Unexplainable - Lost Worlds: Life on Mars?

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

Mars was once a very different planet, with rivers, lakes, and — potentially — life. NASA’s latest Mars rover is on a mission to find traces of past life. What happens if it does? This is the third episode of our new four-part series, Lost Worlds. For more, go to http://vox.com/unexplainable It’s a great place to view show transcripts and read more about the topics on our show. Also, email us! [e-mail] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Hassenfeld. and this is the third episode of our series, Lost Worlds. So far, we've talked about whether there was a technological civilization on Earth before humans and how the particular way the moon was created may have helped the development of life on Earth. This week, we're going to Mars. Here's science editor Brian Resnick. For ages, scientists have looked at Mars and just wondered. Anybody home?

200, 150 years ago. if you ask to the average person who understood the concept of planets in our solar system, you know, do you think that there is life on other planets in our solar system? Their answer would almost certainly have been yes. This is Lindsay Hayes. She's a NASA astrobiologist. And she explains just for a lot of scientific history, people really just assume there was advanced life on Mars. The science community was looking at Mars, not asking the question, are there Martians?

but what are the Martians like and what do they do and how are they living on their planet? And it wasn't just a few fringe scientists. Really big thinkers were in on this idea. Percival Lowell, H.G. Wells, Alexander Graham Bell were all folks who read about Mars and wrote about life on Mars and conditions on Mars. In particular, the astronomer Percival Lowell, he hypothesized that an advanced civilization had built these canals on the surface of Mars. And these wild ideas just stuck around for a long while. Lindsay told me about a newspaper clipping from 1915. After the outbreak of World War I, there was articles that were essentially like, the Martians can probably see we are at war.

And they probably think, what are those human beings doing? Because they're probably so much more advanced. They probably don't have war. The thing is, though, we couldn't really figure out whether there were Martians until we just got an up-close view of Mars. So starting in the 1960s, NASA sent a series of spacecraft to fly by and take a look. In 1965, the unmanned spacecraft Mariner 4 flew past Mars 6,000 miles above its surface. Its single camera took photographs that were startling. We realized not only did the canals not exist, but Mars is a lot less hospitable than we thought it was.

Mars is a desert. It's rough and pockmarked with craters. It's desolate, dead. It certainly wasn't inhabited by the Martian pacifists. It's not only not inhabited by advanced life. It is pretty hard to imagine how life would really be continuing on the surface of Mars. There were no obvious signs of life on Mars, but that didn't end the search. Mars is a planet that continues to show us just enough to keep us.

intrigued. Mars is still the most similar surface environment of any planet or of any body in the solar system. There's still an atmosphere there. You know, it still gets a good amount of sunlight. It's still intriguing in the potential. In the decades since the Mariner missions, we've sent landers to Mars and orbiterers and rovers to land on the planet, and we've collected a lot of information. We've realized that those scientists from a hundred years ago, they were just asking the wrong question. The question isn't who are the Martians. It might be when were the Martians.

The quest to find signs of ancient life on Mars is to ask some of the biggest questions possible about life and how it began and how it begins. It could help us understand life on our own planet. Where it came from, and perhaps even weirder, show us that it didn't even start on Earth at all. So that's what we're going to talk about on this week's show. Was there ever life on Mars?

And how would we know if we found it? You're looking at a kind of world that hasn't existed for millions of years. There hasn't existed. Millions and millions and millions. It's almost as if time forgot this place. Is there life on Mars? There's a whole universe out there, Steve, beyond anyone's comprehension. Since the 1960s, scientists have found evidence of

a lost Mars. This was a Mars billions of years ago where there were rivers, lakes. Mars is a very different place today than it was four billion years ago, but you can see evidence of what it was like four billion years ago. What you see are things like what looks like the remnants of a huge river delta, which indicates not only did you have water flowing, but you probably had lots of water flowing over a long period of time that continued to deposit sediments. A lot of the evidence of this lost Mars comes from on-the-ground work by rovers, like the curiosity, which has been driving on Mars since 2012. There's a sort of standing joke, oh, scientists have discovered water on Mars again. You know, NASA has discovered water on Mars again.

Water is essential for all life as we know it. So that water could have had life, even if it's just microbes. And that life could have settled into the sediment of some Martian River Delta. and then that sediment could have turned to rock, preserving that evidence that life existed. And those rocks could just be up there waiting for us to find them. But it's not guaranteed. Not only did life have to exist for long enough to sort of spread and take a hold and be something that was enough happening to be a process, but it also had to be preserved, and then it had to be preserved in a place that we can find.

And so there's a certain needle in a haystack aspect to this as well. It's a real long shot. But the best way to figure out if there is some life preserved in those rocks is to get those rocks here on Earth. And so in July 2020, NASA launched Perseverance, its latest rover to explore the Martian surface. Launch sequencer start. What's really cool here is that Perseverance is a first rover

that's specifically collecting samples to be studied here on Earth. It's kind of like getting moon rocks back for the first time. These samples will be game changers. Possibly our best shot at answering the question, was their life on Mars? The skies look great. There is little wind. The destination, Jezero Crater. This is a place where billions of years ago, a river emptied out into a lake.

It dropped sediments, rocks, and potentially light. And this is the exact sort of place where signs of life could have been preserved. Status check. Go Atlas, go Atlas, go Centaur. Go Mars 2020. But first, perseverance had to survive a really dangerous journey. Five, four, engine ignition, two, one, zero, and lift off. It wasn't the seven-month flight through space that was so dangerous, but actually landing on Mars. They have confirmation of entry interface. Perseance is currently going, 5.3 kilometers per second,

at an altitude of about 120 kilometers from the surface of Mars. The landing was called The Seven Minutes of Terror. It took about seven minutes for the spacecraft carrying the rover to go from the top of the Martian atmosphere to landing safely at the bottom. And all the while, it had to slow down from around 12,000 miles per hour to, well, you know, zero. Our current velocity is about 5.36 kilometers per second and an altitude of about 67 kilometers from the surface. A lot could have gone wrong. Mars is so far away that any command NASA sent to the spacecraft took several minutes to get there,

which meant they just couldn't pilot the spacecraft in real time. It had to land itself in a very rough landscape. The ship deployed. The navigation has confirmed that the parachute has. deployed and we're seeing significant deceleration. But the spacecraft was just too heavy to land by parachutes alone, so NASA needed to use a special maneuver called a sky crane to get the rover down to the surface. Skycrain maneuver has started, about 20 meters off the surface.

When the spacecraft was just above the surface, it fired thrusters so it was hovering, and then that really heavy 2,000-plus pound rover was lowered down from the spacecraft by cables. Once it was on the ground, the spacecraft detached the cables from the rover and then blasted away so it wouldn't fall on top of it. Perseverance has been on the surface of Mars for more than a year now, looking for that perfect rock that might contain evidence of past life. But how do you choose those rocks on a planet full of rocks? How do you find that needle in that enormous haystack? We wanted a firsthand perspective here, so we did something fun. We sent producer Mandy Nguyen to Mars.

Well, I didn't technically get to Mars, but I went to the next best place. So what we're looking at is what essentially looks like a large sandbox with rocks of different sizes. I went to the Mars yard at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. And this is where I met Morgan Cable, a research scientist on the Perseverance team. We can position these large rocks and boulders as obstacles to be able to test the autonomous navigation of the Perseverance rover. So this is almost sometimes it functions as an obstacle course. That's exactly right. The Marsyard is the best place to test the rover without going to space.

It's supposed to be like the Martian landscape itself. Dusty, rocky, and full of boulder. Well, you wouldn't see the trees in the background or hear the birds chirping. But yes, this is essentially what you would see. And maybe in the evening, close to dusk or at night, you might look up and see a little blue dot in the sky and realize that that's where everyone else who's ever lived in human history has been. It's right there in that tiny little blue dot. And you can... And maybe there wouldn't be construction on that.

Yeah, I know. There is some construction going on here. Let's walk back inside. Okay. Morgan led me into a small warehouse in the Mars yard, which is where the rovers are. But these aren't the actual rovers that end up on Mars. They're exact replicates. So we have a copy of the Mars Perseverance Rover right here,

and that allows us to run all sorts of tests, diagnostics, to do some experiments here that might be perceived as a little bit too risky to try on Mars because we can very easily make repairs here, and we can't really do that quite as easily on the red planet, at least not yet. Can we go look at the rover? We can totally go look at the rover. Amazing.

Perseverance was kept behind these red velvet ropes, kind of like what you'd see at museums. But we weren't allowed to go closer than about six feet because the static electricity humans generate could tamper with the instruments on the rover. Okay, can you describe to me what we're looking at? Like, it's, this is really big. They are really big, right?

Perseverance kind of looks like a huge wally. It's car-sized, seven-foot-tall, 2,200 pounds, nuclear-powered, with an extendable arm and a drill attached to it. It also just looks so rugged, like the six wheels. I mean, I guess this is the sort of thing ready to just exist on Mars and drive around. All of the instruments work together to be able to give us a more complete picture of Mars' geology and its potential for astrobiology, which is what excites me the most. The actual Perseverance Rover, not the copy, is all the way on Mars now.

But it can't get around all on its own. That's where Camden Miller comes in. I am a rover planner, a.k.a. rover driver. Even though Perseverance can navigate to a specific spot on its own, it still needs constant guidance from scientists and engineers like Camden to determine exactly where it should go. Every Martian morning will point its antennas at Earth and listen for commands and receive the commands,

and then once it receives them, it'll start executing them. But figuring out when that Martian morning starts can lead to some issues. When we landed, we were living on Mars time for about two months. One Martian day is about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day. So keeping up with Martian time is like shifting two time zones every three days. So yeah, the schedule gets. a little crazy when you're living on Mars time. One time, me and my two roommates, we were all

sitting at the dinner table, and I tend to wake up earlier. I was even waking up early on Mars time, and so I was eating lunch. My other roommate who was on Mars time was eating breakfast, and our other roommate who wasn't on Mars time was eating dinner. We were all sitting at a table eating different meals at the same time. All of these scheduling workarounds can sometimes make driving the Mars rover seem like a chore. I think I was on shift one time, and we were looking at these pictures of the ground in front of the rover, and it was just nothing but pebbles. We're like, wow, this is a really boring workspace. It's just nothing but pebbles. Then it dawned on us, it's like, we're looking at rocks on another planet. We're calling it boring.

What's wrong with us? Holy crap, we're driving a rover on Mars. So Camden's controlling the rover, but when he wants to know exactly where to look for signs of life on Mars, he has to talk to scientists like Morgan. We're exploring different sedimentary layers, and we're looking at changes in composition. as we go through those, just like a geologist would here on Earth. Morgan specifically works on an instrument called Pixel, one of the attachments of Perseverance's robotic arm that analyzes the makeup of Martian rocks.

Pixel is basically a very fancy x-ray that fires at rocks, and when those x-rays interact with the actual atoms in the rock, they fluoresce. And in doing that, we can actually give you a map of what kinds of elements are in that rock. The only way we'll know for sure if any of this is life, or at least points to life, is if we're able to look at rock samples up close and back on Earth, with all the equipment scientists couldn't pack onto the rover.

We have to bring the rocks home, because sometimes what seems like life at first might not be life at all. You might have heard of a particular Mars meteorite that was collected here on Earth in Antarctica back in 1984. It was called ALH 8401. Basically, a chunk of Mars was ejected into space by some sort of impact,

floated around for a while, and eventually crash-landed onto Earth. We were able to cut that meteorite open, look inside, and we saw some structures that looked an awful lot like cells, tiny little worms, but they were much, much smaller than the width of a human hair. Very, very tiny. And just by your eye, you would say, oh, that looks like a worm, that looks like life. That must be life. Scientists thought that they had actually discovered tiny Martian life inside this meteorite.

But now many scientists think that what looked like fossilized bacteria was actually shaped by geochemical interactions between water and rock. That's why whenever we search for life or evidence of life in other places, we don't just rely on one thing. We don't just rely on an image that might trick our eyes. We don't just rely on one chemical technique that could potentially be confounded by something that we don't fully understand. It's also possible that we might actually find life in these rocks and not recognize it. It just might be too different from life on Earth for us to identify. But for us to have the best possible shot,

we need to get the rocks back to Earth. All of those bits of information need to be collected together and analyzed as a whole for us to really be confident that we have made what I think would be civilization-level science of finding out for the first time in human history that we're not alone. Perseverance can't get the rocks home on its own, so NASA and the European Space Agency

have plans to retrieve the samples with a different spacecraft sometime after 2030, which would be the first time we've ever taken Mars rocks all the way back to Earth. This whole journey that Perseverance is on, what if it all works? What would it mean to find evidence of what? life on Mars.

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Sign up for free at rBC trainingground.ca. Unexplainable. We're back. Hey, Mandy. Hi. So you went on this really fun field trip, and I'm just jealous. You saw this perseverance clone up close. Yes, I did, and it was so incredible. What do you think will happen if all of this works and we get these rocks back? I mean, I think that's going to be such a huge deal. Like, we've never deliberately gotten rocks back from Mars.

And, you know, if they could tell us anything about if there was life there, I think that'd be like, as Morgan said, like civilization to be. finding science if we were to find anything. What do you hope? Do you hope there was life? I mean, of course. I think that's so exciting. That's like the big question, right? That like years and years and decades that people have been trying to figure out. And it's more than just the answer to is their life on Mars. Lindsay Hayes, the astrobiologist in NASA I was talking to, She was telling me about, like, getting a sample of life on Mars could really teach us about where life on Earth comes from or just, like, where life comes from in general. You know, to me, the reason that I am interested in the search for life, it has to do with this concept of how interrelated life is on Earth, right? All of life that we know of on Earth is all related.

You and I are related to each other. you know, if you go back on our family trees far enough, however many thousands of years, like, we'll find an ancestor in common. And that's true of not just humans, but like, you know, at a certain point, there's a common ancestor between a human and a chimpanzee, you know, going further back. And even further back, there's a common ancestor between a chimpanzee and a fish. And then going back, you know, there's a common ancestor between a fish and bacteria. And Lindsay has this really epic question. Knowing that all life on this planet seems to be all related to each other,

what would life on a different planet be like? If we found an example or a specimen that showed there was used to be life on Mars, her big question is, well, is that life related to life on Earth? Does the life on Mars share a common ancestor? At which point, wow, that means that, you know, maybe life is created in one place and then sort of spreads between planets or moons. It could be we're related to Martians, which is, whoa. How are we related to Martians? If that's the case, maybe life didn't start on Earth at all.

Maybe it started on Mars. And then somehow, like, got here. She used the term, like, planet swapping spit. Like, as the planets are forming, maybe, you know, a bit of an asteroid blasts off a chunk of one that has some life on it that goes into another planet. I mean, weirder scenarios can come from there. Like, what if life didn't start on Mars or Earth, but somewhere else? Ooh, spooky. Spooky.

Like, where do that life come from? But then, like, every answer to this question is epic, because if it turns out the life on Mars is somehow different or, like, too different to have a common ancestor with life on Earth, then maybe that means, like, life spontaneously started there. Which means that life is so fundamental a process. of the universe, that you can have two different life-generating events in the same solar system. And that totally changes our perception of life. But also, is it like us or is it something completely different?

Right. Is life a fundamental process that happens anytime there is a habitable environment? And in that case, it might mean that anytime the conditions are right for life anywhere in the galaxy around any planet, like life will just form. because that's what it does. So that is just such a woe for me that, you know, if we do get samples back, and, you know, as you were describing there, you know, a lot of converging lines of evidence, and we kind of reconstruct a picture, whatever this ancient, probably microbial life was, like, we really get really close to the question of all questions of, like, how does life start?

So if we were to find life in these little rocks, we'd either be related to Martians potentially or it could just be the beginning of finding a lot of more life everywhere. And this is also like a cool thing about the overall missions on Mars is that the surface of Mars is really old. It's like billions of years old. And so anything we find there is going to be just so old and so ancient and just like like older than anything we can find on earth. So we might even find like an earlier form of life than has ever been discovered on earth, like something even more primordial.

Wow. I don't know. Yeah. It's really kind of like, I love this contrast of like a lot of these answers can be figured out from just like a handful of rocks. Like isn't that wild to you? Yeah, that's that's super, super wild. to me. I mean, now we just have to play this waiting game. We're not going to know till probably like 10 years or so. Why so long? I mean, so the sample return missions still have to be planned. Someone needs to send a rocket to collect those rocks and bring them back. Right now, the rover's just carrying all of them. But eventually they'll have to decide where to place these samples on the surface of Mars so that they can be picked up later.

There's no definitive, I think, timeline on that yet. Yeah, that's kind of funny. It's like interplanetary FedEx needs to come and pick them up. That's basically how it's going to be. But I keep, you know, like there's so much work involved into this project. I keep wondering, what if we bring all these rocks back? We spend all this time doing all this work and scientists look at it and they don't find anything. You know, it's funny.

That's the question I asked Lindsay. and she just told me that, well, she just would want to look somewhere else on Mars. You know, there's the question of like, you know, it took me 100 tries to make the light bulb, and it's not that I failed 100 times, but I found 100 ways not to make a light bulb. You know, it's a similar kind of thing, right? And so, you know, let's keep looking. Let's see what else we can find. I think I really get Lindsay's persistence here.

It's like every answer to the question, was their life on Mars, is just so perspective shifting. It's so close to that big question of why are we here, which is why she would want to go back again and again and just try to find the evidence of life. And, you know, maybe there won't be, but it seems worth it to look. The search for life is never going to be an easy thing. But the questions that you learn, even if you don't answer, was there life here, the answers you find can tell you a lot more about planets and about the solar system. and about life. It's just so cool to imagine that on this rusty colored world, amid dust and billion-year-old rocks, there is this lonely robot on this mission, you know, kind of completing a dream

that scientists have been thinking about for hundreds of years. Well, I mean, it's also not so lonely. When I think about perseverance on Mars, I think it's really easy to think about. It as a lone rover traversing the desert landscape, the rocky red, you know, ground. But after going to NASA and speaking to the scientists, I can't help but think about all the people and all the history that is behind this rover. And how, like, yes, it's kind of, in a way, alone on Mars, but it's not truly alone. One of the things that Morgan said to me was that with the perseverance, It's almost like we're extending our senses to the red planet.

And so to me, this rover is a part of us, but across space, you know. I love that. This was the third episode of our Lost World series. Next week, a murder mystery. What killed Venus? Earth and Venus really like twins, really. They'd been born at the same time and made of the same stuff yet. Earth is a paradise.

So why do we have a paradise next to a paradise lost? This episode was reported and produced by Manding Wynne and Brian Resnick, with production help from Meredith Haudenot and Bird Pinkerton. It was edited by Catherine Wells, with additional edits from Meredith and me. I also scored the episode, mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, and fact-checking from Richard Seema. To read more about some of the topics we cover on the show

or to find episode transcripts, check out our site at vox.com slash unexplainable. thoughts about the show, you can always email us at UnexPlanable at Vox.com, or you could leave us a review or a rating, which we'd love to. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back with the final episode of our Lost World series next week.