NASA's Perseverance rover should touch down on Mars in February.
If you haven’t done it already, mark your calendar for Feb. 18 to watch the NASA Perseverance rover make its tricky “seven minutes of terror” landing on Mars. It will broadcast live on NASA TV, which is available anywhere with streaming Internet.
After the dust clears and the cheers die down, then keep an eye on this important mission. Perseverance is the keystone in NASA’s search for microbial life on the Red Planet, and it’s really just a beginning.
For at least the next couple of years, the rover will probe interesting environments that once had water rushing through. It will cache promising samples. Then sometime soon, hopefully by end of decade, NASA and a consortium of international partners will fetch the samples for an unprecedented trip back to Earth for detailed analysis.
Could Perseverance usher in a new era of alien hunting? It’s hard to say right now, but we do know that Mars once had abundant flowing water and that the climactic conditions may have been great for microbes once upon a time. And if we can find even a single bacterium on Mars, it really bodes well for the solar system and beyond.
Let’s not forget all the other countries reaching for Mars now or the near future — China and the United Arab Emirates both have orbiting missions on the way for arrival in 2021, with China including a lander/rover as well in its mission. Europe is planning another life-hunting Mars rover called Rosalind Franklin, now expected to launch in 2022 after technical problems forced a delay.
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Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune each host a plethora of icy moons that may also be habitable for life, and at least two missions in the coming years (NASA and European) will target Jupiter’s Europa in an effort to learn more about this water-spurting moon. Then like toddlers taking the first steps from their parents’ arms, we can gain confidence in searching for life close to home and move our work even further out in the universe.
Artist's impression of the James Webb Space Telescope that will look at large planet atmospheres.
We sure have been looking for signals of intelligent life for a while. Fans of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) programs mourned the loss of the Arecibo Observatory in late 2020, which collapsed due to large-scale structural problems associated with a hurricane and ongoing repair issues. Its radio searches were one of many looking for communicative extraterrestrials, and will be difficult to replace. But we have other tools coming on board to search for lifeforms, too.
Consider the quickly evolving field of exoplanets. NASA’s retired Kepler observatory discovered thousands alone, and the newer NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is hunting for more Earth-sized planets closer to our own world. We’re discovering more and more rocky planets that may be habitable, although the science is at its infancy. But more observatories are coming online soon, which may help.
Consider NASA’s long-delayed James Webb Space Telescope, which may finally launch in 2021. It’s not likely to show us much about small planet atmospheres (as they are very small and difficult to see), but it can ferret out information from larger gas giants. This in turn could spur studies and technology development on even more powerful telescopes in the coming years.
There are also other telescopes under development that will tell us more. The ground-based European Extremely Large Observatory is under construction in Chile, and two space telescopes under development known as the Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor (LUVOIR) and Habitable Exoplanet Observatory (HabEx) may fly in the coming years. All are designed to ferret out more information from small planets.
The year 2021 may be remembered as the year our search for alien life really accelerated. Where it will take us remains to be seen, but we hope that whatever the result, it sheds more light on the precious planet we live upon and the process of how life took hold in this suburban corner of the universe.
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