is it's the hot destination right now right and i think the next big big achievement is space exploration is going to be putting humans on mars even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic three unmanned spacecrafts from three different countries set off for mars in july 2020 the united arab emirates hope probe china's town one one rocket and of course nasa's perseverance rover all three took advantage of a particularly opportune launch window when objects launched from earth would have a shorter more efficient path to mars the three missions will explore the red planet's atmosphere map certain parts of its brain and collect surface samples for evidence of water and life and do it in three different ways through these missions scientists hope to understand how a planet like mars can transform from a possibly habitable system with liquid water organic material and an energy source into a dry dusty and desolate place so why the sudden race to mars life has been what is driving so much of mars exploration but there really is a lot more to mars and one of the things is that it has this fantastic rock record extending over billions of years and no other planet has that so if we want to understand even simple things about you know how do earth-like planets evolve over their first billion years mars is the place to do that dr brianni horgan is on the science team for the perseverance rover as well as a co-investigator on the mass kinsey camera system which captures the stunning images sent back from mars nasa's perseverance rover landed on mars on february 18th in gizero crater a 500 meter deep crater that was once home to a 1600 foot deep lake scientists think a network of rivers probably fed into the site making it a prime place for life to have evolved on the red planet and we can see that because when you look at jezreel from orbit you can actually see this huge river channel cutting through the crater rim flowing into the crater and creating a delta where it flowed into an ancient lake that's where organic materials can be concentrated and preserved over very long periods of time on earth since we're hoping to find the same thing on mars armed with multiple scientific instruments including a pixel x-ray spectrometer and a rimfact subsurface radar perseverance rover has four main goals goal one determine whether life ever existed on mars this mission focuses on surface-based studies of the martian environment with perseverance seeking biosignatures and rocks that formed in an ancient martian environment a biosignature is any substance that provides scientific evidence of past or present life dr horgan an expert in menurology knows exactly what type of biosignatures the perseverance rover may find on the martian surface you can do things like search for you know larger scale fossils that microbial colonies might leave behind in a rock so textures right that could be that look biological in origin they can look at things like that goal two characterize the geology of mars each layer of rock on the martian surface contains a record of the environment where it was formed like rings on a tree perseverance will search for rocks that formed in water and preserved evidence of organic materials the chemical building blocks of life on mars there are you know four billion year old rocks just sitting on the surface where they were deposited waiting for us to come look at them and it's entirely possible that some of those rocks could contain uh contain signs of how life started on mars which could then tell us about how life started on our own planet goal three analyze the climate of mars mars atmosphere wind and weather patterns also play a key role in analyzing if microbial life existed in the past so nasa's perseverance rover carried something big underneath its belly on its month-long mission to mars to accomplish this goal something new to the red planet that's never been attempted before the ingenuity helicopter there are so many questions we want to ask that are kind of like just beyond the range of a rover you know how did things in this region form or like why did mars have a magnetic field and when did it go away those kind of questions require much bigger spatial scales and so a helicopter would be an absolutely fantastic way to do that weighing less than four pounds the ingenuity helicopter was designed to survive in the harsh martian environment after landing since there is a 20-minute delay in communication from earth to mars ingenuity has to fly independently without human control out on april 19th it did ingenuity successfully completed the first powered flight on another world a historic moment and a major milestone demonstrating what's possible on mars yeah so that video is fantastic because you can see the dust lifting off and then getting blown away and it's actually getting blown away to the north which is really important for understanding you know how stuff is moving around the crater and where the the sedimentary rocks we might be seeing right now how they formed and where they came from and finally perseverance's last goal to prepare for human exploration nasa hopes to send a manned mission to mars within the next 20 years but human survival on mars for an extended period of time comes with its own set of unique challenges mars atmosphere is 96 carbon dioxide oxygen is less than one percent compared to 21 percent in earth's atmosphere fortunately the perseverance rover has moxie the mars oxygen in c2 resource utilization experiment moxie draws carbon dioxide and compresses it before passing it into what's known as the solid oxide electrolyzer or soxy soxy essentially takes co2 which is two oxygen atoms and one carbon atom and separates them the separated oxygen ions join up to create a new molecule o2 which is the oxygen that humans need to breathe the co or carbon left behind is essentially waste but could be used to potentially fuel future vehicles on mars and on april 20 the rover's 60th day on mars moxie successfully produced five grams of oxygen from the red planet's thin carbon dioxide rich atmosphere nasa's perseverance rover china's tian1 missions and the uae hope probe are equipped with some of the most advanced scientific instruments to ever explore mars but with so many missions happening at the same time is there a risk one of them could potentially harm the planet there's a whole field at nasa called planetary protection and that's about trying to prevent us from contaminating other planets with life from earth when we take robots to mars and we take humans to mars can we do it as safely as possible without contaminating the martian environment especially because we don't actually know for sure that there isn't life living on mars today right it very well could be and so we by if we contaminate mars too much we'll risk kind of wiping out that you know martian unique martian ecosystem but how likely is it that the rover will actually find evidence of life on mars it's always hard to say you know we're trying to answer a really big question that we have no idea what the answer is to um and i think if we can answer in either direction that's a really really big result if we see zero evidence for any kind of microbial life that's still a very important result that'll really help us understand you know how rare and special life is in the universe you\n"