NASA’s car-sized Perseverance rover cautiously surveys the surface of Mars for signs of past life. It also captures stunning views of the planet’s extraterrestrial sky.
The space agency released an eerie image of the dark Martian sky this week. Dark, just before sunrise. Mars clouds float in the air. Sunlight illuminates the distant atmosphere. It may be a landscape on Earth. But it’s a view tens of millions of miles away.
“It’s dusty and cold, sure, but Mars has a definite raw beauty.” NASA tweeted.
Such high Martian clouds are often made of water ice. carbon dioxide clouds.
The Perseverance rover is now passing through the Jezero crater, a site with a dried up river delta and where planetary scientists believe there was once a lake. “This delta is one of the best places for the rover to look for signs of past microscopic life,” he said, according to NASA.
Mars was once a wet world that harbored oceans, but it began to dry out, so microscopic life may have remained in Jezero’s wet clay and soil. Remnants of organic matter that may be evidence may remain or be preserved. Such remnants may be elements, substances, or chains of molecules. The Perseverance rover did indeed discover carbon-like organic matter in the Jezero crater, but this in itself is far from evidence of past life.
The hurdles to claiming evidence of life are so high that they will almost certainly need to scrutinize real samples from Mars. This is one of the reasons why the rover dug a hole in the Martian soil to collect extraterrestrial soil tubes. in the next decade, NASA plans to bring these samples back to Earth.
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For now, the Perseverance rover continues to move — noisy — across the Marten Desert while advanced chemical survey equipment sniffs out the terrain. Its sidekick, the dusty Ingenuity helicopter, Help NASA create a winding course for the rover.
