![]() Is it the same as ancient life on Earth? Did life on both planets have the same origins?” Corpolongo said. “There is a really big question if we find evidence of ancient life on Mars. ![]() ![]() Suddenly, a picture shows up of the underside of the rover and its surroundings on Mars.” “Watching the landing, I remember being too excited to sit down,” Czaja said. Before the launch, NASA engineers described the spacecraft’s final descent through the thin Martian atmosphere as “seven minutes of terror.”Ĭzaja and other members of the science team tuned in to the JPL livestream to watch as they learned of the spacecraft’s fate, deploying its parachute, jettisoning its heat shields and lowering the rover by cables onto the Martian surface. Perseverance has celebrated a series of successes from its launch to its touchdown on Mars seven months later via a Skycrane, a rocket-powered descent vehicle that lowered the rover to the surface via cables. The person who thinks of that question might not have been born yet.” “There may be questions nobody has even thought of yet. You’re not just doing it to answer the questions we have today,” Czaja said. Mission controllers prepared to look again. Perhaps, said skeptics, alien markings were hidden by haze. The camera on board MGS had to peer through wispy clouds to see the Face. “That’s one of the great things about sample return. The Face on Mars is located at 41 degrees north martian latitude where it was winter in April '98 - a cloudy time of year on the Red Planet. These analyses are bound to reveal other surprises back on Earth. If Perseverance does find what looks to be tangible evidence of ancient life, confirmation likely will have to wait until a return mission to retrieve the samples the rover collects. I’m excited and honored to be part of it,” Czaja said. The team includes experts in geology, geochemistry, planetary physics and epidemiology, among others. One fundamental task of the mission: collect rock samples on the Martian surface to bring back to Earth during a future mission.Ĭzaja, who studies Precambrian paleobiology, astrobiology and biogeochemistry, is one of 16 scientists around the world named in June to a new NASA science group that will plan how the global scientific community will share and study those samples. Now he and his two students are members of the mission science team helping NASA explore the red planet to answer fundamental questions about the origins of life in the universe. UC associate professor Andy Czaja served on the NASA advisory board that picked where to send the rover for the best chance to find evidence of ancient life. UC College of Arts and Sciences geology students Desirée Baker and Andrea Corpolongo are working on the NASA science team, using the rover and its helicopter sidekick, Ingenuity, to explore Jezero Crater near an ancient river delta that might hold clues of the first known extraterrestrial life. College of Engineering and Applied Science.College of Education, Criminal Justice, & Human Services. ![]() College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. ![]()
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