is there life on mars essay

Essay on Life on Mars for Students and Children

500 words essay on life on mars.

Mars is the fourth planet from the sun in our solar system. Also, it is the second smallest planet in our solar system. The possibility of life on mars has aroused the interest of scientists for many years. A major reason for this interest is due to the similarity and proximity of the planet to Earth. Mars certainly gives some indications of the possibility of life.

Possibilities of Life on Mars

In the past, Mars used to look quite similar to Earth. Billions of years ago, there were certainly similarities between Mars and Earth. Furthermore, scientists believe that Mars once had a huge ocean. This ocean, experts believe, covered more of the planet’s surface than Earth’s own oceans do so currently.

Moreover, Mars was much warmer in the past that it is currently. Most noteworthy, warm temperature and water are two major requirements for life to exist. So, there is a high probability that previously there was life on Mars.

Life on Earth can exist in the harshest of circumstances. Furthermore, life exists in the most extreme places on Earth. Moreover, life on Earth is available in the extremely hot and dry deserts. Also, life exists in the extremely cold Antarctica continent. Most noteworthy, this resilience of life gives plenty of hope about life on Mars.

There are some ingredients for life that already exist on Mars. Bio signatures refer to current and past life markers. Furthermore, scientists are scouring the surface for them. Moreover, there has been an emergence of a few promising leads. One notable example is the presence of methane in Mars’s atmosphere. Most noteworthy, scientists have no idea where the methane is coming from. Therefore, a possibility arises that methane presence is due to microbes existing deep below the planet’s surface.

One important point to note is that no scratching of Mars’s surface has taken place. Furthermore, a couple of inches of scratching has taken place until now. Scientists have undertaken analysis of small pinches of soil. There may also have been a failure to detect signs of life due to the use of faulty techniques. Most noteworthy, there may be “refugee life” deep below the planet’s surface.

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Challenges to Life on Mars

First of all, almost all plants and animals cannot survive the conditions on the surface of Mars. This is due to the extremely harsh conditions on the surface of Mars.

Another major problem is the gravity of Mars. Most noteworthy, the gravity on Mars is 38% to that of Earth. Furthermore, low gravity can cause health problems like muscle loss and bone demineralization.

The climate of Mars poses another significant problem. The temperature at Mars is much colder than Earth. Most noteworthy, the mean surface temperatures of Mars range between −87 and −5 °C. Also, the coldest temperature on Earth has been −89.2 °C in Antarctica.

Mars suffers from a great scarcity of water. Most noteworthy, water discovered on Mars is less than that on Earth’s driest desert.

Other problems include the high penetration of harmful solar radiation due to the lack of ozone layer. Furthermore, global dust storms are common throughout Mars. Also, the soil of Mars is toxic due to the high concentration of chlorine.

To sum it up, life on Mars is a topic that has generated a lot of curiosity among scientists and experts. Furthermore, establishing life on Mars involves a lot of challenges. However, the hope and ambition for this purpose are well alive and present. Most noteworthy, humanity must make serious efforts for establishing life on Mars.

FAQs on Life on Mars

Q1 State any one possibility of life on Mars?

A1 One possibility of life on Mars is the resilience of life. Most noteworthy, life exists in the most extreme places on Earth.

Q2 State anyone challenge to life on Mars?

A2 One challenge to life on Mars is a great scarcity of water.

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“Is there life on Mars?” is a question people have asked for more than a century. But in order to finally get the answer, we have to know what to look for and where to go on the planet to look for evidence of past life. With the Perseverance rover set to land on Mars on February 18, 2021, we are finally in a position to know where to go, what to look for, and knowing whether there is, or ever was, life on the Red Planet.

Science fiction aside, we know that there were not ancient civilizations or a population of little green people on Mars. So, what sort of things do we need to look for to know whether there was ever life on Mars? Fortunately, a robust Mars exploration program, including orbiters, landers, and rovers, has enabled detailed mapping of the planet and constrained important information about the environment.

We now know that there were times in the ancient past on Mars when conditions were wetter and at least a little warmer than the fairly inhospitable conditions that are present today. And there were once habitable environments that existed on the surface. For example, the Curiosity rover has shown that more than three billion years ago, Gale crater was the location of a lake  that held water likely suitable for sustaining life. Armed with information about the conditions and chemical environments on the surface, the Perseverance rover is outfitted with a science payload of instruments finely tuned for extracting information related to any biosignatures that might be present and signal the occurrence of life .

Panoramic view of the interior and rim of Gale crater. Image generated from pictures captured by the Curiosity rover.

But where should we go on Mars to maximize the chances of accessing the rocks most likely to have held and preserve any evidence of past life? To get at that answer, I co-led a series of workshops attended by the Mars science community to consider various candidate landing sites and help determine which one had the highest potential for preserving evidence of past life. Using data from Mars orbiters coupled with more detailed information from landers and rovers, we started with around thirty candidate sites and narrowed the list over the course of four workshops and five years. Some sites were clearly less viable than others and were weeded out fairly quickly. But once the discussion focused on a couple of different types of potentially viable sites, the process became much tougher. In the end, the science community felt—and the Perseverance mission and NASA agreed—that Jezero crater was the best place to look for evidence of past life on Mars.

This image shows the remains of an ancient delta in Mars' Jezero Crater, which NASA's Perseverance Mars rover will explore for signs of fossilized microbial life. The image was taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera aboard the ESA (European Space Agency) Mars Express orbiter. The European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, operates the ESA mission. The High Resolution Stereo Camera was developed by a group with leadership at the Freie Universitat Berlin.

What is so special about Jezero crater and where is it? Jezero crater is ~30 miles (~49 km) across, was formed by the impact of a large meteorite, and is located in the northern hemisphere of Mars (18.38°N 77.58°E) on the western margin of the ancient and much larger Isidis impact basin. But what makes it special relates to events that happened 3.5 billion years ago when water was more active on the surface of Mars than it is today. Ancient rivers on the western side of Jezero breached the crater rim and drained into the crater, forming a river delta and filling the crater with a lake. From the study of river deltas on the Earth, we know that they typically build outwards into lakes as sediment carried by the associated river enters the lake, slows down, and is deposited. As this process continues, the delta builds out over the top of lake beds and can bury and preserve delicate and subtle signatures of past life. These “biosignatures” are what Perseverance will be looking for when it lands on the floor of the crater and explores the ancient lake beds and nearby delta deposits.

Perseverance will use its instruments to look for signs of ancient life in the delta and lake deposits in Jezero crater and will hopefully allow us to finally answer the question of whether there was ever life on Mars. In addition, Perseverance will begin the process of collecting samples that could one day be returned to Earth. The importance of sample return cannot be overstated. Whether or not evidence of past life is found by Perseverance’s instruments, the legacy enabled by samples the rover collects will be the “scientific gift that keeps on giving”. Once returned to Earth by a future mission, these Mars samples can be subjected to more detailed analysis by a much wider set of instruments than can be carried by Perseverance . Moreover, sample archiving can preserve material for future analysis here on Earth by new and/or more detailed instruments that may not yet exist. So even if Perseverance does not find evidence of past life, it will collect samples that, once returned to Earth, could provide new insight into the evolution of Mars and whether there was ever life on the Red Planet.

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Life on Mars: A Definite Possibility

Was Mars once a living world? Does life continue, even today, in a holding pattern, waiting until the next global warming event comes along? Many people would like to believe so. Scientists are no exception. But so far no evidence has been found that convinces even a sizable minority of the scientific community that the red planet was ever home to life. What the evidence does indicate, though, is that Mars was once a habitable world . Life, as we know it, could have taken hold there.

The discoveries made by NASA ’s Opportunity rover at Eagle Crater earlier this year (and being extended now at Endurance Crater) leave no doubt that the area was once ‘drenched’ in water . It might have been shallow water. It might not have stuck around for long. And billions of years might have passed since it dried up. But liquid water was there, at the martian surface, and that means that living organisms might have been there, too.

So suppose that Eagle Crater – or rather, whatever land formation existed in its location when water was still around – was once alive. What type of organism might have been happy living there?

Probably something like bacteria. Even if life did gain a foothold on Mars, it’s unlikely that it ever evolved beyond the martian equivalent of terrestrial single-celled bacteria. No dinosaurs; no redwoods; no mosquitoes – not even sponges, or tiny worms. But that’s not much of a limitation, really. It took life on Earth billions of years to evolve beyond single-celled organisms. And bacteria are a hardy lot. They are amazingly diverse, various species occupying extreme niches of temperature from sub-freezing to above-boiling; floating about in sulfuric acid; getting along fine with or without oxygen. In fact, there are few habitats on Earth where one or another species of bacterium can’t survive.

What kind of microbe, then, would have been well adapted to the conditions that existed when Eagle Crater was soggy? Benton Clark III , a Mars Exploration Rover ( MER ) science team member, says his “general favorite” candidates are the sulfate-reducing bacteria of the genus Desulfovibrio . Microbiologists have identified more than 40 distinct species of this bacterium.

Eating Rocks

We tend to think of photosynthesis as the engine of life on Earth. After all, we see green plants nearly everywhere we look and virtually the entire animal kingdom is dependent on photosynthetic organisms as a source of food. Not only plants, but many microbes as well, are capable of carrying out photosynthesis. They’re photoautotrophs: they make their own food by capturing energy directly from sunlight.

But Desulfovibrio is not a photoautotroph; it’s a chemoautotroph. Chemoautotrophs also make their own food, but they don’t use photosynthesis to do it. In fact, photosynthesis came relatively late in the game of life on Earth. Early life had to get its energy from chemical interactions between rocks and dirt, water, and gases in the atmosphere. If life ever emerged on Mars, it might never have evolved beyond this primitive stage.

Desulfovibrio makes its home in a variety of habitats. Many species live in soggy soils, such as marshes and swamps. One species was discovered all snug and cozy in the intestines of a termite. All of these habitats have two things in common: there’s no oxygen present; and there’s plenty of sulfate available.

Sulfate reducers, like all chemoautotrophs, get their energy by inducing chemical reactions that transfer electrons between one molecule and another. In the case of Desulfovibrio, hydrogen donates electrons, which are accepted by sulfate compounds. Desulfovibrio, says Clark, uses “the energy that it gets by combining the hydrogen with the sulfate to make the organic compounds” it needs to grow and to reproduce.

The bedrock outcrop in Eagle Crater is chock full of sulfate salts. But finding a suitable electron donor for all that sulfate is a bit more troublesome. “My calculations indicate [that the amount of hydrogen available is] probably too low to utilize it under present conditions,” says Clark. “But if you had a little bit wetter Mars, then there [would] be more water in the atmosphere, and the hydrogen gas comes from the water” being broken down by sunlight.

So water was present; sulfate and hydrogen could have as an energy source. But to survive, life as we know it needs one more ingredient carbon. Many living things obtain their carbon by breaking down the decayed remains of other dead organisms. But some, including several species of Desulfovibrio, are capable of creating organic material from scratch, as it were, drawing this critical ingredient of life directly from carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) gas. There’s plenty of that available on Mars.

All this gives reason to hope that life that found a way to exist on Mars back in the day when water was present. No one knows how long ago that was. Or whether such a time will come again. It may be that Mars dried up billions of years ago and has remained dry ever since. If that is the case, life is unlikely to have found a way to survive until the present.

Tilting toward Life

But Mars goes through cycles of obliquity, or changes in its orbital tilt. Currently, Mars is wobbling back and forth between 15 and 35 degrees’ obliquity, on a timescale of about 100,000 years. But every million years or so, it leans over as much as 60 degrees. Along with these changes in obliquity come changes in climate and atmosphere. Some scientists speculate that during the extremes of these obliquity cycles, Mars may develop an atmosphere as thick as Earth’s, and could warm up considerably. Enough for dormant life to reawaken.

“Because the climate can change on long terms,” says Clark, ice in some regions on Mars periodically could “become liquid enough that you would be able to actually come to life and do some things – grow, multiply, and so forth – and then go back to sleep again” when the thaw cycle ended. There are organisms on Earth that, when conditions become unfavorable, can form “spores which are so resistant that they can last for a very long time. Some people think millions of years, but that’s a little controversial.”

Desulfovibrio is not such an organism. It doesn’t form spores. But its bacterial cousin, Desulfotomaculum, does. “Usually the spores form because there’s something missing, like, for example, if hydrogen’s not available, or if there’s too much [oxygen], or if there’s not sulfate. The bacteria senses that the food source is going away, and it says, ‘I’ve got to hibernate,’ and will form the spores. The spores will stay dormant for extremely long periods of time. But they still have enough machinery operative that they can actually sense that nutrients are available. And then they’ll reconvert again in just a matter of hours, if necessary, to a living, breathing bacterium, so to speak. It’s pretty amazing,” says Clark.

That is not to say that future Mars landers should arrive with life-detection equipment tuned to zero in on species of Desulfovibrio or Desulfotomaculum. There is no reason to believe that life on Mars, if it ever emerged, evolved along the same lines as life on Earth, let alone that identical species appeared on the two planets. Still, the capabilities of various organisms on Earth indicate that life on Mars – including dormant organisms that could spring to life again in another few hundred thousand years – is certainly possible.

Clark says that he doesn’t “know that there’s any organism on Earth that could really operate on Mars, but over a long period of time, as the martian environment kept changing, what you would expect is that whatever life had started out there would keep adapting to the environment as it changed.”

Detecting such organisms is another matter. Don’t look for it to happen any time soon. Spirit and Opportunity were not designed to search for signs of life, but rather to search for signs of habitability. They could be rolling over fields littered with microscopic organisms in deep sleep and they’d never know it. Even future rovers will have a tough time identifying the martian equivalent of dormant bacterial spores.

“The spores themselves are so inert,” Clark says, “it’s a question, if you find a spore, and you’re trying to detect life, how do you know it’s a spore, [and not] just a little particle of sand? And the answer is: You don’t. Unless you can find a way to make the spore do what’s called germinating, going back to the normal bacterial form.” That, however, is a challenge for another day.

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Essay on Life on Mars

Things to Know About Mars!

Mars, in the solar system, is the fourth planet from the sun. This planet is the second smallest planet in our entire solar system. The possibility of life on mars has aroused the interest of our scientists, now for many years. A reason for this curiosity is the similarity and for the proximity of the planet to the Earth. Mars, of course, gives some indications of the possibility of life existing on this planet.

In our essay, we will detail the possibility of life on this planet, Mars.

Scientists and researchers have spent their years researching for evidence or any trace of life on the Red Planet, Mars. All these researches till now indicated that there is no previous trace of life on this planet. But the evidence of some elements like the frozen water, the liquid water, which traces the past, and the methane in the atmosphere of Mars have provided some lead in the research to find the existence of life on this Red deserted planet, Mars.

If I ever get a chance to go to Mars and have a life there, then I would definitely explore around. I would only wish that the planet changes its conditions to make itself fit for humans to live and survive. Also, this gives an insight for us. Humans should learn not to further pollute another planet the way they have polluted Earth.

Bio Signatures

Some research data from Mars Global Surveyor indicates that liquid water may exist just below the surface in rare places on Mars. Water ice is present at the Martian poles, and these areas will be good zones to search for proof of the existence of life as well. Spach and Research Organizations will also look for life on Mars by searching for indicative markers, or biosignatures, of current and past life. The element carbon is an essential building block of life and comprehending where carbon is present and in what form would explain a lot about the type of existence that Mars had or has.

Most of the current Martian atmosphere consists of carbon dioxide and if carbonate minerals were created on Mars' surface by chemical reactions between water and the atmosphere, the existence of these minerals would be a giant clue that water had been present for a long time. One of the top needed explorations for Mars is the understanding of its present climate. Its climate is like in the distant past that drives climate change over time.

Biosignatures are the morphological, chemical which is organic, elemental, or mineral, and the isotopic traces of the organisms that are preserved in minerals, sediments, and rocks. They represent the physical presence of the organisms as well as the proof of their metabolic activities and their metabolites. A biosignature is also called a chemical or molecular fossil and is any given substance – such as an element, isotope, molecule, or phenomenon – that supplies scientific evidence of past or present life.

Measurable features of life contain the complex physical structures and chemical structures and also the utilisation of free energy and the production of biomass and wastes. It has unique characteristics, a biosignature can be interpreted as having been created by living organisms. However, it is important that they not be considered absolute because there is no way of knowing in advance which ones are omnipresent to life and which ones are personal to the strange occasions of life on Earth.

In conclusion, scientists are still spending time to find evidence of life on Mars. The presence of frozen water, liquid water, and methane in the atmosphere has given some hope that some day life may exist there. There are quite many theories and fiction that are connected to the solar system’s fourth planet, Mars. Other controversies that are connected with life on Mars have come up in the late 20th and the 21st century. The possibility of life which is already existing on Mars or in the future that the humans inhabiting Mars is an excellent topic to discuss. One can find all the relevant material on Vedantu’s Site. You can refer to it for exams or for gaining general knowledge. You can also download PDFs and read it at your dispersal. 

FAQs on Essay on Life on Mars

1. What are the Challenges to Life on Mars?

All animals and plants cannot survive on Mars in extremely harsh weather conditions. The other major problem is the gravity of Mars. The gravity is 38% to that of Earth, low gravity can cause health problems. Another problem is, the temperature of Mars is much cooler than Earth. 

The sun in our solar system and different stars are fusion reactors that spew great amounts of electromagnetic energy, including X-ray and ultraviolet radiation. The sun and other intensively energetic objects like the centre of galaxies, also emit high-energy protons, atomic nuclei, and other particles that can induce radiation illness, adversely influence one's central nervous system, increase one’s lifetime risk for cancer and cause degenerative diseases. One of the most important characteristics a planet needs to sustain human life is the atmosphere. On Mars, there exists a very thin one that clings to Mars and it’s made up of all the wrong gases for humans. Mars' atmosphere looks like-

Primarily composed of carbon dioxide (95.3% compared to less than 1% on Earth).

Scarcely any oxygen (0.13% compared to 21% on Earth)

Little nitrogen (2.7% compared to 78% on Earth)

2. Does Mars have Oxygen?

Mars has oxygen which is only 0.13% of the atmosphere, which is compared to 21% of the Earth's atmosphere. The MOXIE system is responsible for producing oxygen like a tree, pulling in the Martian air with a pump, and using an electrochemical process to separate a single oxygen atom from another molecule of carbon dioxide. Mars' atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide, 3% nitrogen, 1.6% argon, and it has hints of oxygen, water, etc along with a lot of dust. Dust turning in the air colours Mars’ sky tan in photos when taken from the surface. The density of the oxygen on Mars is approximately 1/10,000th of what Earth experiences. Mars' atmosphere does have a lot of carbon dioxide as it has about 500 times more CO 2 than oxygen. If one wants to harvest oxygen on Mars for use by future adventurers or launch systems, a better way might be to remove some of it out of the CO 2 and use that instead. That's where MOXIE technology plays a role.

3. What are we looking out for from Mars missions?

Life needs water on Earth to survive. If life had ever developed on Mars, it did so in the existence of a long-standing supply of water on the planet. On Mars, the search for evidence of life in areas is running where liquid water was once stable, and beneath the surface where it still might exist today. There might also be some current hot spots on Mars where hydrothermal pools furnish places for life. 

4. What does the climate look like on Mars?

The current Martian climate is controlled by seasonal transformations of the carbon dioxide ice caps and the direction of large amounts of dust by the atmosphere. The exchange of water vapour between the surface and the atmosphere also plays a crucial role in deciding the climate of that planet. One of the most involved weather patterns on Mars is the generation of dust storms that typically occur in the southbound and summer. These storms can grow to enclose the whole planet. Humans still don't understand how these storms develop and grow but this is one goal of future climatic studies.

A better understanding of Mars' current climate will assist the scientists in more effectively modelling its past climatic behaviour. Humans are working towards the detailed weather maps of Mars and information about how much dust and water vapour are present in its atmosphere.

Observing the planet for this information over 1 full Martian year which is 687 Earth days, will help to understand how Mars behaves over its seasonal cycle and navigate us toward comprehending how the planet changes over millions of years.

Life just might exist on Mars after all

The red planet may have once been home to an abundance of microbes. new studies suggest it's possible that some hardy microbes managed to survive underground in a frozen state..

About 3.5 billion years ago, two of the planets that orbited the sun may have had biospheres of similar bulk. One, Earth, evolved in a way that allowed life to flourish and splinter into endless forms most beautiful . Mars, the other world, followed a different path.

Today the Martian surface is hostile to life as we know it, but as this scientific story goes, Mars may have once hosted a rich abundance of microbes . Residing in the planet’s briny underworld and shielded from the lethal radiation that bathes the surface, these organisms could have grown in nooks and fissures, multiplying until their collective heft rivaled Earth’s cache of life. Called methanogens, Mars’s microbes would have inhaled atmospheric hydrogen and carbon dioxide and exhaled methane gas—and in a twist, they may have turned out to be their own worst enemy.

Over time, their growing, insatiable appetite would have robbed the Martian atmosphere of hydrogen—a powerful greenhouse gas during the planet’s early days—ultimately casting a deadly freeze over the planet and driving microbial populations into deeper, warmer crannies. How long those burrowing microbes could have survived in the deep is unknown. It’s possible they were only a short-lived flash of life on an otherwise sterile world.

“Maybe extinction is the cosmic default of life in the universe,” says Boris  Sauterey of the Institut de Biologie de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. “It’s not the process of life appearing that is limiting; it’s life maintaining itself that is limiting.”

But perhaps, more than 30 feet beneath the surface and encased in ice , these ancient single-celled organisms achieved a state of dormancy—a sort of cryopreserved slumber, ready to perk up when more life-friendly conditions arise.

The Martian interior may not be as lifeless as its face. It could host a world of alien organisms that are capable of waiting thousands of years between each turn of their metabolic engines.

This scenario may sound farfetched, but recent results from scientists modelling the habitability of ancient Mars and studying the hardiness of microbes in labs and beneath our own planet’s surface all point in the same direction: It’s a long shot, but it’s possible life evolved on Mars and still exists. And scientists may just find signs of that life when meteors barrel into Mars and excavate buried layers of ice , or when new spacecraft arrive to plumb this underground realm.

“I wouldn’t put it past the Martian microbe to beat the odds and survive for an extended period,” says Amy Williams of the University of Florida. “Whether it’s still there today, I can’t hazard a guess. But as an astrobiologist, my hope is that it is, and that maybe that knowledge can help us have a deeper appreciation for our place in the universe.”

A temperate Mars of the past

Dry and irradiated, the Martian surface would challenge even the hardiest of Earth’s microbes to survive for more than a moment.

Billions of years ago, though, the planet was warmer and more watery . It’s not clear how long those temperate conditions persisted or exactly how much water there was, but it is clear that ancient Mars contained all the ingredients for life as we know it , including water, carbon-containing organic compounds, and active chemical reactions that provide energy.

Which is why Sauterey, a computational ecologist, decided to see just how habitable early Mars might have been. Previously, his team developed models to characterise how Earth’s early life influenced the planet’s surface conditions some 3.5 billion years ago, when Mars may have been habitable as well.

As described in a paper published in  Nature Astronomy , Sauterey and his colleagues considered multiple models of Mars with different atmospheres, surface temperatures, and types of brine, which have different freezing points. They assumed that any organisms populating the planet would have been the sort of hydrogen-gobbling, methane-producing microbes that also populated early Earth—and they assumed that such microbes would be limited to environments at least 10 feet beneath the Martian surface, where life-sustaining brines are plentiful and radiation is not.

The team found that both surface temperature and the type of brine play a crucial role in determining the likelihood of habitability. In the team’s simulations, habitable subsurface environments were less likely to exist on a colder, more ice-covered planet because glaciers limit the amount of hydrogen gas that can reach the subsurface to fuel alien metabolisms. But on a warmer and less icy world—in its most life-friendly form—Sauterey found there was at least a 50 percent chance that swaths of the shallow subsurface were habitable billions of years ago.

“Our result is that Mars, if it was not fully ice-covered, was likely habitable,” he says. “That does not mean it was probably inhabited , because we don’t know how you switch from habitability to inhabitation.”

The team also mapped the most likely habitable subsurface sites on the planet and found that Hellas Planitia —a sweeping impact basin in the planet’s southern hemisphere—could support life in all but the worst of circumstances. Isidis Planitia and neighbouring Jezero Crater , where NASA’s Perseverance rover is currently collecting samples for return to Earth , were also among the more habitable locations.

Sauterey and the team then simulated how the burgeoning Martian methanogens might have impacted their environment. They were surprised to find that life on Mars could have been a casualty of its own existence, draining the atmosphere of planet-warming hydrogen; Earth escaped that fate because of the different mix of gases in its atmosphere.

“To an extent, we expected to find that Mars was habitable to these types of organisms,” Sauterey says. “We did not expect to find the opposite influence of life on planetary habitability—that, if that type of life existed on Mars, it would have actually deteriorated the habitability of the planet.”

Sauterey and his colleagues suggest that as they altered the planet’s climate, these doomed Martian microbes may have moved even farther underground, where it’s warmer and more hospitable, but less energy-rich.

Jackie Goordial, a microbiologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario who studies microbes in the permafrost at Earth’s poles, says that life may have been even more likely to exist than the models suggest because Sauterey and his colleagues used somewhat conservative definitions of habitability.

For example, the team used minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 Fahrenheit) as the lowest temperature at which life could survive; on Earth, Goordial says, scientists have observed microbes surviving at colder temperatures. Sauterey’s team also assumed that ice cover would limit the extent of habitable environments by limiting access to atmospheric gases, but on Earth, microbes can feed on hydrogen produced underground , suggesting Martian microbes could exist farther underground than the simulations assume.

“There’s a whole community of scientists who do nothing but look at life being cut off from the atmospheres—and it exists," Goordial says. “It’s weird life. It’s really cool and it’s certainly applicable to Mars.”

Hardy microbes

  Another team of researchers approached the question of Martian life in a different way: by seeing how long microbes could survive in conditions mimicking those roughly 30 feet beneath the surface. At that depth, the level of incoming solar and cosmic radiation is about the same as the dose sustained on Earth’s surface—but the soils are frozen and dry.

The team chose to study a bacterium called Deinococcus radiodurans —one of the most famous extremophiles, known for its ability to withstand immense doses of radiation. Found in nuclear reactors as well as Antarctic soils, D. radiodurans survives by quickly repairing radiation damage to its DNA .

“The fact that we have these things on Earth—the fact that radiodurans is found in nuclear reactors—is crazy. We didn’t have [reactors] until not even a hundred years ago,” says the University of Florida’s Williams, who was not involved in the new research.

In liquid culture, D. radiodurans can survive a dose of approximately 25,000 Gray (Gy); in contrast, just 5 Gy will kill humans and most other vertebrates.

The team studying D. radiodurans found a way to make the critter even more extreme, as described in a study published in the journal  Astrobiology . First they dried out a culture of D. radiodurans . Then they froze it, mimicking the cold, desiccated state beneath Mars—which caused the culture to enter a dormant state. When they challenged the sleeping bacteria with increasing doses of radiation, they found that cells in suspended animation could withstand a dose of approximately 140,000 Gy.

“That’s really an enormously big number; it’s astronomical,” says lead researcher Michael Daly of the Uniformed Services University in Maryland. “One would expect that microorganisms that evolved on Mars are as resistant—if not more resistant—to radiation than D. radiodurans,  which evolved on a relatively mild planet called Earth.”

The team repeated the same experiment with five less robust microbes, including E. coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae (brewer’s yeast), and found that desiccation and freezing similarly increased the cells’ tolerance to radiation—although they still couldn’t tolerate anywhere near the level of exposure as D. radiodurans.

When Daly and colleagues calculated how long a single cell of D. radiodurans could survive roughly 30 feet beneath Mars’s surface, they came up with a startling number: It would take nearly 280 million years to destroy the cell. That number applies to cells in a dormant state, but over time, multiple warming events—like meteor strikes—could temporarily transform the subsurface environment and revive the cells, providing an opportunity for them to reanimate and replicate.

Researchers have observed similarly extreme lifecycles in microbes buried deep beneath Earth’s surface, and scientists have been able to retrieve viable microbes from ancient permafrost cores. Models of life in deep sea sediments also suggest organisms may be able to survive with very little energy input, Goordial says.

“We think these microbes exist in a really slowed down state of metabolism . Perhaps their cells are replicating once every 10,000 years,” she says. “We see this on Earth—although it’s very difficult to study directly … Could something similar be happening in the subsurface of Mars?”

If microbes are there, they’re buried too deeply for current technologies to find. The Perseverance rover’s drill bores less than four inches deep; Daly and his colleagues calculated survival times for microbes 100 times deeper.

In the future, scientists hope to deliver spacecraft to Mars with deeper drilling capabilities. One of those missions, the Mars Life Explorer , was recently ranked among the highest priorities in U.S. planetary science for the next decade—although it wouldn’t launch until the 2030s at the earliest.

Or maybe scientists will get lucky sooner. A recent meteorite impact , detected by NASA’s InSight lander and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter , gouged a hole in the planet’s crust and launched boulders of previously buried water ice onto the planet’s surface—which Daly says is exactly the type of material he’d want to investigate for the presence of dormant microbes.

“While I don’t expect life to ever walk up to one of our rovers on Mars,” Williams says, “I don’t want to underestimate the ability of life to find a way.”

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Is there life on mars we asked a nasa scientist: episode 31.

Emily Furfaro

Is there life on Mars?

There’s lots of pieces of evidence that say there was once a huge ocean on Mars and an atmosphere that could have supported life.

But there’s still a lot of Mars left to explore.

There are places that are potentially habitable, like the deep subsurface. There are places underground that could have fluids in them or organisms could live, and they’d be protected from the radiation that’s so harmful on the surface.

We’re just now getting instruments onto the Martian surface that can help us understand these potentially habitable places and we can ask deeper questions about the potential for habitability in those rock cores.

So is there life on Mars? Not that we’ve found yet, but there’s still a lot of Mars left to explore. Learn more: https://mars.nasa.gov

[END VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]

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Wish you were here? A composite picture taken by the Curiosity rover’s Navcams in both morning and afternoon light, 16 November 2021. Photo by NASA

Thriving on Mars

Dust storms, long distances and freezing temperatures make living on mars magnificently challenging. how will we do it.

by Simon Morden   + BIO

Can humans live on Mars? The answer is startlingly simple. Can humans live in Antarctica, where the temperatures regularly fall below -50ºC (-60ºF) and it’s dark for six months of the year? Can humans live below the ocean, where pressure rapidly increases with depth to crushing levels? Can humans live in space, where there’s no air at all?

As the limits of our ingenuity, our materials science and our chemistry have grown, we’ve gone from being able to tolerate only a narrow band of conditions to expanding our presence to almost every part of the globe, and now beyond it. Even the most hostile environment we’ve ever faced – the vacuum of space – has had a continuous human population for more than two decades.

So why not Mars? If we can live in Antarctica, if we can live in space, then surely it’s simply a question of logistics. If we can put enough materiel on the surface of the Red Planet, then perhaps we can survive – and even thrive – there.

But that ‘if’ is doing an awful lot of work. When we went to the Moon, the astronauts had to carry everything for their visit in their tiny, fragile landers. The Apollo missions spent between just one and three days on the surface – and it took only three days to get to the Moon itself. When a Mars-bound astronaut will spend months in space just getting to the landing spot, spending just a couple of days on the planet isn’t going to satisfy. Any mission, even the initial one, will necessarily be planned to be months-long, and that increases the complexity of the logistics enormously.

M ars is a particularly difficult planet to land on . It’s too far away from Earth to control any descent remotely – on average, a radio signal takes 12 minutes to cover the distance – so everything has to be preprogrammed in. A single error in either the computer or in its inputs will result in a new and expensive crater, of which there’ve been many. And once the command for landing has been given, there’s nothing that anyone back in Mission Control can do to intervene – the length of time it takes between that order, and a safe landing , is known as the ‘seven minutes of terror’.

The tenuous Martian atmosphere also complicates landing. It’s thick enough that any deorbiting spacecraft requires a heatshield to prevent it from burning up, but even the latest generation of vast, supersonic-rated parachutes struggles to provide significant purchase on the tenuous air on the way down. What remains of the orbit velocity has to be accounted for, or our landers will break against the frozen Martian surface.

A vast silver rocket with everything the astronauts need for their months-long stay simply isn’t practical

Various methods have been used, but the most consistently successful has been the ‘sky crane’, a disposable frame fitted with retro-rockets that burn until it’s hovering a few yards above the surface. It then winches the lander down gently, disengages its connecting cables, and then flies a safe distance away before its propellent runs out.

As expected, these calculations are very finely judged. Every pound of lander – the batteries, the solar panels, the scientific experiments – needs several kilogrammes of fuel in the sky crane. And every kilogramme of fuel in the sky crane requires several more kilogrammes of fuel on the rocket that takes it to Mars orbit. We’d send bigger, better landers to Mars if we could – but rocketry is at the very limits of our capabilities, getting a rover the size of a subcompact down to the ground. This has huge implications for conducting a successful crewed mission to Mars.

While we might dream of a vast silver rocket slowly descending to the dusty red surface, containing everything that the astronauts need for their months-long stay, we have to realise that it simply isn’t practical. That rocket, and the even-larger spaceship required to get it there, is beyond our projected launch capabilities for decades, if not centuries, to come. Planning for a successful Mars mission – for a permanent presence on Mars – requires us to work smarter , and use every advantage that we can. That includes those we can find on Mars itself.

M ars is a planet full of useful resources, and specific dangers. On the plus side, if we pick our landing site sensibly, we don’t need to take water. Water is heavy, and there’s nothing we can do to make it lighter. It takes up space, and there’s nothing we can do to make it smaller. And, even with the very best recycling facilities, the astronauts will still require a certain amount of spare water. Yet on Mars, there are many places where water, in the form of ice, is just part of the soil. Stick a shovel in the ground, and half of what gets picked up is water ice. And we can use that water for all sorts of things, not just drinking. We can use it for chemistry.

We can split it using electrolysis into its component gases. We can breathe the oxygen – which saves us from having to take tanked air. And if we recombine it with the hydrogen, we have an explosive mixture we might use as a rudimentary rocket fuel. If we go one stage further, we can scavenge the carbon from Mars’s carbon dioxide atmosphere and synthesise hydrocarbons for a better burn.

That carbon dioxide is also vital for plant growth. Add water, and a growing medium, and suddenly supplementing our freeze-dried packets of food becomes not just a possibility, but a mission goal. Humans consume a lot of calories, but we also eat with our eyes. A side salad isn’t just nutrition, but a morale booster.

Then there’s the stuff of Mars itself. We can use that as a construction material: make bricks from it, or simply heap it up and over our existing structures. And we really need to do that because life on the Martian surface isn’t straightforward.

The red dust has become a nanoparticle and is a major hazard, both to us and to our machines

Most immediately, there’s the temperature. Mars is an average of 80 million kilometres (50 million miles) further from the Sun, and its atmosphere is too thin to buffer the extremes of daily variations. Daytime temperatures in high summer can reach a balmy 21ºC (70ºF), but that same day, just before dawn, will have recorded -90ºC (-130ºF). Temperatures can fall as far as to freeze carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The extra insulation provided by several feet of Martian soil is going to be a welcome bonus.

Moreover, it’ll help with a long-term threat: radiation. The Sun spits out charged particles all the time, as well as high-energy light in the form of gamma and X-rays. On Earth, and to a lesser extent, on the Moon, we’re protected by Earth’s large magnetic field, which extends out into space and deflects the solar wind around us. Mars has no such magnetic field, and while conditions at the surface aren’t acutely life-threatening, every day that astronauts spend on the surface of Mars, they are accumulating radiation damage 10 to 20 times faster than they would on Earth – not counting the occasional solar flare that squeezes a decade’s worth of exposure into a single event.

Burying the astronauts’ base beneath the ground is one relatively easy solution to this radiation problem. So is building it inside a cave – volcanic areas of Mars are the sites of lava tubes that now form huge tunnels, with access through partial roof collapses.

The soil itself is toxic, rich with perchlorates. While these are a potential source of oxygen, perchlorates are water-soluble: contaminated soil cannot be used as a growing medium.

Then there is the dust. The red dust has been formed by hundreds of millions of years of continuous grinding of volcanic ash, becoming so fine that even the weak Martian winds can carry and keep it aloft for weeks at a time. The dust has become a nanoparticle – averaging 3μm (one 10,000th of an inch) – and is a major hazard, both to us and to our machines. It would be all but impossible to exclude the dust from living spaces: astronauts would carry it in from trips outside, even with assiduous measures – washing, hoovering, anti-static screens and air filtration – it would become part of the air they breathed and the food they ate. As well as the perchlorates previously mentioned, there’s other cancer-causing compounds, and the damage that fine-grained rock powder can cause specifically to lungs and eyes.

We’ve already lost one rover to the dust, which coated its solar panels. The more complex the machinery we take, the more certain we have to be of our seals and surfaces. Maintenance, together with the spare parts to back up that regime, would have to be strictly observed.

S o how might we do this? We have parameters set by the number of crew we send, how long they plan to initially stay for, and what they intend to do when they get there. We have to plan to shelter, water and feed them, and then bring them home – and, if we’re intending anything other than a one-time visit, we need to keep our eye on the long game: what kind of infrastructure can we build that will be useful into the future?

Breaking down the problem into manageable bites is by far the most feasible way. What we learn from such incremental efforts – and what we have already learned – can be used to guide us as we work our way through the various elements that we need to execute a successful, and sustainable, Mars mission.

We must prioritise a safe landing without encumbering the descent with the weight of food, fuel, air and water

The first stage would be to increase our capabilities in low Earth orbit. A multi-month journey to Mars will require the largest spaceship we’ve ever built, and almost certainly something that can’t be lofted in a single launch. It’ll need to be constructed in space, using methods similar to the International Space Station. Fuel, together with everything needed to maintain life for the long journey, will need to be shipped from Earth – twice over, as it’ll be coming back. The descent craft will be a separate part of the ship, while the main portion stays in Mars orbit.

The second stage would be to send supplies ahead to the designated landing area. If we can, we should send robotic, self-erecting modules. This would ensure that there would be somewhere safe for the newly arrived astronauts to go, and enable us to prioritise a safe landing without encumbering the descent phase with the additional weight of food, fuel, air and water. And, this way, we wouldn’t have to commit astronauts to the long and arduous journey to Mars until we know there’s enough equipment in place to sustain them. If one rocket went astray – more than one is statistically likely to be lost – we’d simply send another.

One of the pieces of kit we’d send ahead would be an ascent module, an empty ship capable not just of landing on Mars, but also refuelling itself from the Martian atmosphere, ready for a return to the transfer ship in orbit.

T o be clear, none of this is risk-free. Famously, an alternative speech was delivered in 1969 to the US president Richard Nixon in advance of Apollo 11’s landing, covering the scenario for failure. While our careful preparation has made success more likely, there are still situations that would be all but impossible to recover from. The main cause of this is how long it would take us to react to the unforeseen.

Supply chains are one of the most underestimated and misunderstood factors underpinning a modern economy. We are very used to being able to order anything, from anywhere, and it being available in a matter of days, if not hours. Manufacturers run just-in-time stocks from their suppliers, and retailers promise almost immediate delivery. Behind those storefronts lies a fantastically complex web of communications, transport, inventory control and personnel. We notice it only when it fails.

Almost everywhere on Earth is connected. Vital medicines, microchips, engine parts, even live organs for donation, are moved seamlessly between countries and continents. But there are places where this isn’t true, and they give us a first insight as to what challenges any Martian colonist might face.

Antarctica, despite our technology, remains one of the most isolated and inhospitable places on the planet. Almost everything that is needed – barring air, and water – has to be shipped or flown in, over vast distances and not without risk. Heavy seas, thick ice, a storm, an extra-cold snap: all see food and fuel stuck on a dock or on a runway. Antarctic bases don’t run a just-in-time supply chain, because when that supply chain is inevitably interrupted, people might die. Planning for those interruptions means having to take, and store, far more than is normally needed. Those of us who aren’t preppers will baulk at the amount of groceries required to keep a single person fed for a couple of months: the wintertime population of the Amundsen-Scott base, right on the South Pole, is 50.

Food, of course, can always be rationed. Heating can be reduced to one or two heavily insulated modules. There are back-up generators, and a doctor on site, and a modern, satellite-connected communications suite. Scientists are supported by a whole team of electricians, plumbers and technicians, working around the clock to maintain the infrastructure of the base, catching problems before they become critical and providing workaround solutions through their expertise.

The risk of death – by starvation, cold, asphyxiation, accident, illness, disease – has to be accepted

None of which has stopped problems occurring. Notably, if the base doctor falls ill and requires surgery, as has happened twice, the doctor ends up operating on themselves. In both cases, medical evacuation was impossible due to poor weather conditions and the distances involved. Some permanent bases still insist that personnel have their appendix removed before arrival.

Now, imagine that happening on Mars. A fully functioning base, sited in the most favourable position, and enjoying a multiply redundant infrastructure maintained by shifts of highly motivated and trained engineers, is still in a far, far more precarious position than any Antarctic base is today. A mercy dash to air-drop urgent medical supplies in Antarctica from the South Island of New Zealand is difficult but possible: the travel time, once everything is in place, is a matter of hours. Meanwhile, if the launch window is being kind, Earth to Mars is nine months. New generations of space drives will inevitably reduce that, but nothing can be done to erase the vast distances between the two planets. At best, 56 million kilometres ( c 35 million miles). At worst, when Earth is one side of the Sun, and Mars the other, 400 million kilometres ( c 250 million miles).

Without a doubt, it would be the longest supply chain in history, at the end of which is the harshest environment we have ever encountered. Even in the Age of Sail, the journey from England to Australia was faster.

If you’re the doctor on the first Mars mission, you have to decide not what drugs and bandages and surgical equipment you’re taking, but what you’re not taking. What can you do without? Both space and weight are limited. If you’re the engineer: how are you going to choose between this critical spare part and that critical spare part? Of course, you could ask the mission planners to send one – or two – of everything. But, given all that’s gone before, how feasible is that? At some point, enough will be too much. The risk of death – by starvation, by cold, by asphyxiation, by accident, by illness, by disease – has to be accepted.

As with all pioneers, the heaviest burden will fall on those who go first. They will be the most uncomfortable, the most precarious, the most vulnerable. Those who follow afterwards will have it, if not easy, certainly easier. The infrastructure of the initial base is designed to be expanded, as long as Earth holds faith with the project. For it’s certain that Mars will be utterly dependent on Earth for decades. How, though, would a Mars colony grow towards independence? Can we see that far ahead?

Manufacturing is a key technology here: not just the usual but vital supply of spare parts, but also the chemicals required for life. Specially tailored medicines, dietary supplements and plant nutrients will provide a measure of security for colonists; 3D printers with a vast library of models can start to deal with the physical, while the biological components can be conjured by automated synthesis machines.

Another cornerstone of a more independent Mars would be the colonists themselves – and specifically their education. Necessity is often the mother of invention, but Mars would be a very harsh taskmaster. A Martian colonist would need to devote a significant portion of their time to learning. The level of technology required to sustain a working colony would be high, and the number of personnel limited by available food and air. With everyone an expert in two or three separate areas of knowledge, a tragic accident to one need not turn into a crisis for all.

The highly precarious nature of life on Mars will inevitably lead to new social mores and codes of behaviour. Far from being rugged individualists, Martians will rely on each other for their very lives in a highly interdependent way – and they’ll reflect that, both in their relationships and their laws.

Just how divergent colonists become from the mother planet remains to be seen. But an independent Mars wouldn’t be a carbon-copy of any Earth society. It would be startlingly, and profoundly, alien.

The Red Planet: A Natural History of Mars (2022) by Simon Morden is published by Pegasus Books.

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We may never find life on mars—and that could be a good thing.

Perseverance, the Fermi Paradox, and the Great Filter.

Dirk Schulze-Makuch

Over these past few weeks, we’ve all been stunned by the beautiful images returned by the Perseverance rover on Mars. One of that mission’s main purposes is to find traces of past life on the Red Planet, and the rover has already started traveling around Jezero Crater in pursuit of that goal.

For me as an astrobiologist, no discovery would be more exciting. Yet there are other ways of looking at it. In a 2007 essay , Nick Bostrom, Director of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, wrote that while the discovery of life on Mars would be of tremendous scientific significance, it would be really bad news for the future of the human species.

A re-evaluation of Bostrom’s argument seems timely now that we’re actually getting closer to determining if life ever existed on Mars. Why would a “yes” answer freak out Bostrom? As often happens when considering the possibility of extraterrestrial life, it comes back to the Fermi Paradox —also called the Great Silence. Despite our best research efforts, we have not found any firm signs of intelligent alien life, even though there are myriads of planets out there, many of them likely habitable. A huge number of these must have formed well before our own Solar System, so if the evolution of technically advanced alien species is not incredibly hard, shouldn’t there be evidence of advanced aliens all around us? But there is not.

That means there must be a “Great Filter”—a kind of evolutionary hurdle that prevents most, or maybe all, life forms from becoming a “cosmic” species. And this Great Filter— also proposed by economist Robin Hanson —must be very effective. In Bostrom’s words: “There are billions of potential germination points of life, and you end up with a sum total of zero alien civilizations that developed technology to the point where they become manifest to us Earthly observers.”

We don’t know at what evolutionary step this Great Filter comes into play. It may be at the very beginning, making it exceedingly rare for life to originate in the first place. It could come at any of the major evolutionary transitions, such as the “invention” of the eukaryotic cell or multicellular life. Maybe the hurdle of technological advancement is very hard to clear. Or perhaps the filter lies in our future—the scariest scenario, because it means that doom might be just ahead of us!

If we were to find life on Mars that has an origin independent from Earth—not just our long-lost microbial “cousins”—it would lead us to believe there are probably millions of planets all over the galaxy where life originates, and therefore, that the Great Filter must be located later in the evolutionary timeline. If we find eukaryotic life on Mars or even simple multicellular life like nematodes, it would mean that neither of these evolutionary transitions are the Great Filter either. William Bains and I have argued that once life originates, there are multiple ways for it to achieve these types of transitions given enough time, although the rise of technological intelligence may be rare since it has happened only once in Earth’s 4.5-billion year history.

Thus, if Perseverance or other follow-up missions discover evidence of alien life on Mars, this implies that the Great Filter happens at the point where humans became technologically advanced, or that it lies in our future. If the former is true, that makes our species truly special. Could we really be that unique? I have my doubts when I see other intelligent species on our planet, some of which, such as octopi, apes, and crows , could be said to be in a kind of pre-technological stage. On the other hand, in writing the book The Cosmic Zoo with William, I couldn’t escape the feeling (yes, I know, scientists and feelings) that there is something very special about us humans.

But if the latter is true, and we technological humans are not incredibly rare in the galaxy, the outlook for our species, and indeed for life everywhere, is very gloomy. We’re talking about an existential threat—bigger than Coronavirus or even climate change—that could set us back decades, or even hundreds of years. It would be something capable of taking out all (or nearly all) technologically advanced species. This is why Bostrom hopes we don’t find alien life on Mars, or anywhere else. It would mean we’ve already made it through the Great Filter—perhaps when life first arose on our planet, against great odds.

But that would also leave us in a barren, almost lifeless universe. This is a real possibility, but personally I don’t think it’s likely. My preferred scenario is that we are indeed a truly exceptional species. Or that technologically advanced aliens are in fact all around us, and for some reason we haven’t seen them. In the end, though, the universe is as it is, and not as we wish it to be.

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Dirk Schulze-Makuch | | READ MORE

Dirk Schulze-Makuch is a Professor at the Technical University Berlin, Germany, and an Adjunct Professor at Arizona State University and Washington State University. He has published eight books and nearly 200 scientific papers related to astrobiology and planetary habitability. His latest books are The Cosmic Zoo: Complex Life on Many Worlds and the 3rd edition of Life in the Universe: Expectations and Constraints. Website

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Addressing the possibility of life on Mars

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In 2018, millions of people around the world caught glimpses of the planet Mars, discernible as a bright red dot in the summer’s night skies. Every 26 months or so, the red planet reaches a point in its elliptical orbit closest to Earth, setting the stage for exceptional visibility. This proximity also serves as an excellent opportunity for launching exploratory Mars missions, the next of which will occur in 2020 when a global suite of rovers will take off from Earth. 

The red planet was hiding behind the overcast, drizzling Boston sky on Oct. 11, when Mars expert John Grotzinger gave audiences a different perspective, taking them through an exploration of Mars' geologic history. Grotzinger, the Fletcher Jones Professor of Geology at the Caltech and a former professor in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), also used the eighth annual John Carlson Lecture to talk to the audience gathered at the New England Aquarium about the ongoing search for life on Mars.

Specializing in sedimentology and geobiology, Grotzinger has made significant contributions to understanding the early environmental history of the Earth and Mars and their habitability. In addition to involvement with the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission and the High Resolution Science Experiment (HiRISE) onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), Grotzinger served as project scientist of the Mars Science Laboratory mission, which operates the Curiosity roving laboratory. Curiosity explores the rocks, soils, and air of the Gale Crater to find out whether Mars ever hosted an environment that was habitable for microbial life during its nearly 4.6-billion-year history.

“What I’d like to do is give you a very broad perspective of how we as scientists go about exploring a planet like Mars, with the rather audacious hypothesis that there could have been once life there,” he told the audience. “This is a classic mission of exploration where a team of scientists heads out into the unknown.”

“Simple one-celled microorganisms we know have existed on Earth for the last three-and-a-half billion years — a long time. They originated, they adapted, they evolved, and they didn’t change very much until you had the emergence of animals just 500 million years ago,” Grotzinger said. “For basically 3 billion years, the planet was pretty much alone with microbes. So, the question is: Could Mars have done something similar?”

Part of the research concerning whether or not Mars ever hosted ancient life involves identifying the environmental characteristics necessary for the survival of living organisms, including liquid water. Currently, the thin atmosphere around Mars prevents the accumulation of a standing body of water, but that may not always have been the case. Topographic features documented by orbiters and landers suggest the presence of ancient river channels, deltas and possibly even an ocean on Mars, “just like we see on Earth,” Grotzinger said. “This tells us that, at least, for some brief period of time if you want to be conservative, or maybe a long period of time, water was there [and] the atmosphere was denser. This is a good thing for life.”

To describe how scientists search for evidence of past habitability on Mars, Grotzinger told the story of stratigraphy — a discipline within geology that focuses on the sequential deposition and layering of sediments and igneous rocks. The changes that occur layer-to-layer indicate shifts in the environmental conditions under which different layers were deposited. In that manner, interpreting stratigraphic records is simple, he said.

“It’s like reading a book. You start at the bottom and you get to the first chapter, and you get to the top and you get to the last chapter,” Grotzinger said. “Sedimentary rocks are records of environmental change … what we want to do is explore this record on Mars.”

While Grotzinger and Curiosity both continue their explorations of Mars, scientists from around the world are working on pinpointing new landing sites for future Mars rovers which will expand the search for ancient life. This past summer, the SAM (Sample Analysis on Mars) instrument aboard the Curiosity rover detected evidence of complex organic matter in Gale Crater, a discovery which further supports the notion that Mars may have been habitable once.

“We know that Earth teems with life and we have enough of a fossil record to know that it’s been that way since we get to the oldest, well-preserved rocks on Earth. But yet, when you go to those rocks, you almost never find evidence of life,” Grotzinger said, leaving space for hope. “And that’s because, in the conversion of the sedimentary environment to the rock, there are enough mineralogic processes that are going on that the record of life gets erased. And so, I think we’re going to have to try over and over again.”

Following the lecture, members and friends of EAPS attended a reception in the main aquarium that featured some of the research currently taking place in the department. Posters and demonstrations were arranged around the aquarium’s cylindrical 200,000-gallon tank simulating a Caribbean coral reef, and attendees were able to chat with presenters and admire aquatic life while learning about current EAPS projects.

EAPS graduate student, postdoc, and research scientist presenters included Tyler Mackey, Andrew Cummings, Marjorie Cantine, Athena Eyster, Adam Jost, and Julia Wilcots from the Bergmann group; Kelsey Moore and Lily Momper from the Bosak group; Eric Beaucé, Ekaterina Bolotskaya, and Eva Golos from the Morgan group; Jonathan Lauderdale and Deepa Rao from the Follows group; Sam Levang from the Flierl group; Joanna Millstein and Kasturi Shah from the Minchew group; and Ainara Sistiaga, Jorsua Herrera, and Angel Mojarro from the Summons group.

The John H. Carlson Lecture series communicates exciting new results in climate science to general audiences. Free of charge and open to the general public, the annual lecture is made possible by a generous gift from MIT alumnus John H. Carlson to the Lorenz Center in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

Anyone interested in join the invitation list for next year’s Carlson Lecture is encouraged to contact Angela Ellis .

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October 10, 2019

I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s

The Labeled Release experiment on the Viking mission reported positive results, although most have dismissed them as inorganic chemical reactions

By Gilbert V. Levin

The view from Viking.

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

We humans can now peer back into the virtual origin of our universe. We have learned much about the laws of nature that control its seemingly infinite celestial bodies, their evolution, motions and possible fate. Yet, equally remarkable, we have no generally accepted information as to whether other life exists beyond us, or whether we are, as was Samuel Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, “alone, alone, all, all alone, alone on a wide wide sea!” We have made only one exploration to solve that primal mystery. I was fortunate to have participated in that historic adventure as experimenter of the Labeled Release (LR) life detection experiment on NASA’s spectacular Viking mission to Mars in 1976.

On July 30, 1976, the LR returned its initial results from Mars. Amazingly, they were positive. As the experiment progressed, a total of four positive results, supported by five varied controls, streamed down from the twin Viking spacecraft landed some 4,000 miles apart. The data curves signaled the detection of microbial respiration on the Red Planet. The curves from Mars were similar to those produced by LR tests of soils on Earth. It seemed we had answered that ultimate question.

When the Viking Molecular Analysis Experiment failed to detect organic matter, the essence of life, however, NASA concluded that the LR had found a substance mimicking life, but not life. Inexplicably, over the 43 years since Viking, none of NASA’s subsequent Mars landers has carried a life detection instrument to follow up on these exciting results. Instead the agency launched a series of missions to Mars to determine whether there was ever a habitat suitable for life and, if so, eventually to bring samples to Earth for biological examination.

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NASA maintains the search for alien life among its highest priorities. On February 13, 2019, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said we might find microbial life on Mars. Our nation has now committed to sending astronauts to Mars. Any life there might threaten them, and us upon their return. Thus, the issue of life on Mars is now front and center.

Life on Mars seemed a long shot. On the other hand, it would take a near miracle for Mars to be sterile. NASA scientist Chris McKay once said that Mars and Earth have been “swapping spit” for billions of years, meaning that, when either planet is hit by comets or large meteorites, some ejecta shoot into space. A tiny fraction of this material eventually lands on the other planet, perhaps infecting it with microbiological hitch-hikers. That some Earth microbial species could survive the Martian environment has been demonstrated in many laboratories. There are even reports of the survival of microorganisms exposed to naked space outside the International Space Station (ISS).

NASA’s reservation against a direct search for microorganisms ignores the simplicity of the task accomplished by Louis Pasteur in 1864. He allowed microbes to contaminate a hay-infusion broth, after which bubbles of their expired gas appeared. Prior to containing living microorganisms, no bubbles appeared. (Pasteur had earlier determinted that heating, or pasteurizing, such a substance would kill the microbes.) This elegantly simple test, updated to substitute modern microbial nutrients with the hay-infusion products in Pasteur’s, is in daily use by health authorities around the world to examine potable water. Billions of people are thus protected against microbial pathogens.

This standard test, in essence, was the LR test on Mars, modified by the addition of several nutrients thought to broaden the prospects for success with alien organisms, and the tagging of the nutrients with radioactive carbon. These enhancements made the LR sensitive to the very low microbial populations postulated for Mars, should any be there, and reduced the time for detection of terrestrial microorganisms to about one hour. But on Mars, each LR experiment continued for seven days. A heat control, similar to Pasteur’s, was added to determine whether any response obtained was biological or chemical.

The Viking LR sought to detect and monitor ongoing metabolism, a very simple and fail-proof indicator of living microorganisms. Several thousand runs were made, both before and after Viking, with terrestrial soils and microbial cultures, both in the laboratory and in extreme natural environments. No false positive or false negative result was ever obtained . This strongly supports the reliability of the LR Mars data, even though their interpretation is debated.

In her recent book To Mars with Love , my LR co-experimenter Patricia Ann Straat provides much of the scientific detail of the Viking LR at lay level. Scientific papers published about the LR are available on my Web site .

In addition to the direct evidence for life on Mars obtained by the Viking LR, evidence supportive of, or consistent with, extant microbial life on Mars has been obtained by Viking, subsequent missions to Mars, and discoveries on Earth:

Surface water sufficient to sustain microorganisms was found on Mars by Viking, Pathfinder, Phoenix and Curiosity;

Ultraviolet (UV) activation of the Martian surface material did not, as initially proposed, cause the LR reaction: a sample taken from under a UV-shielding rock was as LR-active as surface samples;

Complex organics, have been reported on Mars by Curiosity’s scientists, possibly including kerogen, which could be of biological origin;

Phoenix and Curiosity found evidence that the ancient Martian environment may have been habitable.

The excess of carbon-13 over carbon-12 in the Martian atmosphere is indicative of biological activity, which prefers ingesting the latter;

The Martian atmosphere is in disequilibrium: its CO 2 should long ago have been converted to CO by the sun’s UV light; thus the CO 2 is being regenerated, possibly by microorganisms as on Earth;

Terrestrial microorganisms have survived in outer space outside the ISS;

Ejecta containing viable microbes have likely been arriving on Mars from Earth;

Methane has been measured in the Martian atmosphere; microbial methanogens could be the source;

The rapid disappearance of methane from the Martian atmosphere requires a sink, possibly supplied by methanotrophs that could co-exist with methanogens on the Martian surface;

Ghost-like moving lights, resembling will-O’-the-wisps on Earth that are formed by spontaneous ignition of methane, have been video-recorded on the Martian surface;

Formaldehyde and ammonia, each possibly indicative of biology, are claimed to be in the Martian atmosphere;

An independent complexity analysis of the positive LR signal identified it as biological;

Six-channel spectral analyses by Viking’s imaging system found terrestrial lichen and green patches on Mars rocks to have the identical color, saturation, hue and intensity;

A wormlike feature was in an image taken by Curiosity;

Large structures resembling terrestrial stromatolites (formed by microorganisms) were found by Curiosity; a statistical analysis of their complex features showed less than a 0.04 percent probability that the similarity was caused by chance alone;

No factor inimical to life has been found on Mars.

In summary, we have: positive results from a widely-used microbiological test; supportive responses from strong and varied controls; duplication of the LR results at each of the two Viking sites; replication of the experiment at the two sites; and the failure over 43 years of any experiment or theory to provide a definitive nonbiological explanation of the Viking LR results.

What is the evidence against the possibility of life on Mars? The astonishing fact is that there is none. Furthermore, laboratory studies have shown that some terrestrial microorganisms could survive and grow on Mars.

NASA has already announced that its 2020 Mars lander will not contain a life-detection test. In keeping with well-established scientific protocol, I believe an effort should be made to put life detection experiments on the next Mars mission possible. I and my co-experimenter have formally and informally proposed that the LR experiment, amended with an ability to detect chiral metabolism, be sent to Mars to confirm the existence of life: non-biological chemical reactions do not distinguish between “left-handed” and “right-handed” organic molecules, but all living things do.

Moreover, the Chiral LR (CLR) could confirm and extend the Viking LR findings. It could determine whether any life detected were similar to ours, or whether there was a separate genesis. This would be a fundamental scientific discovery in its own right. A small, lightweight CLR has already been designed and its principle verified by tests. It could readily be turned into a flight instrument.

Meanwhile a panel of expert scientists should review all pertinent data of the Viking LR together with other and more recent evidence concerning life on Mars. Such an objective jury might conclude, as I did, that the Viking LR did find life. In any event, the study would likely produce important guidance for NASA’s pursuit of its holy grail.

Is There Life on Mars? A New Study Offers Tantalizing Clues

M ars is both a wonderful and a terrible place to go looking for life. On the one hand, the planet is a wasteland, where wintertime temperatures plunge to -153º C (-225º F), and the atmosphere—such as it is—is just 1% the density of Earth’s and composed principally of carbon dioxide. On the other hand, the Red Planet wasn’t always such a wreck. For the first billion or so years of its 4.5 billion year life span, it was awash in oceans and seas and protected by a thick blanket of air. Eventually, however, its magnetic field shut down, allowing the solar wind to claw away the atmosphere and the water to vanish into space.

But that first billion years offered Mars plenty of time to cook up at least microbial life, some of which may have died and left chemical traces on the surface—or even have retreated underground to continue thriving in deep, warm aquifers. Now, a new study, announced by NASA and published on Jan. 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , suggests that some of those lingering surface markers of ancient life may have been found—lying in plain sight, in fact.

The new research, led by geoscientist Christopher House of Pennsylvania State University, was based on work conducted by NASA’s Curiosity rover , which has spent the last nine and a half years in Mars’s Gale Crater, a one-time lake, studying its rocks and surface sediments in search of clues to the planet’s geologic—and biologic—history. In the first part of House’s study, the rover used its on-board drill to collect rock and soil samples at 24 different sites around Gale Crater. The samples were then transferred to a laboratory oven within the body of the rover and heated to about 850º C (1,500º F). A laser spectrometer then went to work, analyzing the chemistry of the vaporized samples—looking especially for carbon, the elemental backbone of all life as we know it. Plenty of carbon was indeed detected—which was pretty much as expected. The surprise was just which type.

Carbon comes in two principal isotopes: carbon-13, with six protons and seven neutrons; and carbon-12, with six protons and six neutrons. Carbon-13 doesn’t play well with biology; its heavier structure makes for tougher molecular bonds that don’t allow for the nimble coupling, decoupling and recombining that make biological processes possible, and that carbon-12 performs so easily. The more carbon-12 you find in a Martian sample, the greater the possibility that you’re looking at an artifact of early life. And Curiosity found plenty of it: Nearly half of the samples the rover studied had significantly higher levels of carbon-12 than scientists typically detect in Martian meteorites or in the Martian atmosphere.

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House and his colleagues posit an intriguing biological explanation for their findings: Ancient Martian microbes growing in and under the soil would have preferentially grabbed the available carbon-12 over carbon-13, metabolizing the isotope and producing methane as a byproduct. The methane would have risen into the atmosphere, where it would have been broken down by ultraviolet light, and the carbon-12 would then have precipitated back down as a dusting on the surface. Adding support to that idea was that the samples were collected in the relative highlands and cliffs of Gale Crater—which would have been above the ancient water level and been particularly exposed to the precipitating carbon-12.

“The large carbon-12 amounts observed [on Mars] are found on Earth in biological methane or when biological methane is consumed by microbes,” wrote House in an email to TIME. “In some ways, the Martian samples resemble Earth rocks from Australia from 2.7 billion years ago, when our atmosphere was rich in biological methane.”

NASA is no less sanguine about the findings—even if cautiously so. “We’re finding things on Mars that are tantalizingly interesting,” said Paul Mahaffy, a recently-retired member of the Curiosity science team, in a statement. “But we would really need more evidence to say we’ve identified life.”

Mahaffy’s caution is well-placed, because even House admits there are other, non-biological phenomena that could explain the new findings. For one thing, ultraviolet energy from the sun might have caused changes in the molecular makeup of the Martian atmosphere, producing excess amounts of carbon dioxide and carbon-12, which would then have rained down on the surface just as it would in biological processes.

“There are papers that predict that UV could cause this type of fractionation,” said House in a statement released by Penn State. “However, we need more experimental results showing this … fractionation so we can rule in or rule out this explanation.”

Alternatively, and more dramatically, evidence from meteorites indicates that every 100 million years or so, the solar system passes through an interstellar cloud that is rich in multiple elements, including lighter carbon-12. In theory, that carbon could have rained down on Mars and could explain the new findings. The problem with that scenario is that the cloud would have led to global cooling that would in turn have resulted in glaciation in Gale Crater—signs of which have not been detected. “We have not seen significant evidence for a glacier at Gale Crater yet,” House says.

The Curiosity rover, meantime, will continue its explorations, not only analyzing more of the Martian surface, but also sniffing for methane plumes that are known to be released from beneath the surface of Mars periodically, and checking them for the telltale carbon. That would be something of a gold standard finding—possibly indicating not just ancient, but extant life.

“If we were to [discover a large enough plume],” House says, “the result might match the carbon on the ancient surface, suggesting that the same microbes still inhabit the subsurface.” Short of that case-closed discovery, House is reserving his judgment. “All three of the explanations proposed fit the data that we have,” he says. “We are being cautious with our interpretations here, but that is the right approach when studying another world such as Mars.”

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Write to Jeffrey Kluger at [email protected]

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Essay on Life On Mars

Students are often asked to write an essay on Life On Mars in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Life On Mars

Introduction.

Mars is the fourth planet from the sun. It is also our neighbor in space. For a long time, scientists have been curious to know if life exists on Mars.

What is Mars Like?

Mars is a cold, dry, and rocky planet. It has mountains, valleys, and deserts, much like Earth. But, Mars has no liquid water on its surface, which is crucial for life.

Searching for Life

Scientists use rovers and satellites to explore Mars. These machines look for signs of past or present life. They also study the soil, rocks, and atmosphere of Mars.

Can Humans Live on Mars?

Living on Mars would be hard for humans. The air is thin and cold, and there’s no food or water. But, scientists are studying ways to make Mars more livable in the future.

So, is there life on Mars? We don’t know yet. But, the search for life on Mars continues. It’s a fascinating topic that sparks our imagination and curiosity about the universe.

250 Words Essay on Life On Mars

Is there life on mars.

The idea of life on Mars has always been a topic of interest. Mars is the fourth planet from the sun in our solar system. It is often called the “Red Planet” because of its reddish appearance.

Mars has similarities with Earth which makes scientists think that life could exist there. It has seasons, polar ice caps and weather. It also has signs of water, which is vital for life.

Signs of Life

Scientists have found signs of ancient rivers, lakes, and possibly even an ocean. This suggests that Mars may have once had conditions suitable for life. They have also found chemicals in the Martian soil that are needed for life.

Scientists use rovers to search for signs of life on Mars. These rovers can take pictures, dig into the soil, and perform experiments. They are looking for signs of past or present life.

Future of Life on Mars

Many space agencies plan to send humans to Mars in the future. These missions will help us learn more about the planet and possibly find evidence of life.

In conclusion, the question of life on Mars is still unanswered. But with ongoing research and future missions, we may soon find the answer. The discovery of life on Mars would be a major breakthrough. It would change our understanding of the universe and our place in it.

500 Words Essay on Life On Mars

Mars, the fourth planet from the sun, has always been a topic of interest for scientists and space lovers. This red planet, named after the Roman god of war, is often seen as a potential place for life outside Earth.

What Makes Mars Special?

Mars is special because it shares some similarities with Earth. It has a day and night cycle nearly the same as Earth, with a day on Mars being just over 24 hours. Mars also has seasons like Earth, due to the tilt of its axis. It’s these similarities that make scientists think that Mars could, in theory, support life.

Searching for Signs of Life

Scientists have been looking for signs of life on Mars for many years. They use space probes and rovers, like the famous Mars Rover, to explore the Martian surface. They are looking for signs of water, as life as we know it needs water to survive. Recent discoveries have shown that there was once liquid water on Mars, and there is still ice today. This is a promising sign for the possibility of life.

Could Humans Live on Mars?

The idea of humans living on Mars may seem like something out of a science fiction movie, but it’s something that scientists are seriously considering. Living on Mars would be tough. The atmosphere is very thin, so we would need to wear space suits all the time. The temperature is also much colder than on Earth. Despite these challenges, scientists are researching ways to make Mars more habitable for humans. This includes ideas like building habitats that can protect us from the harsh Martian environment and finding ways to grow food on Mars.

Future of Mars Exploration

The future of Mars exploration looks exciting. NASA plans to send humans to Mars in the 2030s. SpaceX, a private space company, also has plans to send people to Mars. These missions will help us learn more about Mars and could be the first steps towards establishing a human colony on the red planet.

While we still have a lot to learn about Mars, the possibility of life on this red planet is an exciting prospect. Whether it’s finding microscopic life forms or establishing human colonies, the exploration of Mars will continue to be a key focus for scientists in the future. The question, “Is there life on Mars?” is still open, and the answer could change our understanding of life in the universe.

(Word count: 400)

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Essay on Life on Mars

Table of Contents

Scientists and Astronomers from around the world have collated evidences about the possibility of life on Mars. The study about this planet is going on since decades and there is still a long way to go. Many spacecrafts have been sent on Mars in an attempt to understand whether life exists on this planet or is there any scope of inhabiting this planet in future. This is an interesting subject of exploration and has caught the fancy of astronomers since long time.

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The environment of Mars is similar to that of earth in more than one way and this has been a reason for scientific explorations looking for signs of life on the planet. However, mere similarity of environmental factors between earth and mars doesn’t prove that there is life on mars, a claim which needed to be backed by concrete scientific evidences. Beginning in the 19 th century, the quest for life on mars continues even today.

Long and Short Essay on Life on Mars in English

We are providing below essay on Life on Mars in English, to help you with the topic in your exams/school assignments.

These Life on Mars essay will give you an elaborate but simple explanation of the previous explorations and researches for life on mars; why is it more likely to support life etc.

You can select any Life on Mars essay as per your interest and need and present during your class assignment, debate competition, speech, essay writing etc.

Short Essay on Life on Mars 200 words

The existence of life on Mars has been a subject of study since more than a century. Scientists have been trying to collate evidences to figure out whether life has ever existed on this planet or is it inhabited with people presently or if there is any possibility of life on Mars in the future. The research done until now hints that there has never been any life on Mars nor is it inhabited with people currently. However, the possibility of life on the red planet cannot be ruled out completely.

Research shows that surface liquid water was present on Mars during the ancient Noachian period. This made for a habitable atmosphere for microorganisms. However, whether microorganisms ever penetrated on the planet is still a question. Research on the subject is still going on. Today, water on Mars exists in its solid state that is in the form of ice. Some of it also exists as vapour in the planet’s atmosphere.

Scientists have been trying to conduct research on Mars by way of telescopes, spacecrafts and rovers that are helpful in collecting evidences about the condition and nature of this planet. It is interesting and exciting to learn that life on this planet may be possible as its atmosphere is quite similar to Earth.

Essay on If I were on Mars 300 words

Mars is the fourth planet in the solar system. It is positioned just next to Earth and thus scientists and astronomers believe that there could be a possibility of life on this planet just as our planet. The evidences about the presence of water and oxygen on Mars have raised hopes about the probability of life on Mars.

If I Get a Chance to Live on Mars

While the scientists keep sending spacecrafts and rovers on Mars to conduct their research, I often dream about going to the planet to understand if there are any people living there and whether life is actually possible on this planet or not.

I wish I get some special powers to visit Mars and see how the planet really is. If I were on Mars, I would explore every bit of it to learn about it. I would live at different places on the planet to experience the variation in climate. I really wish I could transform Mars into a place which is fit for human civilization if it isn’t already. I want this planet to stay as pure as our Earth was during the beginning of the times.

If I ever got a chance to be on Mars and manage things there, I would grow several plants and make sure the people who eventually come to live on the planet lead a simple life like that of a villager devoid of the high-tech gadgets that are ruining our planet, Earth. I will ensure that there is no pollution on the planet and urge the people living there to contribute in keeping the atmosphere clean.

I want people to learn from the mistakes made on Earth and avoid the same on Mars. We have almost destroyed our beautiful Earth. I wish we do not do the same with the planet which is yet in its pure form.

Essay on My Trip to Mars 400 words

I have been reading news about the possibility of life on Mars since years and have always fancied how it would be like if life can actually be possible on this planet. How many of us will shift to this uninhabited planet and start our life there, how our relatives and friends living on Earth will plan trips to visit Mars, how would life on Mars actually be – will it be like that on Earth or different from it? All these questions come across my mind quite often and I get lost in the dreams of this far-away place. I have even made full-fledged plans of how I would visit the red planet if ever life is possible there.

My Trip to Mars

My trip to Mars is very much on my bucket list. However, I would certainly not rush to the planet as soon as it is declared habitable. I would wait for it to develop for a few years before I plan my visit. I would go to Mars with my friends. I would plan a trip for at least 15 days as I assume I would not get a chance to visit the planet often enough because of the distance and expenses involved. So, I would like to explore each and every corner of this planet on this trip.

We humans are known for demarcating the land and labelling it. I am sure just as Earth; Mars will also be divided into several countries within few years. While some of these countries would be worth spending time in others may be worthy of just a glance. I would talk to the local people on the planet and gather information about how and where all to visit to make the most of the trip. I will visit as many places as I can and try all sorts of cuisines available on Mars. I will shop a lot and take back sovereigns for my dear ones. I will also take a lot of pictures to cherish the memories of the days spent there.

I know my trip to mars is a far-fetched dream. However, I do hope I will get a chance to visit this planet once in my lifetime. I believe our new-age astronomers, scientists and technicians and know they will soon find a way to make this planet fit for human civilization. Until then, I shall visit some places on our planet Earth to seek adventure and gratify the travel enthusiast in me.

Essay on If I were to be the First Human to Visit the Mars 500 words

I aspire to be an astronomer. The celestial bodies fascinate me. My school conducts space workshop every year and I make sure I participate in the same each year. During these sessions, we are told about the Sun, Moon, planets and stars in detail. Besides getting theoretical knowledge about these, we also get a chance to view some of these via telescope which is my favourite part. It is all mesmerizing and my interest in astronomy is increasing with every workshop I attend.

It is the planet Mars that has caught my interest more than any other celestial body. I would definitely plan a manned mission to the red planet when I become an astronomer.

The Fame of Being the First Human to Visit Mars

As keen as I am on going to Mars, I am as much scared to visit the planet alone. I would like to visit the planet with a team of fellow astronomers and technicians. However, I dream of becoming the first person to land on Mars. After all, people only remember the first person to accomplish a mission. The names of the rest are forgotten soon. Just as we all remember Neil Armstrong who was the first to step on the moon. He was accompanied by other astronomers who too stepped on this astronomical body however no one remembers them. Likewise, being the first human to visit Mars will bring me a lot of fame.

My name would be published in every newspaper and flashed on every news channel. It would be a proud moment for me, my family as well as the entire nation. I would receive numerous awards for excellence in my field and for achieving what many could only dream of. I would be remembered for years and years to come. Students across the globe will read about my achievements as a part of their curriculum.

Experience Life on Mars as the First Human on the Planet

I would not just like to visit mars and come back. I would like to live there for few weeks to experience how life on Mars really is. Mars is known to be rich in minerals. I would like to explore the kind of minerals available there and also collect some to bring back home in order to conduct further research on them. I would like to experience and understand how life on Mars would actually be and that can only happen if I stay there for long. I would also carry few seeds to the planet and see if they grow there in a couple of weeks. I would explore different parts of the planet to experience the kind of climate it has.

If I would be the first person to visit Mars, the expectation from my research on the planet would be extremely high. I will spend most of my time studying the atmosphere and condition of the planet to see if it is fit for human civilization.

My interest in exploring Mars is increasing by the day. I aim to work hard and become an astronomer as I grow up to further my mission of being the first human to visit Mars.

Long Essay on Life on Mars 600 words

Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun, is said to have certain similarities with Earth when it comes to its atmosphere. This may be because of its proximity to our planet. This planet has been studied more than any other in the solar system. Every now and then there is news about new evidence indicating the probability of life on the red planet.

Possibility of Life on Mars

The first evidence of life on Mars was found as early as the 19 th century. Since then the planet has caught the interest of the scientists and astronomers around the world. Numerous research operations have been conducted to find out whether life exists on Mars or if it ever did or can. Researchers claim that Mars is quite like our planet Earth when it comes to its atmosphere although it gets much colder.

Though oxygen is present on the planet its environment is not considered fit for human inhabitation. While there have been evidences of liquid water on Mars in the past, today most of the water on the planet is locked in its polar ice caps. This has resulted in the planet’s land becoming barren. The curiosity rover that was sent to the red planet recently helped in exploring the planet further. The rover dug some land on Mars and discovered three different kinds of organic molecules on the planet which indicates the possibility of some kind of life form on the planet.

If there was Life on Mars

I often wonder how interesting it would be if there was life on Mars and the concept of aliens which is shown in various Hollywood and Bollywood movies was actually true. I really wish, the researchers soon find some aliens on Mars and are able to bring them to Earth for research. It would be super exciting. We will learn so much about the planet with the help of those aliens. We will understand the kind of hardships faced on the planet and the joys of living there. I wish we soon find out that Mars supports life and we can inhabit it.

I wish after this discovery, we humans are given a choice about whether we wish to live on Earth or Mars or take a trip to Mars just as we visit other cities and countries. Special aircrafts would be made to take people from Earth to Mars. We would be able to explore a whole new world and meet people who are completely different from us or may be have some similarities.

I really wish that if people actually exist on Mars they are not as selfish as those living on Earth. I would like to leave Earth and live on this newly explored planet. I would like to experience life on that planet at least for few years. It would be so exciting to meet new people, learn new languages, and eat new kinds of cuisines and pet different types of animals. Due to the difference in the climatic conditions of Earth and Mars, the flora and fauna of the two planets is not likely to match. We will thus get a chance to witness newer varieties of plants and animals on Mars. I really wish Mars is not yet perturbed with technology and that people on that planet live in harmony with nature. It would be blissful living in such a place.

Whether Mars is or will ever be fit for inhabiting is a question which is still likely to take several decades to answer. Numerous researches have already taken place in this regard and many others are going on. I really wish we get some crucial evidence on life on Mars soon.

Essay on Life on Mars FAQs

What is the life on mars.

There is no confirmed life on Mars yet; scientists are still exploring.

What is a short paragraph about Mars?

Mars is a planet in our solar system, often called the 'Red Planet' due to its rusty appearance.

Can people live on Mars essay?

People can't live on Mars without advanced technology and life support systems.

How do humans live on Mars?

Humans could live on Mars with life support and creating habitats.

There is no known life on Mars; it's a focus of scientific research.

What is the Mars essay?

An essay about Mars would talk about its features, exploration, and potential for human colonization.

What is the conclusion of life on Mars?

The conclusion about life on Mars is that it's a challenging environment, and more research is needed to understand its potential for life and human settlement.

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Essay on Life on Mars

List of essays on life on mars in english, essay on life on mars – essay 1 (150 words), essay on life on mars: with conclusion – essay 2 (250 words), essay on life on mars: future and past instances – essay 3 (300 words), essay on life on mars – essay 4 (400 words), essay on life on mars: popular expeditions – essay 5 (500 words), essay on life on mars: finding, future and conclusion – essay 6 (600 words), essay on life on mars: studies, experiments and missions – essay 7 (750 words), essay on life on mars: introduction, facts and investigations – essay 8 (1000 words).

Life on Mars is yet a matter of research for scientists. Mars is also known as the Red Planet and is right next to earth in the solar system. Surprisingly, images and evidence gathered in the past few years, confirm the existence of oxygen and water on the planet.

Even if, there is no life on Mars until now, scientists strongly hope for the possibility of it. The reason is the presence of oxygen and water in the form of snow. Both of these factors could play an essential role in the likelihood of life on Mars.

Over the decades, all kinds of spacecraft and satellites have been put to work for collecting as much information about life on Mars as possible. So far, whatever has been known to us, is not enough to give any solid conclusion about whether life on Mars has ever existed or not.

Introduction:

How will life on Mars be? If there was life on Mars, would it be possible for humans to live on it? These questions have aroused the curiosity of many. Therefore, it would only be proper to understand what Mars is all about.

Mars is the fourth planet from the sun and the second smallest after Mercury in the solar system. It is popularly referred to as the red planet. Let us now consider the intricate details of this planet.

Proof of Life on Mars:

There have been confirmations of water and magnetic fields previously protecting the planet. Other scientists believe that water stills exist on Mars but because of its topography and atmosphere it would be salty. As a result, it is believed that the planet Mars has the environmental conditions necessary to support life.

The atmosphere of air on Mars is mostly carbon dioxide. Also, air on the planet is a hundred times thinner than that on planet earth. Hence, it would be difficult for humans to breathe on Mars without a spacesuit filled with oxygen. Plants and animals can’t seem to survive on Mars due to the planet’s gravity which is 38% of Earth.

Exploration of Mars:

In spite of all our curiosities, no one has actually been able to venture into the planet. In the early ’70s, for the first time, mechanical objects were sent on an explorative mission to check for life on Mars. Two robots, known as Viking 1 and Viking 2 were sent to the planet to observe and gather intelligence. They lasted for 6 and 4 years respectively. Robots expeditions have continued till recent times and have grown to include orbiters, landers, and rovers.

Conclusion:

The possibility of life on Mars, till date, has continually captured the attention and interests of both scientists and non-scientists. Whether fantasy or not, it is the wish of many that one day man will be able to step on Mars comfortably.

Life on Mars is one of the debatable subjects that come up every now and then. Scientists are working day in and day out to confirm the presence of life on Mars; however, there is no concrete proof as of now. There are a lot of people who believe that there is a presence of intelligent life on Mars but all we can do is waiting till the rumours are turned true.

The Future:

If we happen to detect life on Mars, it will open up a world of new possibilities. Along with finding out what kind of life exists in Mars and the kind of atmosphere which is present, there are plenty of other things which will have to be examined as well.

The space is full of so many puzzling stories and it is imperative to pay heed to the specifics. Until and unless, the scientists manage to find concrete proof that life on Mars is not just an imaginary concept but a reality, things really can’t materialize a great deal.

The Past Instances:

There have been a few instances wherein some scientists have claimed that they spotted life on Mars. Of course, the precise signs can vary and when asked, they couldn’t come up with a concrete proof. It very much boils down to your belief and imagination. But given the massive size of the space and how endless it truly is, it surely is likely that there is intelligent life out there.

Whether we find life on Mars or on some other planet inside our galaxy or outside is a question which is put to debate. We truly need to wait for the scientists to come up with the best results.

The bottom-line remains the fact that if aliens exist they might also be in the quest to find someone like them. Life on Mars definitely sounds a very interesting topic to dig further on.

Life on Mars is one of the mysteries that all the scientists in our world have been researching for over decades. The existence of life on Mars or probably its possibility is being discussed and the studies are yet to go through a long way before a conclusion.

Mars is the red planet, closest to earth and the fourth among our planets in the solar system. Many types of research and studies have proved that Mars has a similar atmosphere to that of Earth. This triggered the concept of life on Mars in the minds of our genius scientists.

Many astronautic devices, space crafts, rovers, etc., are used to check whether any evidence or sign of life on Mars can be found to prove the theory. But every attempts to find the possibility has found negative results till date. But frequent efforts are being taken from the scientific side of our world to find life on Mars a possibility.

Similarities:

Studies and constant research have found oxygen content to be present on the surface of the red planet. However, it is not as habitat-able as on Earth for humans to survive or breathe. But this miraculous discovery has seeded the life on Mars theory further on.

Later on, water presence on the planet was also found, but in its solid form, ice. The latest update was given by the rover that three kinds of microbial organisms were found when the land sample was being examined by them. This has created a major spark in the research of life on Mars theory.

All these studies prove that there may be some kind of life on Mars but however, that may not be very similar to that of life on Earth. The living creature may be different form every species of flora and fauna living in our world.

Responsibility:

Even if life on Mars is found and the possibility is being proven, there are some ethics and responsibilities we should be following. We, humans, have almost destroyed the beauty and diversity of our mother Earth. The same mistake should not be done in case of life on Mars.

Instead of finding more technological advancements that eventually destroys the life on Mars, we should focus on more sustainable ways to exist in the new environment. Exploring new ways of life is not a bad thing, but instead of destructing the life on Mars we should find a mutual way to exist on the planet along with maintaining its natural beauty.

Mars is a planet which has the closest of similarities with the planet earth. Hence there has been most research on the chances of discovery of life on this planet. Mars, also known as the red planet remains a mystery for us for many reasons although as on today we know a lot of about than we did some fifty years ago.

Early Expeditions:

While space crafts equipped with robotics have given us magnificent perspectives, no people have ever endeavoured to adventure to Mars, and no such missions will endeavour for a long time. Meanwhile, NASA is buckling down now to find whether there is life on Mars. Different nations have been sending space crafts to orbit or land there since the 1960s, and every mission encourages us more about this entrancing planet. We have discovered that despite the fact that Mars is more like Earth than anyplace else in the close planetary system, and subsequently is the best place to search for life, it is as yet unique in relation to Earth from numerous points of view.

Why Mars may not be another Earth?

The earth and Mars have a lot of similarities between them. However, there are some critical differences which make them look so different. A compass focuses toward the north post on Earth in light of the fact that our entire planet acts like a giant magnet; however, Mars does not act along these lines. Other than turning a compass needle, Earth’s attractive field dismisses hazardous radiations coming from the space. Without an attractive field on Mars and with a whole lot less air than on Earth, more unsafe space radiation reaches its surface, making the possibility of life thin. However, there have been instances of polar ice found of Mars suggesting that water and even early forms of, life could have existed on this red planet.

Some Popular Expeditions:

In 1976, NASA landed spacecraft named Viking 1 and Viking 2 on Mars. One of these landers worked there for almost 4 years and the other kept orbiting it for over 6 years. Among their logical tests were the main ones so far explicitly intended to find whether there was something little for instance small microscopic organisms living on Mars? Most researchers are of the view that the outcomes don’t lead to any indications of life. The shuttle had cameras that returned a large number of pictures of the surface, demonstrating the changing seasons and delicacies of the stones and earth close to the stationary landers. However, the cameras did not show any signs of life on the planet.

Did Life ever exist on Mars?

Regardless of whether there was no life on Mars, it is energizing to realize whether there used to be lives there. So notwithstanding searching for living microscopic organisms, space agencies will look for small fossils that may show life did begin on Mars at some of the time may be hundreds or thousands of years ago. Maybe sometime in future we may have expeditions where man lands on Mars just as we landed on the Moon one day. But for now, there remains no evidence to support that life does exist on Mars today.

Life on Mars has been an idea in people’s minds since we discovered how the planet looks. Compared to the other ones in our solar system Mars is a planet that is most similar to our homeland. One can argue that life on Mars is just a part of our imagination and something that will never be achieved, a hypothetical idea far from realization. But there are others who wholeheartedly believe that life on Mars is possible and, some argue, there was life on this planet before.

Is life on Mars possible?

To answer the question of whether or not life on Mars is possible we first need to look at all the prerequisites for life to exist. Some scientists have made a list of nineteen factors that need to be present on a planet for it to sustain life as it is encountered on planet Earth.

Even though Mars is bigger as a planet the Earth and it has soil on it unlike some of the other planets that are orbiting the Sun, many of the key factors for life are missing. Life on Mars is impossible without water to sustain the growth of plant life that we need to feed ourselves. The other big problem with life on Mars is the lack of an ozone layer and therefore of air.

The Findings:

Over the past decades, human explorations of space has made us question the possibility of life on Mars. Such questioning naturally led to missions of exploration and different national space agencies investigated the planet the best they could.

One such exploration of life on Mars sent a probe to the planet to collect a soil sample, this happened in 1976. The scientists were searching for any evidence of life like bacteria but they found nothing that would indicate the existence of a life form on this planet

Then in 1996, the question of the prior existence of life on Mars was asked once more when a meteorite from the planet fell to Earth. The sample collected showed fossilized bacteria and other simple life forms that existed on the planet. After several years of research, the majority of scientist found that the meteorite actually had no evidence in support of life on Mars, the claim was disputed but some researchers still maintain that the evidence is present in the findings.

The future of life on Mars is not as bleak as the idea that there was life on the planet earlier. Many people are creating hypothetical programs that would support life on Mars and there is a general idea present that humanity could colonize the planet successfully and turn it into their new home. What remains is a real investment in the projects that would experiment with life on Mars and this can only be achieved with state funding. In the end, the future of life on Mars depends on our attempt to settle on the planet and on the individuals willing to fulfill such a goal.

Life on Mars is not just a childish dream but a real project that has many people excited. The great thing about this idea is that it opens up a whole new field of inquiry and a search for solutions to very specific and one could say planetary problems. Such problems offer a wide range of opportunities for us to imagine new technologies and to invent new machines to use for space exploration. People are doing the best they can to explore the possibility of life on Mars and once more resources get pushed towards this exploration of the planet, we will see incredible results.

Mars is a planet just like earth due to its similarity in life sustaining properties. Although there has been no evidence of life on mars previously and so there is no cumulative evidence of life in Mars. Mars is adjacent to earth and has environmental components that are similar to those on earth. Scientists have speculated that Mars has a possibility of sustaining life just like earth and the components of life sustainability have been analyzed.

Is Mars habitable?

According to scientists, there is possibility of habitation in Mars. However, the environmental parameters could be insufficient but scientists have not made a conclusive report on them. The availability of water on Mars has been confirmed because liquid water was found on the surface. The environmental chemicals that have been established to be present are essential metals and nutrients. The source of energy would be solar energy and geochemical energy. Physical conditions like temperature, atmospheric pressure and climate changes were also determined to be able to sustain life. In the past, microbes were suspected to have existed on Mars. Up to date, evidence of life on Mars has not been established. Ionizing radiations are present and coexist with cosmic radiation in Mars. There is no magnetic shields on Mars due to the loss of the protective magnetosphere and atmosphere. This results in deleterious effects of radiations to living things.

Conditions that enable survival of living things range from the temperatures, radiations, humidity, atmospheric components and pressure. Life on mars has been made to appear impossible but there are some survival strategies with limited functions of reproduction, ability to thrive and evolution of living organisms.

Studies, experiments and missions to Mars:

There have been studies, missions and experiments that have been done to determine life on Mars. The first journey to Mars began in 1962with the launching of a spacecraft. The mission was called Mars 1. This space craft lost communication on the way to mars. Although communication was lost, there were few findings that were recorded. There were temperature abnormalities on the surface of Mars. And no signs of life on Mars were detected.

Mars 4 was another mission that was successful in 1965, results showed that there was no evidence of water in Mars through photographs which showed lack of water bodies like rivers and oceans. Findings showed that there was no magnetic field in the globe. The atmospheric pressure was also established to be too low compared to that of earth. After determination of these harsh conditions that are threatening to life of multicellular organisms, scientists started speculating for microbial life. Thereafter, Viking orbiters continued to look for evidence of life. The experiment were focused on soil to determine life on Mars for microbes but the results were inconclusive for existence of life.

Perchlorates have been determined to be present on Mars. It is very destructive compound that cannot sustain living things.

Reasons for human colonization of Mars:

All the studies, experiments and missions to Mars have been termed human colonization of the planet. The main reason for this colonization is economical interest. People want to be established economically hence the quest to find evidence of life on mars. Also, there is curiosity that drives scientists into finding more about evidence of life on Mars. The colonization process requires a lot of resources e.g., robots and technologies that are advanced and therefore there are attempts to develop these resources to enable research to be continued. Astronomic adventures and scientists are ambitious in the colonization of Mars.

In conclusion, no matter how similar mars is to earth, the possibility of human life sustenance is limited. Through experiments, the conditions of life sustenance are adverse and unable to promote survival. In as much as survival is limited, the presence of deleterious components are more pronounced in Mars than on earth. These deleterious components include harmful chemicals like perchlorate, heavy metals like lead, ionizing and cosmic radiations which contribute to impossible habitation of Mars by humans. However, life on Mars has not been determined to be completely impossible because a larger scope of research has not been done. Life on Mars is still inconclusive and research is ongoing. The absence of a protective magnosphere and atmosphere give poor prognosis with matters of life sustenance even with adjustments of other parameters. In as much as we desire life on a different planet, earth is still the best place to be. Earth provides and sustain living things comfortably.

As we all know, Mars is the fourth planet in distance in our solar system from of course the sun. It is the second least planet when the sizes of the planets are considered, only mercury is smaller than mars. Mars has some similarities to the earth where we human beings live. Most especially, there are similarities in our atmospheres. These similarities may be as a result of the proximity of the planet mars to our own earth. The planet mars is popularly called the red planet because of the abundance of iron oxide that is reddish in colour on the surface of the planet and this gives the planet a very reddish and distinctive appearance that separates it from the other planets and can be seen clearly; it is probably the most studied planet in our solar system. The continuous study of the planet mars has indicated that there is the probability that life exists on the planet and it can support life.

The Possibility and Probability of Life on Mars:

The very first evidence indicating life on Mars is dated back to the early 19 th century. Astronomers and scientists have since then been interested in mars and have been trying and striving to learn more about the red planet. There have been numerous operations of research over the years that were conducted to discover whether mars support life (if there is currently life on mars, if there ever was life on mars or if it can support life in the future). A lot of these researchers involved have claimed that our planet here is very much similar to mars when we put the atmospheres into consideration. It is important to note that the atmosphere of mars is very much colder than that of earth.

The environment and surroundings of mars is not believed to be fit and safe for human beings to live even though there is oxygen available and present in the atmosphere and all over mars. In the past, there used to signs of the presence of water in its liquid state on Mars, the only form of water we have on mars today are the ice caps that we have on the planet. As a result of this, the land of the planet mars is largely barren. Scientists and researchers recently sent a curiosity rover to the mars that has greatly helped in the exploration of the planet a lot further. The land dug by the rover on mars has led to the discovery that there are three very different types of molecules that are organic on mars and this point to the possibility that there might be the existence of some sort of life or living organism on mars.

Some facts about the planet mars and the earth:

It has been discovered that seasonal cycles and period of rotation of the planet earth is very similar to that of the planet earth. The Olympus Mon which is the volcano that is largest and also the mountain that is second highest in all of the big solar system. There are two moons on the planet mars and they are named: deimos and phobos both of which are irregularly shaped and very small.

Investigations on the habitability of mars:

Investigations are ongoing on the assessment of the habitability of the mars in the past and also the possibility and probability of life on mars. There are plans of missions of future astrobiology like Exomars and Mars 2020 rovers. Because of the extremely low and little atmospheric pressure of mars, the existence of liquid water is impossible on mar’s surface. The atmospheric pressure of the planet mars is almost lower than 1% of the atmospheric pressure of the earth.

The planet mars has two ice caps at the poles that seem to be formed majorly from water. It is believed that the quantity and volume of iced water that is in the ice cap of the south pole is more than enough to immerse the entire surface of the planet mars to about 11 meters in depth if it is melted. Around 2016, it was reported by NASA that they found a large quantity of ice underground in some of the regions on mars including Utopia Planitia. The volume and quantity of water that has been detected on mars is estimated to equal to the quantity and amount of water that we have in the Lake Superior.

It is very possible to see the planet mars from the earth even with naked eyes; it red colouring is very conspicuous from the earth. The apparent magnitude of the planet mars reaches about -2.94 and is only exceeded by the apparent magnitudes of the sun, the moon, Venus and Jupiter. Optical telescopes that are ground based are primarily limited to only resolving features that are about 190 miles or 300 kilometres across when Mars and Earth are very close due to the atmosphere of the earth.

Some physical characteristics of the planet mars:

The planet mars is almost half of the earth’s diameter and the surface area of the mars is only a little bit lesser in size than the earth’s total dry land area. The earth is also denser than the planet mars and the volume of the planet mars is only about 15% of the volume of earth and the mass of the planet mars is only about 11% of the mass of the planet earth. This means that the surface gravity of the planet mars is only about 38% of the surface gravity of the planet earth.

There is still no solid assurance or certainty that the mars will be able to safely and fully support life like the planet earth. It is a serious question that might take several years to answer; we do not know for sure if the planet mars will one day be fit and safe for inhabiting. A lot of various researches are currently ongoing to discover and work on life on mars.

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• Published: 21 February 2023

Life on Mars, can we detect it?

• Carol R. Stoker   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7265-292X 1  

Nature Communications volume  14 , Article number:  807 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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• Astrobiology
• Biochemistry

Searching for evidence of life on Mars is a major impetus for exploration. A new study published in Nature Communications finds that current Mars mission instruments lack the essential sensitivity to identify life traces in Chilean desert samples that strongly resemble the martian area currently under study by NASA’s Perseverance rover.

Almost half a century ago the NASA Viking landers searched for evidence of life in Mars soils by attempting to detect active metabolism and measuring organic compounds by heating to vaporize them for detection via Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS). When no organic compounds were detected even at levels of parts per billion 1 , this provided a puzzle. Since organic compounds are continuously delivered to Mars by meteorites, comets, and interplanetary dust particles they should be ubiquitous and comprise up to 2% of Mars soil 2 . But where are they? This curious lack of organics argued both against a biological interpretation for results of the metabolism experiments, and for the presence of strong soil oxidants that actively destroy these compounds 3 . However, decades later the Viking GC-MS results were explained by the presence of high levels of perchlorate salts in the Martian soil 4 that oxidized organics during pyrolysis in the Viking GC-MS instrument 5 .

While Viking lander results seemed unpromising for surface life in the cold, dry martian conditions, data from Viking orbiters and later missions showed that Mars had surface liquid water early in its history (3 to 4 billion years ago) 6 where life may have thrived. This led later NASA rover missions to seek evidence of ancient habitable environments hosting organic remnants of life. The SAM ( Sample Analysis on Mars ) instrument on the Curiosity rover detected organics in ancient lakebed deposits 7 , 8 , but they are found at low levels (parts per billion) and appear to be highly altered. The Perseverance rover, now exploring an ancient illuvial fan river delta, has detected aromatic organic compounds using fluorescence spectroscopy 9 . But in these cases, the simple organics detected could have been delivered to Mars from space so proving a biological origin is impossible.

The paper by Azua-Bustos et al. 10 in Nature Communications describes analysis of samples collected from “Red Stone”, an alluvial fan river delta more than 100 million years old in the Atacama Desert of Chile, Earth’s oldest and driest desert. Red Stone has similar geology to the delta area currently being studied by NASA’s Perseverance rover 11 (Fig.  1 ). The Red Stone location (near the ocean) frequently experiences fogs that provide water for sparse but active microbial life that was detected by DNA extraction and gene sequencing, microscopy, and growth of a few microbial strains cultured from the samples. Most microbes identified consist of “microbial dark matter” i.e., genetic information is from organisms that have not yet been described.

a Red Stone deposit from panorama image courtesy of Armando Azua-Bustos. b A section of the panoramic composite image [image PIA24921_MAIN-20k.jpg] of the Jezero delta captured by the MastCam-Z camera on the Perseverance Rover in June 2022 15 (Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS). The height of both white scale bars are ~2 m.

Samples from Red Stone were also analyzed by instruments that simulate those used on Mars, but even finding organics in these samples was challenging. A GC-MS instrument comparable to but ten times more sensitive than Curiosity rover’s SAM instrument was barely able to detect specific biogenic organic compounds at the limit of detection, suggesting that SAM could not have detected them. There was more success with organic detection after sample extraction with a powerful solvent that was also implemented on the SAM instrument. Indeed, the SAM instrument detected organics in both sedimentary mudstones and dune sands on Mars by using solvent extraction and derivatization (a chemical treatment to make organic compounds easier to detect) 8 .

Red Stone samples were analyzed with a testbed of the MOMA (Mars Organic Molecular Analysis) instrument 12 planned for the European ExoMars rover payload. No organics were detected when flash pyrolysis was used, but a few organic molecules were identified in evaporite samples when they were first extracted with a solvent and derivatized.

Red Stone samples were also analyzed with the SOLID-LDChip (Signs of Life Detector-Life Detector Chip) 13 , an instrument based on the technology of immunoassay that is commonly used in biomedicine. SOLID was designed for life detection on Mars but no scheduled missions plan to use it. Interestingly, the LDChip detected evidence of cyanobacteria that were not seen in the modern microbiota so Azua-Bustos et al. 10 posit these biosignatures were deposited along with the delta sediments at least 100 million years ago.

This Red Stone sample analysis 10 shows how critical it is to test instruments designed for life detection on other planets by using samples from relevant Earth analogs prior to selecting them for flight missions. If the biosignatures can’t be detected in Earth samples, where both current and ancient life is clearly documented, we should not expect these instruments to be capable of detecting evidence of life from Mars’ early history.

Azua-Bustos et al. 10 argue that detection of ancient life signatures will require sample analysis in sophisticated terrestrial laboratories. This same view has led to the current plans for searching for life: the Perseverance rover is collecting samples that are to be retrieved and brought to Earth by a future mission 14 . But any biological activity in these samples presumably took place billions of years ago, and only a few small samples can be brought to Earth for study. It remains to be seen if unambiguous signatures of life can be found in those limited samples. We must be cautious about interpreting absence of strong evidence of life as evidence of its absence!

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A small segment of a panorama comprised of Perseverance Rover MastCam-Z images (image PIA24921_Main-20k.jpg) taken June 2022. The full panoramic image is available for download at https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/26978/detailed-panorama-of-mars-jezero-crater-delta/ .

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Could Mars Have Been The Birthplace Of Life In Our Solar System?

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Mars was the place to be way back when the rock was young.

Benjamin Taub

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Was there ever life on Mars?

Image Credit: joshimerbin/Shutterstock.com

T he organic molecules that enabled life to emerge were present on  Mars  around 4.5 billion years ago, research suggests. And while these critical components may have hitched a ride to Earth around the same time, it was on the Red Planet that life found the most hospitable conditions.

Earth and Mars are both members of inner Solar System , which is made up of four rocky planets and the asteroid belt. Shortly after their formation, these terrestrial planets endured a brutal bombardment as a torrent of asteroids rained down on the inner Solar System.

While these rocks became assimilated into the crust of both Earth and Mars, the movement of plate tectonics on our home world caused these ancient meteors to be recycled into the interior of the planet. In contrast, the surface of Mars is stationary, which means the rocks that smashed into the planet in the distant past remain in place and can be studied.

By analyzing 31 Martian meteorites , the study authors sought to answer a series of fundamental questions about their origin. For example, until now scientists had never determined whether these ancient projectiles came from the inner or outer Solar System, or whether they carried any of the organic material that could have allowed life to develop.

Using ultrahigh precision chromium isotope measurements, the researchers identified the meteorites as carbonaceous chondrites from the outer Solar System. Based on the prevalence of such rocks on Mars and the fact that ice usually accounts for 10 percent of their mass, the authors calculated that these ancient impacts brought enough water to Mars to cover the entire planet in 307 meters (1,007 feet) of water.

Significantly, carbonaceous chondrites from the outer Solar System are also known to have transported organic molecules such as amino acids to the inner Solar System. These compounds are essential for the formation of DNA, and are likely to have provided the raw materials that allowed life to emerge.

“At this time, Mars was bombarded with asteroids filled with ice. It happened in the first 100 million years of the planet's evolution,” explained study author Professor Martin Bizzarro in a statement . “Another interesting angle is that the asteroids also carried organic molecules that are biologically important for life.”

However, while conditions on Mars may have been ideal for life at this early juncture, the same can’t be said for Earth. “After this period, something catastrophic happened for potential life on Earth,” says Bizzaro.

“It is believed that there was a gigantic collision between the Earth and another Mars-sized planet. It was an energetic collision that formed the Earth-Moon system and, at the same time, wiped out all potential life on Earth.”

Taken together, these findings suggest that life probably had a better chance of thriving on Mars than on Earth during the formative years of the inner Solar System.

The study is published in the journal Science Advances .

An earlier version of this article was published in   November 2022 .

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NASA’s search for life on Mars: a rocky road for its rovers, a long slog for scientists – and back on Earth, a battle of the budget

I s or was there life on Mars? That profound question is so complex that it will not be fully answered by the two NASA rovers now exploring it .

But because of the literal groundwork the rovers are performing, scientists are finally investigating, in-depth and in unprecedented detail, the planet’s evidence for life, known as its “ biosignatures .” This search is remarkably complicated, and in the case of Mars, it is spanning decades.

As a geologist , I have had the extraordinary opportunity to work on both the Curiosity and Perseverance rover missions. Yet as much as scientists are learning from them, it will take another robotic mission to figure out if Mars has ever hosted life. That mission will bring Martian rocks back to Earth for analysis. Then – hopefully – we will have an answer.

From habitable to uninhabitable

While so much remains mysterious about Mars, there is one thing I am confident about. Amid the thousands of pictures both rovers are taking, I’m quite sure no alien bears or meerkats will show up in any of them. Most scientists doubt the surface of Mars, or its near-surface, could currently sustain even single-celled organisms, much less complex forms of life.

Instead, the rovers are acting as extraterrestrial detectives, hunting for clues that life may have existed eons ago. That includes evidence of long-gone liquid surface water, life-sustaining minerals and organic molecules. To find this evidence, Curiosity and Perseverance are treading very different paths on Mars, more than 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) from each other.

These two rovers will help scientists answer some big questions: Did life ever exist on Mars? Could it exist today, perhaps deep under the surface? And would it be only microbial life, or is there any possibility it might be more complex?

The Mars of today is nothing like the Mars of several billion years ago . In its infancy, Mars was far more Earth-like, with a thicker atmosphere, rivers, lakes, maybe even oceans of water, and the essential elements needed for life. But this period was cut short when Mars lost its magnetic field and nearly all of its atmosphere – now only 1% as dense as the Earth’s.

The change from habitable to uninhabitable took time, perhaps hundreds of millions of years; if life ever existed on Mars, it likely died out a few billion years ago. Gradually, Mars became the cold and dry desert that it is today, with a landscape comparable to the dry valleys of Antarctica , without glaciers and plant or animal life. The average Martian temperature is minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 62 degrees Celsius), and its meager atmosphere is nearly all carbon dioxide.

Early exploration

Robotic exploration of the Martian surface began in the 1970s, when life-detection experiments on the Viking missions failed to find any conclusive evidence for life.

Sojourner, the first rover , landed in 1997 and demonstrated that a moving robot could perform experiments. In 2004, Spirit and Opportunity followed; both found evidence that liquid water once existed on the Martian surface.

The Curiosity rover landed in 2012 and began ascending Mount Sharp, the 18,000-foot-high mountain located inside Gale crater. There is a reason why NASA chose it as an exploration site: The mountain’s rock layers show a dramatic shift in climate , from one with abundant liquid water to the dry environment of today.

So far, Curiosity has found evidence in several locations of past liquid water, minerals that may provide chemical energy, and intriguingly, a variety of organic carbon molecules .

While organic carbon is not itself alive, it is a building block for all life as we know it . Does its presence mean that life once existed on Mars?

Not necessarily. Organic carbon can be abiotic – that is, unrelated to a living organism. For example, maybe the organic carbon came from a meteorite that crashed on Mars . And though the rovers carry wonderfully sophisticated instruments, they can’t definitively tell us if these organic molecules are related to past life on Mars.

But laboratories here on Earth likely can. By collecting rock and soil samples from the Martian surface, and then returning them to Earth for detailed analysis with our state-of-the-art instruments, scientists may finally have the answer to an age-old question.

Perseverance

Enter Perseverance, NASA’s newest flagship mission to Mars . For the past three years – it landed in February 2021 – Perseverance has been searching for signs of bygone microbial life in the rocks within Jezero crater, selected as the landing site because it once contained a large lake.

Perseverance is the first step of the Mars Sample Return mission, an international effort to collect Martian rock and soil for return to Earth.

The instrument suite onboard Perseverance will help the science team choose the rocks that seem to promise the most scientific return. This will be a careful process; after all, there would be only 30 seats on the ride back to Earth for these geological samples.

Budget woes

NASA’s original plan called for returning those samples to Earth by 2033. But work on the mission – now estimated to cost between US$8 billion to $11 billion – has slowed due to budget cuts and layoffs . The cuts are severe; a request for $949 million to fund the mission for fiscal 2024 was trimmed to $300 million , although efforts are underway to restore at least some of the funding .

The Mars Sample Return mission is critical to better understand the potential for life beyond Earth. The science and the technology that will enable it are both novel and expensive. But if NASA discovers life once existed on Mars – even if it’s by finding a microbe dead for a billion years – that will tell scientists that life is not a fluke one-time event that only happened on Earth, but a more common phenomenon that could occur on many planets.

That knowledge would revolutionize the way human beings see ourselves and our place in the universe. There is far more to this endeavor than just returning some rocks.

• Colonizing Mars means contaminating Mars – and never knowing for sure if it had its own native life
• Bringing Mars rocks back to Earth: On Feb. 18, Perseverance Rover landed safely on Mars – a lead scientist explains the tech and goals

Amy J. Williams receives funding from NASA Participating Scientist grants associated with the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover and the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover.

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Interview highlights

Why nasa wants human guinea pigs to test out martian living.

Scott Detrow

Marc Rivers

Jeanette Woods

Inside a simulated Mars exterior portion of the CHAPEA's Mars Dune Alpha at the Johnson Space center in Houston, Texas in April 2023. Mark Felix/AFP /AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Inside a simulated Mars exterior portion of the CHAPEA's Mars Dune Alpha at the Johnson Space center in Houston, Texas in April 2023.

Recently, NASA invited the public for a chance to go to Mars. Or, as close as you can get to Mars on Earth.

The space agency is seeking volunteers to test out living in the 1,700-square-foot habitat known as Mars Dune Alpha. They are trying to determine — as realistically as possible — how living on Mars would affect humans.

There are already four volunteer crew members living in that habitat, who entered in June 2023 and will emerge in July of this year.

NASA is looking for people to test out its Mars simulator for a year

To talk about what it might be like for humans to make it to the real Mars, and stick it out, behavioral ecologist Kelly Weinersmith joined All Things Considered host Scott Detrow.

Weinersmith is the co-author of A City On Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, And Have We Really Thought This Through? alongside her husband, Zach Weinersmith.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity

Interview Highlights

Scott Detrow: How hard would it be to survive on Mars? And what are some of the big examples that you came up with of just how challenging this would actually be? Kelly Weinersmith: It would be pretty hard. Mars might look sort of Earth-like from the photos, but it's got some really unique challenges, like its atmosphere is only 1% of the atmosphere that we have here on Earth.

So you can't go outside without a spacesuit. There'll be no enjoying the feel of the breeze on your skin. You're going to need to suit up. And that also means that if your habitat ever depressurizes and you don't fix it fast enough, you would probably not make it through that experience.

We also don't really understand how Mars impacts the human body. We've had humans orbiting Earth since the 1970s, we have had over 600 astronauts go to space, but the space stations are orbiting under the protection of Earth's magnetosphere.

So they don't get exposed to the radiation that space has to offer, which differs from what we have here on Earth. So we actually don't know, for example, how much cancer risk would be increased in a place like Mars, which doesn't have a strong magnetosphere like we have on Earth and doesn't have a thick atmosphere to protect you.

Imagine getting brunch here someday. NASA/Getty Images hide caption

Imagine getting brunch here someday.

That sand on the surface of Mars, it's actually called regolith. It's sharp and jagged and sort of laden with endocrine-disrupting hormones, which will mess up your blood pressure and your heart rates. So you're going to want to make sure that you don't grow your plants directly in that or let that get into your habitat.

And it's probably going to be cramped. Right now, it costs something like $300 to send just an apple to the International Space Station. It's going to cost way more to send it to Mars. And so you're going to have a pretty small habitat when you're initially starting out on Mars. So it's going to be cramped, and you better like the people you're stuck in there with.

NASA retires Ingenuity, the little helicopter that made history on Mars

Detrow: Why do you think they're such a draw then? This is a scientific goal not just at NASA, but at big, private companies like SpaceX, and more beyond that. It really seems like something embedded in our culture — this desire to get to the next big thing.

I feel like there are a lot of people out there, including the people who have volunteered to be locked in a room at the Johnson Space Center for a year, who have dreamed about maybe going to Mars one day. Why do you think that is

Weinersmith: I'm a sci-fi geek. I totally get it. The idea of waking up on the surface of Mars and seeing a Martian sunrise sounds absolutely epic. But there are people who have other specific reasons for going, and it sort of depends on the community that you're talking to.

The rotating space station community, which these days is led by Jeff Bezos, who has a rocket company called Blue Origin — they argue that living in these rotating space stations is going to save the Earth because you can move people off-planet to these rotating space stations. That's going to reduce the pressure on the planet Earth.

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A lot of the Mars folks are excited about a chance to sort of start new governments and new ways of life, and a lot of them argue that Earth has become bureaucratic and wimpy and by going to Mars, we'd be able to start over again and sort of fix all the mistakes that we've made here on Earth.

And that community tends to be led by Elon Musk, who owns SpaceX. And Musk is also particularly excited about having a backup for humanity. So the idea that if humans are multiplanetary, if something happens to the humans on Earth, there'll be a backup so humans can continue on even if something happens to Earth. So there's a lot of different reasons for wanting to go to space, a lot of different camps, but for me, I think it's mostly awesome.

Detrow: So do you think there's value in these continued studies that NASA is doing? Do you think there's more information to gather about what this is like? Or like you said, is the track record pretty clear, and we know what the challenges would be?

Weinersmith: You know, so I love NASA, and I love their exploration missions. And I never want to really be on the record saying that I am not pro something NASA's doing, but here I go. To me, the value of these analogs can be measured in what you change about your mission plan when the analog is done.

If at the very end they said, 'OK, we know that humans can't survive isolated and confined environments for nine months because they end up hating each other, so we're not going to go.'

That would be a concrete thing. That's not going to happen here. And as far as I can tell, there's no specific piece of information they're going to get at the end of this one year or at the end of the three one-year stints, that's going to specifically change something about a plan for going to Mars.

A new satellite will track climate-warming pollution. Here's why that's a big deal

We've had astronauts in space for more than 50 years. Surely, we can extract the data from what we know about what astronauts eat on the International Space Station. And this just seems like an incredibly expensive way to sort of validate that. And also, it's not even running for the full two years that you would need for a mission to Mars — because of orbital mechanics, it takes about six months to get there. You usually stay for about a year, [or that's what is suggested in] most of the proposals - and then a six-month trip back.

For two years, you're not even getting all the psychology information you'd need about how hard it is to live with four people for the whole length of time you'd need to be out there. So as far as I can tell, I'm not seeing the piece of information that's going to change our plans for going to Mars. Maybe I've missed it.

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What Is The Thesis Statement Of The Research Report Life On Mars?

Many students look for an excellent way to start a research paper on life on mars. However, to write a good thesis statement on the topic, a student must understand what a thesis statement is and its importance. This article aims to enlighten you on how to write a great thesis statement and give you some suggestions on thesis statements ideas you can use for your upcoming essay. But first: a thesis statement appears in the introductory paragraph and presents the essay’s main topic. In your life on mars paper, the thesis statement should introduce the reader to what you’ll be talking about. Your thesis statement is the most crucial part of an essay because it also sets the tone for the rest of the paper.

What Can You Write About in Your Life on Mars Thesis?

How to start thesis statement of the research report life on mars, why introduction to research report on life on mars matters, topics to write in your life on mars research paper thesis statement, let’s help you write the best life on mars thesis statements and papers.

There are three approaches you can use to write a thesis statement about life on Mars. They include giving detailed explanations, arguing your facts, and analyzing the topic. Here’s more to that:

• Explanatory thesis statement: This is where the writer gives a detailed account of a particular topic on life on mars. It requires you to be accurate on facts you write down and present evidence. These thesis statements do not support or oppose any claim.
• Argumentative thesis statement: Such a thesis statement requires you to express a specific view on life on Mars. After that, back or oppose your idea while supporting your stand. You need plenty of research to back your opinion. An example is ‘There can be no life on Mars.’
• Analytical thesis statement: It requires analysis of a particular topic, defining it, noting its various features, and evaluating it. Such thesis statements are suitable for writing papers where data analysis dominates.

An introduction to a research report done correctly will help you structure your argumentative, analytical or explanatory essay . Here are the steps to follow when writing your thesis statement on the research report on life on Mars:

• Conceptualize your thesis statement. It’s always a good idea to brainstorm and have the statement ready before writing. Have the relevant research to help you develop the body of your essay. In this case, read about life on Mars from several materials to establish points to write about.
• Answer a certain question. Your thesis statement should be an answer to a specific question. It should inform the reader what you’ll be writing about. For instance, a thesis statement such as ‘How life on mars negatively affects human life’ tells the reader that you intend to write about the adverse effects of mars on human life.
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The introduction of any research report informs the reader of the paper’s contents. It gives some information on the subject that will be discussed. An excellent example of an introduction ought to:

• Provide the reader with background information about Mars.
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Are you figuring out what to write? The following are some examples regarding life on Mars that you can use as inspiration in your paper:

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