The Search for Life on Mars with Perseverance

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Published Mar 25, 2021

How will the Perseverance rover help us find life beyond Earth?

NASA, together with its partners, has landed a new robotic rover on Mars. Perseverance’s safe landing is just the beginning of an ambitious effort to find past or even existing life on the Red Planet.

Perseverance carries scientific instruments such as cameras and lasers. Some instruments can analyze the chemical makeup of Martian rocks and identify potential signatures of fossilized microbial life that may have existed in the Jezero crater, an area once flooded with water and home to an ancient river delta.

Several rovers have landed on Mars since the 1990s. What do we expect for this new $2.7 billion robotic explorer? How will Perseverance search for complex carbon-based molecules, remnants of past microbes? What can we expect from the experimental helicopter called Ingenuity? Will Perseverance find irrefutable proof of the existence of past or present life on Mars?

To answer these questions, we invited two scientists whose research and work are directly related to the study of Mars using robotic missions and who are involved with the rover or one of its instruments. Elena Amador-French is a science systems engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and a Science Operation Coordinator for the Curiosity rover. Pablo Sobron is a planetary astronomer at SETI Institute and an expert on Raman spectroscopy, a technique used to detect organics on Mars.

Janice Bishop, a chemist and planetary scientist at the SETI Institute who has explored the planet Mars for more than 20 years, will moderate this SETI Talk.

Elena Amador-French has a PhD in planetary science and astrobiology from the University of Washington. She is now a science systems engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working as a Science Operations Coordinator for the Curiosity rover in Gale crate. She interfaces daily with the science team and the JPL engineering team to make sure science priorities are maintained as the plan is uplinked each day. As a postdoc at CalTech from 2017 to 2019, she was involved with the landing site selection for Perseverance rover. She was also a 2008 SETI REU intern with Dr. Janice Bishop!

Pablo Sobron is a research scientist at the SETI Institute who develops sensing technologies in robotic Earth and planetary exploration that include the Curiosity, Perseverance, and Rosalind Franklin rover missions. Pablo founded Impossible Sensing in 2016 to promote technology transfer activities among NASA, other federal departments/agencies, research institutions, and industry at all technology readiness levels. Visit the InVADER Mission website to find out more about some of his most recent work.

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