Astrum Space - Perseverance Made the Biggest Ever Discovery on Mars

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

This Astrum compilation dives into the biggest discoveries made by Perseverance, NASA’s incredible rover on Mars. We’ll explore strange signals, ancient water, and arguably the most important martian discovery ever: signs of alien life. ▀▀▀▀▀▀A huge thanks to our Patreons who help make these videos possible. Sign-up here: ⁠https://bit.ly/4aiJZNF

And here, the Mona Lisa gazed into Mona's eyes in perfect health with no undiagnosed problems and her optic nerve in excellent condition. Anyone here got eyes like Mona? Mine are brownish. Not enough people know about their eye health. That's why OCT scans are included in every standard eye exam at Specsavers locations. Should have gone to Specsavers. Book an eye exam today. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists.

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Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. You've likely all seen the news by now. NASA found a possible sign of life on Mars. These tiny spots, barely visible to the naked eye, are the biggest space news in over 50 years. If this really is a sign of life, it would be the most meaningful discovery in the history of humanity.

But we've been burned by false alarms before. So have we really done it this time? I'm Alex McCulligan and you're watching Astrum. Join me today as we dig into the details of what Perseverance found, why scientists are excited, and what it will take to prove we're not alone in the universe. In February of 2021, NASA's Perseverance Rover, or Percy to his friends,

touched down on an ancient Martian lake bed. The Yezero Crater was once home to a large body of water, with rivers flowing in and out, carving delters and carrying sediment. The soil is rich in clay minerals that can only form in the presence of water. Percy has been sent to hunt for ancient microbial life. If it's going to find them anywhere, the Yesero crater seems like a good bed. You see, ancient lakes often contain perchlorate, which can be metabolized by microbes. Astrobiologists on Earth study microbes like this in extreme environments

to understand if life could survive in similar conditions on other planets. The rover's job is to look for these possible signs of life, identify and store the most interesting samples of Martian rock, and prepare them to be collected by another space mission for an eventual return to Earth. One day, in July 2024, while exploring the edges of the ancient Naretva Valis River Channel, Percy's cameras spotted something unusual. A rock from the Bright Angel formation. Two of the rover's instruments, the planetary instrument for X-ray lithochemistry or pixel,

and the scanning habitable environments with Raman and luminescence for organics and chemicals, or Sherlock for short, detected sedimentary rocks made of clay and silt. On earth, these materials are excellent preservers of microbial life, so Percy took a closer look, and it saw something amazing. The rock, also known as Cheyava Falls, was rich in organic compounds like carbon, phosphorus and iron, arranged into rings. affectionately named leopard spots and poppy seeds, the tiny spots span 200 micrometers to 1mm millimeter in diameter, but it was enough to raise the blood pressure of astrobiologists everywhere.

The light inner part of the leopard spot is chemically similar to the surrounding rock, but the dark outer rim is enriched with iron and phosphorus. It seems to be evidence of localized iron reduction. Percy also detected organic, carbon-based compounds in the rock, and based on its texture and geochemical composition, we strongly suspect this rock was once in contact with water. Usually when we see such a combination of organics, water and iron reduction on Earth, is interpreted as a sign of microbial life. Suddenly, NASA had something very unique on its hands.

And this mudstone rock hold the first alien biosignature ever found. At the centre of this story are two very special minerals, Vivianite and Greigite. Vivianite is an iron phosphate. On earth it forms near metal ores and river sediments, where microbes like geobacter metabolize iron instead of oxygen. They take in iron three oxide and release iron two as a waste product. The energy given off by this reaction then powers their metabolism, a process known as chemosynthesis.

When they expelled iron two reacts with the phosphate and the water in the environment, it forms vivianite. Greyguide follows a similar story. Sulfate reducing microorganisms on earth break down sulfate into sulfide, which reacts with iron to make greyguide. But let's be sceptics for a moment and rule out my own. microbes for now. What else could have caused these reduction reactions? Well, one explanation could be very high temperatures. The sulfide needed to produce grey-gite could have come from

volcanic gases leaking into groundwater. But that means the sulphide would have had to migrate from a hot volcanic system into a much cooler environment, and there's been no evidence for such volcanic or hydrothermal sources nearby. Another possibility is that sulfate in the rocks was reduced to sulfide through reactions with organic matter. But unless temperatures exceed 150 to 200 degrees Celsius, these reactions would be very slow and require a huge amount of energy, making them unlikely. And studies of the rocks around this area have shown no evidence of high temperatures.

So there's no way the surrounding environment could have got hot enough to reduce sulfate and form greyguide. Another possible explanation is acidity. Both iron three ions and sulphate ions dissolve much more readily in water under acidic conditions than they do under neutral conditions, making them much more prone to reduction through purely chemical reactions. If the water on Mars was more acidic than we anticipated, that could have caused the spots Percy saw. Perhaps these spots were just the result of chemical processes on an alien planet, nothing more. But then, Percy spotted this little green mineral. Nestled near the sample site, a small rock of olivine knocked the acidic

water hypothesis on its head. Olivine is the fastest weathering silicate mineral. Unlike other silicone structures like silicon dioxide, for example, olivine doesn't have strong silicon oxygen-silicon bonds. Instead, it's made up of negatively charged silicate ions held together by the electrostatic attraction with positively charged magnesium and iron ions. In acidic conditions, these are displaced by hydrogen ions, breaking olivine down into orthosolic acid and magnesium ions in solution. The more acidic the environment, the more hydrogen ions there are, and the more aggressive

the dissolution of olivine would be. So the very fact that it exists rules out the possibility of acidic conditions causing the strange spots. Science is ultimately about falsification. It's not about proving a hypothesis true, much more often it's about proving a hypothesis false. Over time and through a process of elimination, all roads seem to point to the same explanation. And if that explanation holds up against enough skepticism, for long enough, it eventually becomes an accepted theory, testable, reliable, and widely accepted by the scientific community.

In this paper, the Mars research team tried to prove that these minerals were not left behind by ancient alien life. They started with a null hypothesis and systematically investigated all the non-living explanations for what they found. But after months of study, they concluded they just couldn't do it. Now, saying we can't explain how this was done by something non-living is very different from saying this is a definitive sign of life. For one thing, all our speculation and contained excitement is based on what we know about biochemistry on Earth. And no matter how tempting it may be, we cannot allow ourselves to assume that just because something happens one way on Earth, it would happen the same way on Mars. Maybe it has a totally different biochemistry

we know nothing about. NASA's being extra careful not to say too much too soon. After all, we've been wrong about potential biosignatures on Mars before. Back in 1976, the Viking lander tested Martian soil for life by squirting it with nutrients labeled with radioactive carbon 14. If microbes were present, they'd metabolize the nutrients into radioactive carbon dioxide we could detect, and to everyone's shock, that's exactly what happened. Excited scientists thought they had proof of alien-loxia. life. But in 2008, NASA's Phoenix lander found Martian soil to be rich in Placlorate,

a powerful oxidant that destroys organics and releases gas when heated. What looked like a biological reason was really just chemistry, a false positive. Still, Mars kept dangling hope. In 1996, a photo of meteorite ALH-84001 made headlines. The rock itself was over 4 billion years old from a time when Mars had liquid water on its surface. Under the electron microscope, tiny structures emerged, resembling bacterial colonies. The world stood still. Researchers thought they were onto something big, so big that President Bill Clinton gave a formal announcement about the discovery.

Sounds a lot like NASA's recent statement of Percy's discovery, doesn't it? But in 2022, those squiggles were ruled non-biological, explained instead by a water rock reaction called serpentinization, another false alarm. So is our recent finding in the Yezaro Crater another close call? Or is it proof that the third time really is the charm? There's only one way to find out. We have to bring the sample home for further testing. That's where the Mars sample return mission comes in.

It's a complex mission, which requires sending three separate spacecraft to Mars. Percy has already completed phase one. It's drilled into Cheyava Falls and tucked away a precious core sample of the mudstone rock mission scientist named Sapphire Canyon. Phase two would be to send another spacecraft to land near Perseverance, collect those tubes and launch them into orbit around Mars. The third and final craft would collect samples from the orbiter and ferry them all the way back to Earth. It's a huge task with an estimated price tag of $11 billion.

The Mars sample return mission was first announced in 2022 as a joint collaboration between NASA and ESA. Since then it has been fraught with financial struggles and uncertainties, delaying the project from 2030 to 2040, before ultimately being suspended. intended indefinitely. This is despite the National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey, a meeting of leading scientists who get together every 10 years to decide the future priorities for progress in STEM, naming the Mars sample return as the highest priority for NASA two decades in a row.

And that was before we discovered this potential biosignature on our neighboring planet. All we can do is hope this puts political. political pressure on leaders to mobilize the necessary resources to pull it off. So if we ever do get the Sapphire Canyon sample back home, what kind of experiments might scientists run? There's a good chance that, among other things, they'll be looking for two key fingerprints of life. The first is chirality.

Amino acids come in two mirror image versions, right-handed and left-handed, also known as D and L amino acids. On Earth, life overwhelmingly prefers the L version of things, while non-living materials show more of a 50-50 split. If the Martian sample shows a significant chiral preference, either right or left-handed, that could be a smoking gun. The second fingerprint is carbon isotopes. Carbon comes in a few different flavors.

commonly carbon 12 and carbon 13. Again, life prefers one over the other. The ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13 in living things is much higher than in non-living things. If we see a similar pattern in the Sapphire Canyon sample, that could be another clue that its origin is biological. You see, you and I may often think of discoveries like these in quite a binary way. Either they're a sign of life or they're not. NASA has a much more nuanced take. They recently proposed the confidence of life detection scale, a framework for ordering how likely discoveries actually are to be signs of life based on a set of criteria.

It has seven levels, ranging from, we found something that could be caused by life, all the way to multiple teams have independently confirmed life more than once. hasn't stated where the discovery in the Ezero crater falls, but I'd guess probably somewhere between levels 3 and 4. If the samples come back and independent labs around the world all confirm that what we are seeing really did come from a biological origin, that would push us up to a level 6. Level 7 might even require going back to Mars and finding the same evidence in a completely different location. So when NASA says this discovery could be the clearest sign of life we've ever found on Mars,

they don't mean to say it is clearly life. But the Mars sample return mission could finally reveal whether we've always been alone in the universe or did we once have a cosmic neighbor. Even if our sample turns out to not be life, it's still an extraordinary discovery that will help us understand our own origins even better. See, we think Mars is like a time capsule of an early Earth. Unlike Earth, Mars doesn't have any continental drift or an active plate tectonic system. Its crust has been frozen in place for billions of years, preserved in a way Earth's crust

could never be. The ancient landscapes on our planet have been erased through tectonics, erosion, oceans and volcanism. So when we study Mars, we're not just asking whether it once carried life, we're also peering into a record of planetary conditions that resemble Earth at the dawn of biology. In that sense, Mars is a window into our own origins, offering clues to what Earth might have looked and felt like before life left its mark. But let's dream for a moment, shall we? What if the sample does turn out to be life? Well, most immediately, it would indicate that Mars was habitable far longer than we imagined,

since the sample comes from relatively young sediment. But more importantly, we'd finally answer the question, can life exist on other planets? And in the same breath, open a Pandora's box of follow-ups. Did life on Earth start on Mars, all the other way round? Did a meteor from interstellar space seed life on both our planets? Or did it arise spontaneously twice? Where else could life exist in the universe? How common is it really?

It would also have implications on the Drake equation, a probabilistic formula used to estimate the number of alien civilizations in our galaxy. The FL value here, which stands for the fraction of potentially habitable planets that to go on to develop life, would jump from vanishingly small to closer to one. Since two out of two neighboring planets would then have or have had life at some point, an increase in this value causes the number of civilizations in the universe to shoot up. But crucially, this coefficient only changes if life on Earth and Mars rose independently. If we are related, the products of panspermia, that still represents

just one biogenesis event, and the outcome of the equation remains unchanged. There's a concept known as the 0-1-infinity rule. In astrobiology, it represents the idea that life can only exist in 0, 1, or infinite places. We already know it's not 0. If it's just 1, then we're alone, a single spark in the dark. But if it's 2, Earth and Mars, then why not? 5,000, 5 million, or even infinite places in the universe. Suddenly, life isn't rare. We're not special

anymore. And personally, I hope that if we ever discover life out there, it brings us closer together down here. For centuries, we wondered what was on the surface of Mars. But today, with a fleet of spacecraft in orbit and rovers active on the ground, we know more about Mars. than any other planet beyond Earth. We've seen huge canyons that once held water, observed distant dust storms, and even found some intriguing signs of life that may once have existed there. These discoveries were all things we were actually looking for, and yet the red planet continues to surprise us too.

Recently, NASA's Perseverance rover detected something completely unexpected, something it wasn't designed to investigate, something we'd almost lost hope of finding. And here, the Mona Lisa gazed into Mona's eyes in perfect health, with no undiagnosed problems and her optic nerve in excellent condition. Anyone here got eyes like Mona? Mine are brownish. Not enough people know about their eye health. That's why OCT scans are included in every standard eye exam at Specsaver's locations. Should have gone to Specsaver's Book an eye exam. I exam's provided by independent optometrists.

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That MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. That tiny crackle, like a jack cable being pulled out of a speaker, could be the first ever evidence of lightning on Mars. A phenomenon that, no matter how hard we've surged, even with specially designed missions, we have never detected before. So why is it only now that we've been able to hear it? What does this mean for the red planet? And could there be implications for future manned missions? I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum. Today we're traveling to Mars to investigate the sound so small it was almost ignored.

A tiny crackle that could hold the key to how Mars's atmosphere works, how its storms form, its surface chemistry, and whether humans could one day safely walk its surface. The first lander to touch down on the Martian surface was NASA's Viking 1 in 1976, shortly followed by its sister probe Viking 2 a few months later. These two landers provided the first close-up, color images of the Martian surface we've ever seen, revealing a red-brown landscape under a dusty orange sky. Since then, we've successfully sent eight more landers and rovers to the surface,

Two of which are still active at the time of publishing this video, NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance Rovers. Between them, these remarkable robotic explorers have dramatically increased our understanding of Mars. They've shown that the planet was once covered in liquid water, and that vast reservoirs are still hidden, locked up in ice just below the surface. Our intrepid rovers have had to deal with all kinds of Martian weather, from great. glaring sunshine, to fierce winds and raging dust storms. But one thing's long been missing. Lightning.

We've seen it on other planets. Voyager 1 spotted bright flashes on Jupiter when it flew past in 1979. And more recently, NASA's Juno probe captured stunning images of Jovian lightning up close. On Saturn, storms can stretch for thousands of kilometers and unleash lightning 10,000 times more powerful than Earth's. One colossal lightning storm, observed in 2009 by the Cassini spacecraft, raged for a full eight months. But lightning has never been detected on our planetary neighbor, Mars, until now.

And that discovery is a really big deal, because lightning is far more than a simple weather event. On Earth, lightning plays a vital role in the world. chemistry of our atmosphere. It forms when ice particles collide inside storm clouds, causing them to gain or lose electrons and become positively or negatively charged. As that electrical charge keeps growing, the air between the cloud and the ground can no longer hold it back, and the electricity suddenly discharges as a lightning bolt, releasing so much energy, the surrounding air is briefly heated to over 27,000 degrees Celsius.

That's hotter than the surface of the sun. The burst of energy is so intense, it can break apart nitrogen and oxygen molecules in the air, which then recombine into nitrogen oxides. These dissolve in rainwater and enter the soil, where they act as natural fertilizer, helping plants to grow. As well as its role in the nitrogen cycle, lightning produces ozone, which helps shield our planet from dangerous UV rays. It's even possible that lightning played a role in the origin of life itself by converting atmospheric

gases into vital organic molecules such as RNA and amino acids. So in other words, lightning is far more than a flash of light in the sky. It is a critical part of Earth's natural systems. And if lightning plays an important role in atmospheric chemistry on Earth, it's likely the same will be true on Mars, right? Well, unlike Earth, Saturn, or Jupiter, with their dense atmospheres and towering storm systems, Mars's atmosphere is incredibly thin, more than a hundred times lighter than Earth's. This makes lightning as we know it unlikely.

But storm clouds aren't the only place where lightning occurs. Here on Earth, under the right conditions, lightning can also be generated by volcanic eruptions. This incredible footage was captured by a tour guide in 2023 for Guatemala's Fuego volcano. As ash and dust particles swirl around inside the volcanic cloud, they collide, generating an electrical charge, just like ice particles in a storm cloud. And if this one thing Mars has a lot of, it's dust. Martian winds whip it up into towering dust devils up to 19 kilometers tall. Some scientists estimate, that there could be as many as 145 million of them racing across the surface of the red planet on any given day. And that's not all. Giant dust storms also occur, occasionally growing so

large, they engulfed the entire planet. The two Viking probe saw two of these global dust storms in their first year alone. Driven by seasonal heating, rising plumes of warm air create continent-sized storms. But once every three Mars years, about five and a half Earth years, they combine and become large enough to cover the entire planet. Scientists aren't really sure why these years-long gaps between storms exist, but they suspect it's to do with the fact that Mars' orbit is less circular than Earth's. It means that during the southern hemisphere summer, the planet is closer to the sun and therefore

significantly hotter. Although wind speeds here only reach about 100 km per hour, about half the maximum we see here on Earth, the dust is so fine that this is enough to almost completely block out the sun, not good for solar-powered rovers on the surface. In fact, on the 10th of June 2018, this spelled the end for the Opportunity Rover, who never managed to power back on after a global storm. But whilst bad for mission planners, all that swirling dust provides the perfect conditions for lightning to occur, and for decades, scientists have been trying to detect it.

The European Space Agency's Mars Express spent five years scanning Martian dust storms for any hint of electrical activity, and found nothing. The Skeparelli module, also sent by Issa, was equipped with a special instrument to measure electrical activity in the Martian atmosphere. And sadly, it never got the chance. As it approached the surface in October 2016, a software malfunction caused his parachute to jettison too early, and the module crashed. The high-rise camera on NASA's Mars reconnaissance orbiter captured this view of the crash site.

But now finally, after decades of searching, the Perseverance rover has found tantalizing evidence of lightning on the red planet. it was a lucky break, because as I mentioned earlier, Perseverance wasn't looking for lightning at all. Its super cam instrument is designed to analyze Martian rocks by zapping them with a laser, and analyzing the light and sound produced by the blast. But along with the sounds that bounced back from rocks, the super cam microphone detected a strange crackle and pop. The finding was so intriguing, a team of Mars scientists led by Bartiste Sheed from France's Institute of research in astrophysics and planetology painstakingly trawled through nearly 45 months' worth of

data from the super cam microphone. In total, they found 55 acoustic pops recorded over two Martian years, and most occurred during storms or within Dust Devils. It was looking more and more like this could be the sound of Martian lightning. But are these tiny pops really evidence? Could there be another explanation? In their paper, published in Nature in November 2025, Sheed and the team systematically assessed possible alternatives. Perhaps the lightning discharge came from the rover itself, but the sound doesn't match any known rover noises. Maybe a grain of dust hit the microphone or its housing causing the unusual pop. But that can't account for the electrical interference.

What else could the team do to test whether what Perseverance recorded really could be lightning? Well, they decided to recreate the conditions of a Martian storm here on Earth. Using a replica of the Supercam instrument, they generated a static charge by rubbing particles together and then recorded what the microphone detected. The result was incredibly similar to the electromagnetic spike heard by Perseverance. After analyzing all this, data, the team concluded that the 55 mysterious pops were best explained by the electrical discharge of lightning on Mars. And that's not all. In February 26, another team added weight

to the argument. While sifting through a decade's worth of data from NASA's Mars atmosphere and volatile evolution, or Maven spacecraft, scientists from Charles University in the Czech Republic found one other tiny piece of evidence, a whistler wave. On Earth, whistler waves are low-frequency radio signals that travel along the magnetic field lines of our planet's magnetosphere before dispersing. But what's most interesting about them is what creates them. They are a tell-tale sign and arguably proof of lightning. We've seen them on other planets with both strong magnetic fields and atmospheric electrical discharges, Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune, but never before on Mars. Why? Well, Mars doesn't have a global magnetosphere like these

other planets because the internal activity that creates them stopped billions of years ago. What it does have, however, is localized crustal magnetic fields. These are much stronger in the southern hemisphere than the north, and it's now thought whistlered. waves can travel along these field lines when lightning-like activity in dust storms takes place. The question now becomes, is this a common occurrence? So far, out of more than 100,000 maver data points, the team has only found one whistler wave in Mars's ionosphere, and it lasted just 0.4 seconds. It's only in very specific conditions that these waves can be created, given

the transient nature of Mars' magnetic fields, and Maven has to be in exactly the right place at the right time, which is hard, if not impossible, to predict. But just because we don't see it all the time doesn't mean it's not there. This fleeting signal, combined with Perseverance's discoveries, is telling us that there is almost certainly lightning there. Martian lightning may not be powerful bolts like those seen on Earth. It's closer to a static charge, the kind you get when you walk across a carpet in socks and then touch a metal doornob.

But with so many storms and dust evils raging across the surface, it's likely that millions of these tiny static charges occur. And that has big implications for our understanding of Mars. You see, when dust is electrically charged, it's easier for wind to lift it up, and it also alters how the particles clumped together. So the lightning isn't just a product of Martian weather. It helps drive the storms themselves. The presence of lightning could also solve a long-standing mystery, the origin of Mars's oxidizing chemicals. Mars is full of highly reactive substances known as oxidants. For decades, scientists have been detecting them in Martian soil and atmosphere,

But until now, they couldn't fully explain how they were being produced. These newly discovered electrical discharges may provide the missing mechanism. Even though Martian Lightning is far weaker than Earth's, it still carries enough energy to break molecules apart and create new ones, including hydrogen peroxide and perchlorates, both of which are found in abundance on Mars. This has important implications for the search of life, because these harsh oxidants rapidly destroy organic molecules, effectively sterilizing the surface. So even if Mars once hosted life, the chemical traces it left behind could have been altered

or erased. To have any realistic chance of finding evidence of life on Mars, future missions will need to look below the surface, targeting rocks and sediments that are protected, buried or shielded from the harsh oxidizing environment on the surface. But that's not all. The discovery also has implications for perseverance, as well as other rovers active on the surface, because when dust is electrically charged, it becomes clingy. If you've ever accidentally spilt the contents of a bean bag, you'll know how clingy those tiny

polystyrene beads can be. As the beads collide with each other, they generate a static charge, causing them to cling to your hands, your clothes, the broom, everything. On Mars, electrically charged dust, can cling to the surface of the rovers persistently coating their instruments and solar panels. In December 2022, NASA's poor Insight lander had accumulated so much dust on its solar panels, it lost power completely and never powered back up again. Thankfully, the next generation of landers are already in the works with Issa's Rosalind Franklin

rover currently due to launch in 2008, and Isroo, developing the Mars Lander mission, also known as Vangelion 2, which will set off for the red planet in 2030. And what's arguably more exciting is the fact that in the future, rovers and landers might not be alone on the surface. Both NASA and SpaceX have ambitious plans to send humans to Mars within the next decade. In fact, SpaceX is planning to send its first starships to the red planet at some point in 2026. And that says Artemis missions to the Moon are well underway.

Yes, it's not Mars, but their success will be vital for testing technologies needed to send humans further. They will allow scientists to iron out any kinks in setting up long-term settlements and life support systems on a world beyond our planet. For one thing the Moon can't help us plan for is dealing with this new-found Martian lightning. Is it something astronauts need to worry about? Good news first. The first human to set foot on Mars is unlikely to be struck down by a bolt of lightning, as

it is far too weak. But frequent small electrical discharges could interfere with astronauts' equipment. So while Martian Lightning may not be as impressively powerful as the bolts we get to witness here on Earth, the discovery represents a genuine engineering challenge for future missions. To truly understand Martian Lightning, much more research will be needed. But this chance discovery by the Perseverance rover is enough to open up new avenues of research and show that, even after decades of close observation, Mars keeps surprising us. Who knows what the rovers will discover next?

And here, the Mona Lisa gazed into Mona's eyes in perfect health with no undiagnosed problems and her optic nerve in excellent condition. Anyone here got eyes like Mona? Mine are brownish. Not enough people know about their eye health. That's why OCT scans are included in every standard eye exam at Specsavers locations. Should have gone to Specsavers. Book an eye exam today.

Eye exams provided by independent optometrists. Contact your local Specsavers for details. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor, free of charge.

BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. It is one of the oldest questions mankind has ever asked. Are we alone in the universe? With the universe as vast as ours, could it really be true that we, we are the only ones in it. Surely there was some other inhabited world out there. In the 19th century, the question became more specific. How common was life exactly? Could it be common enough to have arisen multiple times in our own solar system? Could it exist, say, on the planet the most similar to our own? Could there be life on Mars?

Speculation raged. Sci-fi writers imagined entire alien civilization. on the red planet. Although this has calmed down in the last century, as our first probes and satellites went there and sent back photos of nothing but barren deserts, the question didn't entirely vanish. It simply reframed itself. Could life have once existed on Mars? Not now, but in the ancient past. And for all of our inquiring, to this day it is a question that only has one answer. Maybe. Thanks to probes that have gone on before, we know that liquid water once existed on Mars, and where there is liquid water, there is the possibility for life.

This was an incredible discovery when it was made in the 1970s, but it is not proof. It's a question that, if it were proved positive, would forever alter our entire view of the whole universe. Because if life arose twice here, in our solar system, it almost certainly would be able to be. arose elsewhere. But until we find that first fossilized example of life on another planet, we will not know for sure. So NASA said, let's become sure. This is a video about the rover that went to go check. I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum. Join with me today in this supercut as we delve into the first campaign of the Perseverance rover, the NASA machine tasked with

actually collecting samples of fossilized. microbial life on Mars to return to us before the decade is out. This could be the rover that finally lays the ancient question of are we alone to rest? So how did that first campaign go? Perseverance launched on the 30th of July 2020 on an Atlas 5 rocket. There was a great launch window around this time where Earth and Mars were aligned just right for a quick rendezvous. In fact, China and the UAE also launched a rover and probe respectively during this same launch window.

The cruise took seven months, and checks on the system showed that perseverance was in good shape for the atmospheric entry. Landing is the most nerve-wracking part of the whole journey. The extremes in temperatures and speed involved make it very dangerous. NASA have had a lot of practice at it though, and seem to be getting better and better every time. NASA have this cool visualization on their website that I want to show you, because I want you to appreciate that landing a car-sized rover on another planet is no mean feat.

First, about 4,000 kilometers from the landing site, and traveling over 16,000 kilometers per hour, the cruise stage is detached, and thrusters are used to stop the craft from spinning. At an altitude of 120 kilometers, the craft has sped up to over 19,000 kilometers per hour. But it's here that the Martian atmosphere begins slowing perseverance down. Due to turbulence in the atmosphere, thrusters are being used to keep the spacecraft steady and to keep this heat shield facing forward, as friction from the atmosphere is heating the shield up to over 1,300 degrees Celsius. Computers on board are autonomously monitoring its position, keeping it aimed at its final landing

goal. At 60 kilometers up and 16 kilometers from the target, the atmosphere has slowed perseverance down to 3,000 kilometers per hour. Now this is where things start to get interesting, as the spacecraft was fitted with a number of video cameras, giving us an unprecedented view of the landing sequence. First, the huge 21-meter parachute was deployed. You may notice the odd pattern in red and white. This is useful for scientists to see the orientation of the parachute.

But there's also a hidden code in there. Dare mighty things, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's motto, written in binary code, with the GPS location of JPL on the outside. At 10 kilometres up, and having slowed to 600 kilometers per hour, the heat shield is released, reducing the weight and exposing perseverance to the Martian atmosphere for the first time. At around 4 kilometers up, the spacecraft begins imaging the surface to search for a safe place to land, At 2 kilometers up, once it's happy with a landing spot, the upper casing of the spacecraft separates, leaving just perseverance and the rocket propol descent stage.

Rockets are necessary, as the parachute can't slow the fall anymore. Mars's atmosphere is simply too thin. The rocket stage slows the fall from 300 kilometers an hour to zero, and it hovers 20 meters above the surface. The rover itself is then lowered using cabling. Suspended by what is known as the Sky Crane, and once it's safely on the ground, the rocket stage cuts loose to crash a safe distance away. How amazing is that, and actually being able to really see it is incredible.

After a seven-month journey, Perseverance landed on the surface of Mars on the 18th of February 2021. Perseverance is NASA's most ambitious rover yet. To give you a sense of scale, the thing is massive. NASA have basically sent a car to Mars. You may notice though that its looks are heavily based on its famous predecessor, Curiosity. While it may appear almost identical, there have been some major improvements of the design based on what didn't work so well on Curiosity.

One noticeable difference is the wheels. Curiosity's wheels have shown some serious wear so far, so Perseverance's wheels are thicker and more durable. They are also less wide, but have a larger diameter. Another improvement is its robotic arm, which is longer and stronger than the one on curiosity. But the most notable differences are, unsurprisingly, the scientific instruments on board. Because while curiosity was designed to investigate whether Mars was once a place conducive to life, perseverance is looking for actual evidence of fossilized life.

The first step for it will be to find compelling rocks. And it has an advanced suite of instruments to help it do just that. On the mast is a powerful camera called the Super Cam, which uses a laser to identify the composition of rocks. The camera itself takes a photo to visually identify what the laser is pointing at, so it's not actually this camera that takes the impressive panorama you'll see later. However, this instrument is really important. It can analyze a rock from several meters away, which means the rover itself doesn't need

to move within arm's reach of a rock it wants to identify, allowing it to move on to a new region quicker. The 3D panorama cameras are also located in the mast, and they can zoom, focus, and take video. Once intriguing rocks have been identified with the cameras, Perseverance can move in closer and examine them with the spectrometers in its arm. There are two cameras in the arm. A normal colour camera called Watson, and another laser camera. which can also take microscopic images called Sherlock.

Interestingly, I found these images in the raw files of the cameras, and upon investigation, it turns out they brought this along to test the cameras of focusing well, and that the laser reads the material correctly. There are various materials on the rover, including space suit fabric, and some with Sherlock Holmes' Easter eggs. For example, this has a maze on it with a tiny Sherlock Holmes image in the middle, and This rock sample has 221B Baker written on it, the famous address in the books. Apparently, one of these rock cross sections is actually from a suspected Mars meteorite.

If true, it would be the first known instance of a rock from Mars doing a full round trip to Earth and back. Another of the instrument is basically a weather station, an instrument that will keep track of the wind, temperature, humidity, pressure and dust levels. the back of the rover, there is a ground-penetrating radar instrument, which will be used to see the geologic features under the surface. And there is also a rather special experiment module, Moxie, that will be used to see if oxygen can be extracted from the Martian atmosphere, a crucial necessity for the survival

of future human colonies, and surprisingly, even a way to produce rocket fuel. Leaving a planet's gravity naturally takes a lot of fuel. For Mars is lighter gravity, it still requires 30 to 40 metric tons of propellant. It's even harder to do on Earth and becomes harder still if you have to also carry all the fuel you will need to make the trip home again. However, knowing that we might be able to make most or all of that fuel from liquid oxygen found on the planet makes space travel much more feasible. The last experiment on board relates to Perseverance's primary objective.

ending compelling rocks that may host microbial fossils. Once the cameras and spectrometers have identified promising candidates, the arm is equipped with a drill that can either abrade the top layer of a rock to expose the unweathered surface beneath, or if the mission team wants to extract a sample from the rock, the drill can also core out a chunk. The arm will feed the sample through to the body of the rover, where a second arm will move the core to a place where it is sealed, and then a place where it can. get stored in one of 20 caches that will be on board.

Interestingly, although Perseverance was cleaned as much as possible before launch to avoid contaminating Mars and also these samples, even tiny traces of gases from the rover itself could skew readings. To combat this, there are also some witness tubes that are preloaded with witness materials that can capture molecular and particulate contaminants. Each witness tube will be opened on Mars to capture the ambient environment. They will then be sealed like the normal sample tubes. Comparing the witness tubes with the cached samples will allow scientists to know what the

contaminants are and eliminate them. But sadly, Perseverance will not be able to confirm the existence of microbial life by itself. It is actually designed as a forerunner mission. Once Perseverance has filled all the caches, it will place them for another mission to pick up. NASA wants this to be a sample return mission. However, the means of collecting these samples has not been finalized yet.

A launch is currently slated for 2026, using a rover to pick up the samples and deliver them back to a rocket, where this rocket will rendezvous with an orbiter, which will make the journey back to Earth with the samples in our hands come 2028. It's a very complicated system, so let's hope the mission teams will really get everything right in the coming years. As the rover turned on its cameras and took in its surroundings for the first time, it found itself staring out across the red, arid and solitary landscape that we have come to expect from Mars. The terrain around it was mostly flat, albeit interspersed with rocky outcrops.

This was intentional. Scientists had deliberately brought perseverance to a place where its wheels could transport it freely, and where it could find sites of particular scientific interest. To that end, they had chosen Yezzaro crater. Thanks to the outcroppings of rock that surround the crater, perseverance would be able to collect rock samples from many different geological periods without needing to do major drilling, helping scientists piece together the geological history of the Yezero Crater

and to get a better picture of the most likely locations to find life. It would spend some time investigating the sections of Yezero Crater near its landing site in what is known as the crater floor campaign before moving on to the Yesero Delta as part of the Delta Front campaign. You would think that Perseverance would be on the move almost immediately, eager to begin its mission. Thanks to the outcroppings of rock that surround the crater, Perseverance would be able to collect rock samples from many different geological periods,

giving it plenty of opportunity to get started on its search. However, you would be wrong. Despite landing on Mars in February, it wasn't until nearly five months later that Perseverance made any major effort to leave its landing site and begin its journey. And this was not just because scientists took time carefully testing every single piece of scientific equipment and its software to make sure everything was working smoothly. You see, Perseverance was not alone. In fact, it may surprise you to discover, but you might say it was because Perseverance was pre-perseverence was pre-relivenors. Cradled in Perseverance's undercarriage, hidden by a dust shield from the Martian winds and atmosphere, Perseverance had brought with it a second, smaller passenger to Mars, and much of

the initial few months of Perseverance's time was spent helping bring that second passenger into the world. This second passenger was to be Perseverance's companion for the journey ahead, as well as an interesting tech demo. This smaller robot was not a rover, its name was ingenuity, and it was the first ever attempt at a helicopter on Mars. After performing several tests on Perseverance's own software and hardware, scientists turned their attention to this smaller 1.8 kilogram drone.

The atmosphere on Mars is about 100 times thinner than Earth's, making it uncertain whether a helicopter's spinning blades would even work there. would be difficult to displace enough air to create lift. Ingenuity was incredibly lightweight to compensate for this, and its rotor could spin at revs of over 2,000 RPM. Its only scientific equipment was a camera, but this would be invaluable in helping Perseverance find the best routes through the potentially tricky Martian terrain. So on the 21st of March, nearly a month after landing, the birthing began.

started by removing its dust shield, allowing ingenuity to taste the Martian air. Mechanical birthing is a slow process, however, with scientists constantly checking every single piece of data to make sure everything is functioning as it should. It wasn't until the 3rd of April that Perseverance finally placed ingenuity on the hard Martian soil and allowed it to experience its first cold night on Mars. Temperatures on Mars reach lows of minus 100 degrees Celsius, so outside of the protective heaters of Perseverance, it's no small thing that Ingenuity survived the night with no problems. But scientists were delighted that this part of the mission went smoothly. During this stage of Perseverance's mission, it looked on like a proud parent as Ingenuity

began to take its first wobbling steps. Although, just like a parent, Perseverance couldn't resist taking a selfie or two to show off to its friends on Earth. Ingenuity's first flights did not go completely without a hitch. After this, it was a little bit of taking time to test its rotors at varying speeds, ingenuity did run into some software issues that worried the engineers who'd worked on it. However, by the 19th of April, Perseverance was able to record as the solar-powered drone attempted the first ever controlled flight on another planet. The flight was done autonomously, as the time it would take for a signal to travel from Earth to Mars would create too much lag to try and fly remotely. And there were

a lot of unknowns. Mars has lighter gravity compared to us, as well as having thinner air, which meant that testing the rotor on Earth didn't necessarily mean it would work on Mars. It's hard to properly replicate lower gravity on Earth, for example. But fortunately, and with incredible smoothness, ingenuity rose to an altitude of 3 meters, and remained hovering there for 39.1 seconds, just as planned. Scientists were very excited when the tech demo that had been proposed just six years earlier had proved itself a success. Ingenuity was not expected to last long on Mars, but it kept going and going, flying further and higher than every previous attempt.

It didn't crash, didn't break, and actually has become a useful scout for perseverance, to find good routes for the rover to take, or to search for points of interest too small for satellites to detect. The continuity went from a disposable tech demo at the beginning of the mission to a valuable aid and accomplice for the Perseverance rover. What about Perseverance? The Martian rover was not completely idle during this time. Perseverance was able to test out a lot of its own gear while it waited for ingenuity.

Perseverance was equipped with a microphone, and scientist hoped to get the first ever audio sample from the Martian surface. after landing on Mars, Perseverance was able to do just that, giving us our first idea of what the wind on Mars sounds like. And here, the Mona Lisa gaze into Mona's eyes in perfect health, with no undiagnosed problems and her optic nerve in excellent condition. Anyone here got eyes like Mona? Mine are brownish.

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It certainly adds to the desolate feel of the landscape. Perseverance also spent time driving short distances to test its motors, took panoramas of the surrounding landscape, and even successfully extracted oxygen from carbon dioxide out of the Red Planet's atmosphere using its Moxie instrument. Moxie, which stands for the Mars Oxygen Initu Resource Utilization Experiment, managed to produce about 10 grams of oxygen in one hour. Which is not that much, but to be fair, Moxie is only a prototype about the size of a car

battery. It would need to be 100 times larger if we're to actually use it on the red planet to support human interests. However, just knowing that it works is an exciting step forward. But as fascinating as all these things are, there was one thing that Perseverance still needed to do. It had come here to discover one very important thing, was there ever life on Mars? And so, during this period of downtime, scientists were busily plotting the best possible route

for Perseverance to take. Although Perseverance's landing was one of the most accurate Mars landings NASA had achieved so far, it was still many days travel from some of the 40-meter-tall outcroppings of a rock edge of a crater known as South Saita, the scientists had wanted to investigate. And between South Saitar and Perseverance's landing site, there lay a dangerous dune field filled with loose sand, impossible for the rover to cross without risking getting stuck forever, which would spell an end to the mission. Scientists would need to decide the best possible route around the dunes. Was it better to travel anti-clockwise around the crater, which would get perseverance to the outcroppings

faster, or would it be better to travel clockwise, which would take longer, but would allow the rover to stop by more interesting rocks along the way? In the end, as is often the case in space exploration, it came down to efficiency. Scientists chose the second option, to allow it to do as much science as possible in as many areas as possible in the limited time the rover had available to it. Perseverance was finally given the go-ahead. And so, on the 1st of June, Almost five months after arriving on the red planet, Perseverance's wheels trundled into life, and the rover finally left the safety of its landing site and set out on its primary mission to collect core rock samples from locations life could potentially have flourished,

for ultimate return for analysis to Earth. The search for alien life could now begin in earnest. With ingenuity following along to keep Perseverance company, of course. Millions of years ago, a massive object had crashed into the surface of Mars. The resulting crater was hundreds of meters deep and 40 kilometres in diameter, and due to the different geological conditions that existed back then, it soon began to fill up with water. In time, this crater became a massive lake and earned the name Yezerot, which, somewhat unimaginatively, literally means lake in some of the Slavic languages.

Massive rivers began to run into the Yezaro crater, carving valleys through the terrain and depositing all the resulting silt over huge deltas. This is why Yezero was selected as the site for Perseverance's mission. If life worked the same way here as it does on Earth, this location could be rife with possibilities for the emergence and propagation of life. As Mars is now a barren wasteland, the kinds of things Perseverance is looking for would not be immediately obvious. Any life that swam in Yezero's Lake would have lived, died and fallen to the lakebed, where accumulated silt from the river would have buried it in hard rock. Perseverance would need to make good use of all the tools at its disposal,

its drill-mounted arm, its ultraviolet spectrometer Sherlock, and its X-ray fluorescent spectrometer pixel to find this evidence. However, it is important to choose targets carefully. Perseverance has limited resources available to it. It only has just over 30 sample tubes for storing rock cores for the return journey home. Tempting as it might be to just grab a sample from right where it landed, Perseverance needed to only collect samples from the locations most likely to provide evidence of signs of life, or offer particular insight into the formation and age of Yezero Crater to pin

point better possible locations for later. As such, Perseverance did not start drilling immediately, but instead began travelling south from its landing location at Octavia E. Butler Landing, named after the science fiction author, to the area known as Cratered Floor Fractured Rough. Although this location was less than a mile away from Perseverance's landing site, Perseverance would not arrive at this new location for nearly 60 days. This is a place. This is because the unfamiliar, rocky surface of Mars is strewn with obstacles for a rover. You'll notice the rocks that are scattered over the Martian surface. Perseverance would need to pick its path carefully around these, as the rover's 52.5

centimeter wheels can only drive over objects that are so large. Soft terrain poses just as many dangers. The previous Martian rover's spirit came to an unfortunate end after getting stuck in Sanjune. So, choosing its path is a balancing act, not too hard and rocky, but also not too soft. And in the past, these decisions would have been made on Earth with a 20-minute average signal delay. No wonder the previous rovers had travelled so slowly. However, Perseverance had gotten an upgrade compared to spirit and opportunity. Advanced AI software called AutoNav on the Perseverance rover allows it to map out its surrounding environment

and choose for itself the best path through it. Although there is still some oversight from Earth, this greater degree of independence, which Perseverance can do on the fly while driving, allows the Perseverance rover to travel much faster than the rovers before it, allowing for more science to get done. And speaking of science, on the 20th of July, Perseverance successfully managed to navigate its way to cratered floor fractured rough. Taking things slowly, scientists picked out a rock to first test Perseverance's abrading drill systems.

The abrade attempt took place on a paving stone nicknamed Guillaume, and it was a simple success. The drill cut away the top and gave scientists insight into the kind of stones that Perseverance was driving on. By examining grain sizes, chemical composition, and other details, scientists would gain insights into the type of rocks these were, either sedimentary, the kind likely to be. contain fossilized remains and other artifacts, or igneous rock formed from magma. What they saw heartened them, and on the 6th of August, scientists picked out another target rock, nicknamed Rubion, to take their first actual core sample.

Due to the time zones involved, it was only 2 a.m. Pacific Daylight time, when over 90 engineers and scientists gathered online to witness the fruits of their years of labor. cord successfully down to the seven centimeter depth it had been programmed to reach. It photographed the hole afterwards, and everything seemed to be going fine. Over the next six hours, Perseverance painstakingly took the core, placed it in one of its tubes, and moved it to its adaptive cache-in assembly, the place where core samples are processed. Due to the nature of the mission, it's vitally important that no contaminants be allowed to enter the tube, or else it might invalidate the entire process.

Finally, Perseverance transferred the now sealed tube to its storage unit. Scientists were elated at this perfect first-time success. But then more data came through, and scientists realized that there was a problem. The sealed tube was empty. Confusion filled them. Where had the sample gone? Due to the limits of technology, scientists could not record on camera every movement of Perseverance.

It only has so many cameras. So they had to rely on Perseverance to follow the orders they sent it. But here it seemed that Perseverance had followed its orders, and yet the weight sensors in the storage unit informed them that the tube was missing any additional weight. The core was gone. Perseverance drove backwards and looked between its tracks. But there was no sign of a dropped core. In time, scientists arrived at a bittersweet conclusion.

Perseverance had not malfunctioned, or done anything wrong, it was the rock itself that was to blame. In the act of drilling, the unique nature of the Rubion rock meant that it was so crumbly that when Perseverance had gone to pick the core sample up, it had completely turned to dust. Perseverance could not collect it in that state. Scientists had tested perseverance's coring on a hundred different types of rock on Earth, and it had never encountered a problem like this before. Every other rock had been cored successfully.

So while this was good, because it meant that perseverance was not broken, it cast a shadow over the rest of the mission. Would all the rock's perseverance encounters be failures like this? However, NASA was not about to give up without trying. They reasoned that the rocks in this area were likely particularly weathered, and other rocks on Mars might hold themselves together better. It was with renewed determination that Perseverance had another go. Casting its camera around, Perseverance spotted some rocks 150 meters away that were as different

from the crumbly paving stones as possible. Scientists nicknamed these new rocks Citadel, which is French for Castle, possibly hoping for something a bit more fortified this time. As these rocks were sticking up from the landscape, it seemed reasonable that they were made from sturdier stuff than the flat, paving stones. If they resisted erosion, they might do a better job of holding themselves together under a drill. Perseverance trundled over to the ridge and primed itself for another attempt. On the 1st of September, NASA once again held its breath as Perseverance attempted its second core attempt. You really get a sense of how painstaking this process is, given the month-long gap between each attempt. Everything on

earth has to be checked and double-checked, every scrap of data analyzed for the perfect conditions. Every decision is carefully thought out and discussed. Would it work on the second attempt? Perseverance's drill collected a core that were six centimeters long. and, possibly with rye exasperation, before sealing the core in a tube, Perseverance brought it round and added an additional step. It took a photo of what it held, to confirm to everyone on Earth that it was actually holding a core this time. Scientists must have felt a huge relief as data came back that Perseverance had successfully

taken the core and transferred it to its storage area. The core, nicknamed Mondinier, was ready to be taken back. to Earth on a future mission, where in a larger lab, its secrets could be better analyzed. Perseverance took another core sample that day, just to be absolutely certain. They were possibly feeling on a bit of a role, and who could blame them. They were now one step closer to knowing whether life ever existed on Mars. Although this sample was just the beginning, and may not have any signs of life in it, they had stepped a little further into the Encharted.

A week or so went by. A first success was swiftly followed by a third and a fourth, both taken from the rock named Rochette in early September. The crater floor campaign was going well. At that point, sadly, it had to take a pause for solar conjunction. Due to the arrangement of our solar system, Mars and Earth do not always have a line of sight on each other. Sometimes they are on opposite sides of the solar system.

This increases the lag time it takes for NASA to send and receive messages from Perseverance, but that is not the worst problem. When Mars and Earth are perfectly opposite each other, communication between the planets becomes completely impossible, for one simple reason, the Sun. No radio signal can penetrate this cosmological giant. As such, there was little scientists could do but wait for these orbital bodies to move apart. has advanced AI on board, but it still needs to check in with NASA from time to time to plan its route, update its mission, and report back its findings. So it wasn't until November 2021 that

things could really get going again. But NASA was not idle during this solar conjunction. By the time perseverance was powered up again, the NASA scientists had already thoroughly worked out its next objective. In Yezaro Crater, there is a June field known as Saito In amongst these dunes, there is a series of outcroppings that were of particular interest to Perseverance's mission, due to the many different layers of exposed rock they gave access to. These different layers likely represented different geological eras, which would give scientists the clearest picture of the history of Yezzaro, as well as giving them an opportunity to

find life itself. are of particular interest because Perseverance's drilling equipment only allows it to dig several centimeters deep. If it wasn't for outcroppings, where erosion had exposed these layers to the Martian atmosphere, Perseverance would not have access to them. However, sand dunes are of particular danger to a rover like Perseverance. With help, an entire solar system away, if Perseverance was to start wheel-spinning in a section of particularly loose dune, it would likely spell the end of its mission.

As such, Perseverance's trusty sidekick ingenuity were sent in to conduct some preliminary reconnaissance. If it could find a route through the sand dunes that looked safe, Perseverance could get its sample tubes to the vital outcroppings of Saita. Ingenuity began its scouting before the solar conjunction and flew for several flights from September through to December. Flying at a height of 10 meters, these reconnaissance expeditions allowed scientists to pick out the perfect route. Perseverance set off in early November 2021, beginning its exploration of the dunes.

It picked its way carefully, being sure not to travel too fast in case it fell into any unforeseen sand trap. It moved between dunes that were a meter high, finding the flattest path. But thankfully, ingenuity had led it true. Perseverance was able to make it to the protruding rock known as Brack. Now that it had its technique down, Perseverance quickly was able to obtain new samples. Deciding to call the first empty sample container at Brack an atmosphere sample, these next two samples were officially Perseverance's fifth and six sample tubes and their third and fourth

rock samples. From these accumulated samples, scientists were able to make an unexpected discovery. These were not sedimentary rocks, as had first been anticipated. Instead, Perseverance had discovered the igneous rock, Olivine. Olivine is a type of mineral that can actually be found here on Earth, for instance, in parts of Australia. Unlike sedimentary rocks, which are made by particles of sand and other detritus slowly accumulating on top of each other over time, an igneous rock like the same.

Olivine is formed by the cooling of magma. As such, it seems that at one time or another, Yezero Crater must have been witnessed to some volcanic activity. While this might initially seem to be bad news, you might correctly conclude that not much life could be found in magma, scientists could discern signs of water erosion on the rocks. The ridges at the ends of the crater showed signs of water motion. Whatever volcanic activity had happened here, the water that that created Yezero's Delta must have come after it had already cooled. As such, the presence of igneous rocks was actually good news. Ignis rock is usually very high in minerals.

This is why the areas around volcanoes are so fertile. The presence of water and high mineral count rocks could have been the perfect conditions for life. All in all, Perseverance's mission seemed to be going well. But Mars was not done with it. The desert does not give up its prey quite so easily. On Wednesday the 29th of December, on the return journey out of Saita, Perseverance stopped to take another sample from another rock outcropping known as Isol, specifically from

a small stone known as Rubion. Initially things seemed to go well. Perseverance cored its target rock with no issue, it placed its core in a test tube, but when it came to transferring the test tube into the bit carousel on the rover, it was over chassis, it hit an unexpected resistance. Something was blocking the tube from entering the carousel. Perseverance immediately stopped its process when it detected the anomaly and sent a request to NASA asking what it should do next. Through week-long exchanges, NASA was able to use Perseverance's cameras to peer inside the carousel. Staring back at them were four small pebbles.

Now, this might not seem like a big deal, but pebbles that stopped samples from being stored inside the rover would put a halt to Perseverance's entire sample collection mission. It was likely that these rocks had somehow fallen out of the tube during that specific sample collection, possibly once again because of the unexpectedly crumbly nature of Martian rocks. Rocks falling apart had already cost Perseverance one sample. Now they might spell the end of the whole mission. But the Perseverance team had a plan for situations like this, and carefully the rover began to

enact it. Firstly, Perseverance started by taking photos of the ground below it. It wanted to see what was there already, so that once the pebbles were spilled out onto the floor, scientists could count the new arrivals and make sure that they matched up with what had previously been seen inside the carousel. Secondly, it did something it had never been designed to do. It emptied out its core sample tube onto the floor. It must have been with regret that this was done.

However, it was important to know how much was left inside the tube to see how much was likely in the carousel. Also, this would allow a fresh isole sample to be taken later, maximizing its sample space efficiency. Thirdly, perseverance began to do the only thing remaining it could do. It started to wiggle. By rotating its carousel, it was able to dislodge two of the four offending pebbles right then and there.

By double checking the floor afterwards, scientists were able to detect both pebbles, now no longer along for the ride. But this still left two pebbles remaining, and these were proving to be stubborn, not falling out with the carousel's rotation. So, Perseverance took things up a notch. It began driving away, searching for a spot where the slope was steeper. The plan was to position Perseverance at an angle, leaning forward so that gravity could start to pull on the last two pebbles.

Its sturdy base meant that this could be done with relative safety, although tipping over would have been a disaster, so scientists would be careful not to pick a place that was too steep. A suitable location was just a short five meters away. Perseverance drove there and arrived at its location. only to make a surprising discovery. The other two rocks had vanished. Initially cautious and then elated,

the NASA team deduced that the rumbling of perseverance across the site of sands had caused the rocks to shift and then fall out. They made sure to carefully test their equipment, making sure that the tubes could be correctly docked again. And only once everything was proven to be functional did they claim success. Perseverance was ready to go again.

This may seem like a short drama, but my telling of the story might have been this leading. It was the 29th of December that Perseverance first picked up these stowaways. It was only on the 27th of January 2022, an entire month later, that the rocks were completely confirmed to be gone. This is because, when you've spent millions of dollars getting a piece of hardware to another planet, care is always the watchword of the day. Although, it sometimes takes weeks to plot out how to overcome a challenge, it's usually worth it for the longevity of the mission.

Thanks to some careful decision-making and moving correctly across the desert, Perseverance's mission could now continue. Having successfully collected its samples and overcome yet another challenge, it made its way out from among the sands. With Zaita's sands behind Perseverance, Perseverance's crater floor campaign was coming to a close, It would finally be time for the Delta itself. If life ever existed in the now dry waters of Yezero, it was most likely the proof of it lay in those ancient river deposits, which was why it was time for perseverance to really start

booking it. And here the Mona Lisa gaze into Mona's eyes in perfect health with no undiagnosed problems and her optic nerve in excellent condition. Anyone here got eyes like Mona? Mine are brownish. Not enough people know about their eye health. That's why OCT scans are included in every standard eye exam at Specsavers locations. Should have gone to Specsavers.

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play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. The Saita had forced perseverance to travel with care, picking its route carefully to avoid getting trapped in any loose sand. However, the terrain outside Saita is much smoother. This allowed perseverance to unleash its full. potential. As it traveled up and around the outside of the dunes of Saita, Perseverance proved itself by setting the land speed record for a rover on Mars. 319.8 meters traveled in a single day.

Admittedly, that does not sound very fast. The distance is only about the length of three football pitches, but this is impressive for a Mars rover. This was roughly 50% further in one day than the previous record of 220 meters set by the Opportunity Rover in 2005. And bear in mind, it did all this by itself, choosing its route with its autonomous AI system, AutoNav. Being able to assess the terrain around it, on the fly, and by itself, the fact they could pick out the best route to avoid obstacles and rough patches is incredible. And given that Perseverance's top speed is believed to be 120 meters per hour,

Perseverance still has a lot of reserves to tap into. And Perseverance was not done there. It also completed the first multi-day drive on Mars, managing to keep driving without any input from Earth over a three-day period. This has always proved challenging for Rovers. Usually human intervention is required, and regular updates are needed to help negate the uncertainty that always creeps into a rover's awareness of where it is. this intervention, it may get lost, possibly leading into dangerous areas.

But Perseverance's Autonab was able to circumvent this issue. Although some uncertainty does still creep in, Perseverance is able to keep track of its own location well enough that it can be left to run without these regular updates, potentially meaning it can be left to run over weekends or holidays without any supervision from Earth. This allows it to travel much faster and further, getting to the places where the best science can happen. Not that Perseverance wasn't doing science along the way to the Delta, it just did some of it autonomously too. Oh, and I think it's time we talked about Perseverance's heat ray, which it can use, you guessed it, autonomously. Yes, Perseverance has a heat ray,

which it can decide for itself when to deploy. I've mentioned this laser earlier when I spoke about Perseverance's Supercam. What I did not mention was, that this laser didn't just point to interesting targets. It vaporizes them. When I first heard about this, I began to suspect that whoever designed Perseverance had read War of the Worlds and wanted to circumvent any possible invasion of Earth by getting the first hit in. And while this isn't likely the case, Perseverance's laser is no joke. It can heat rocks to a temperature of 10,000 degrees Celsius, melting them to plasma and vaporizing them. Before you ask, this incredible tool is designed for use in evaluating the chemical composition of rocks,

not vaporizing aliens. By heating rocks up to such a temperature, the light they start to emit can be evaluated to see which chemical markers it carries. Different elements and compounds release light at different wavelengths. By seeing what light a rock emits or doesn't emit, when superheated, can be key in identifying its chemical composition for some on-site scientific analysis. Also, it should be noted that this is done on a very, very tiny scale. On the 11th of March 2022, Perseverance zapped one fascinatingly purple-colored rock,

a total of 150 times in the same spot, vaporizing its outer layers to see what lay behind the surface. However, all these repeated vaporizations only bored a hole into the rock that was a single millimeter deep, hardly a weapon for fighting Martians. But these other tools Perseverance employs as it continues its journey, working with scientists along the way to a braid and laser various samples for a little en route science. It even accidentally picked up a pet rock along the way in one of its wheels. This small stone was deemed not to hinder the rover's movements in any way,

so scientists have left it be. So far, the rock has accompanied Perseverance over a distance of 8.5 kilometres over the course of four months, and has proved to be far less of a danger to its mission than the last rocks that it accidentally acquired. But with the arrival of one friend, another would begin to depart. Technology, although impressive, is not infallible. On the 3rd of May 2022, as Perseverance was reaching the end of its journey towards Yesoros Delta, communications dropped out with ingenuity. The Ingenuity helicopter had accompanied perseverance since the beginning of its journey, the two machines traveling together to the red planet and helping each other perform their different missions. Ingenuity had already amazed

the world by being the first flying machine on Mars. It had scouted out the route for perseverance during most of its mission, spotting hazards in advance so perseverance could avoid them. But Ingenuity's intended lifespan of 30 days was already long past. Every day the helicopter still functioned was a gift and one that could not keep giving forever. When Ingenuity first started off on its routine flight, Perseverance thought nothing of it. The two machines weren't always in line of sight with each other, instead keeping contact with frequent radio check-ins. However, when the next scheduled call should have come along, ingenuity failed to check in.

Perseverance froze in its tracks. Scientists thought desperately about what might have happened to the small helicopter. They theorized that if some kind of fault had occurred on ingenuity, it was possible that it had gone into a safe, low-powered mode to preserve itself, thus missing its communications window, or possibly desinking its onboard clock from Perseverances. As such, Perseverance waited a full day, listening all the while to see if ingenuity would wake up and start communications again. And thankfully, it did.

Their little helicopter was all right, reporting no major faults. However, its silence had been extremely worrying. It turned out that the problem was the levels of dust in Mars' air. Over time, ingenuity solar panels that kept its battery topped up had received less and less sunlight, causing the batteries to dip dangerously low. It had entered safety mode to keep itself from losing the heaters that kept it from freezing to death in the cold Martian nights. Ingenuity was given several days of lessened work to give its batteries more time to charge

up to operational levels. However, this came at a cost. It would use its heaters less from here on. Instead of turning its heaters on when temperatures reach minus 15 degrees Celsius, ingenuity would only turn them on a minus 40 degrees Celsius. And nights on Mars were about to get colder. Eventually, that cold will prove to be too much. Wearily, perseverance and ingenuity continued on, but now their goal was in sight.

The sands of the Yezaro crater floor were behind them. They had finally entered the Delta. With that, a whole new campaign would begin. Perseverance had done so much in the first year and a half of its time on Mars. It had performed science, travelled through dunes, and overcome challenges. through careful problem solving. But did it already succeed in finding life? Ultimately, we will only truly know for sure when those samples return to Earth.

Once that happens, it will hopefully be clear how influential the crater floor campaign has been, even if it finds nothing, that in itself will hint at an answer. But for me, it's much more tantalizing to imagine that even now, the irrefutable answer to whether life once flourished on Mars might lie in a little transparent cache safely nestled inside Perseverance's casing. It might be in the next decade we find out that answer. But until then, Perseverance will remain true to its namesake and will keep on going with its mission.

In this incredible real-time video, we can see different stages of the Perseverance rover's descent onto Mars. The parachute deploy successfully, and the heat shield separates to reduce weight. It starts hurtling towards Mars, while Perseverance's descent remains controlled. Perseverance is currently about 10 kilometres from the surface, travelling about 90 metres per second. It blows my mind that we now have the technology to view a video of this on a different planet in real time.

I'm Alex McColligan, and you're watching the Astrum Channel. Join me in the next short, where we will see the final touchdown. In this incredible real-time video, we can see the final touchdown of the Perseverance rover's descent onto Mars. At this point, the sky crane lowers the rover, holding it up only by cables as it descends very gradually, using small rockets seen on the edge here. The rockets kick up more and more dust the closer they get to the surface. Once Perseverance hits the surface, the Skycrain detaches completely and shoots off to avoid colliding

with the rover. The Skycrain's mission is done, but Perseverances is only just beginning. I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching the Astrum Channel. Want more space videos? Don't forget to subscribe. I'm happy to announce we have a weekly newsletter to keep up with all the discoveries. in our cosmos, and our designer Peter has made the most beautiful email you'll ever receive. Sign up with the link down below. It's the best way to stay connected between videos, short, focused

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