Yesterday I woke up at 3 a.m. with a scary thought: what if COVID-19 was a sign that H.G. Wells had it backwards?
What if it wasn’t true that viruses would save us (spoiler alert!) Killing the Martian invaders, as Wells wrote in “The War of the Worlds.” What if the Martians used viruses to weaken us for the invasion? How would we know?
Looking at him, that’s right. And fortunately, Earthlings are recently sending two new probes and a new orbiter to the red planet, adding a NASA rover that will hopefully be controlled in part by the new Hampshire.
“We were all very anxious, waiting to hear. It’s very competitive, it deserves to be carried out at any time,” said Dr Frances Rivera-Hernandez, a postdoctoral planetary geologist at Dartmouth College, who submitted an application to be a component of the clinical team that will indicate where the Perseverance rover will pass and what it will do after it lands on Mars next February.
Dr. Marisa Palucis, an assistant professor at Dartmouth, is also on the waiting list. She revels in the feeling: she is part of the clinical team of the Curiosity rover on Mars. She at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when NASA’s Curiosity rover landed and remembers it with the melancholy that accompanies many pre-pancemic memories: “It’s one of the most productive 10 days of my life.”
Controlling a car-sized cellular scientific device at least 34 million kilometers away is a non-trivial task, either by symptoms of an imminent interplanetary attack or by degrees of water a million years ago. Palucis described the process.
“Every morning you get up and the rover sends pictures from the previous day. You look at it and decide, “Oh, this outcrop is very interesting!” The clinical team then meets and decides. He makes a clinical plan: he leads to this rock, they model the chemistry, take pictures, and then paint the engineering team to combine the plan, which is sent back to the rover,” Palucis said.
COVID-19 will complicate the Perseverance procedure because the clinical team cannot meet in a room and pictures in combination over the march, where the day lasts 24 and a half hours. They will be reflected via videoconferencing, which, as we have all learned, is not the same as doing it in a shared box of Dunkin Munchkins, but despite this, hopes are maximum of what will be discovered when Perseverance starts running on Mars. . at its top speed of a tenth of a mile consistent with the hour.
For scientists, the rover’s greatest merit is its location. It will land in an alluvial cone, a delta of sediments deposited millennia ago through a giant amount of moving liquid.
Curiosity also landed near such a reservoir “but has moved away from the alluvial cone,” Palucis said. “Perseverance will make him rise.”
“Let’s look from the sediments, the stratification of the sediments, the amount of water deposited and when, satellite photographs checking the soil,” he said.
Rivera-Hernandez, who also studies such deposits on Earth, knows what this means. “Mud is effective in preserving biosignatures, evidence beyond life. This is one of the most productive places to look for symptoms beyond life on Mars,” he said. “The rover’s tools were selected in particular to look for symptoms beyond life.” This includes the chemical search for biological molecules and cameras for very close photographs “in search of a texture that we sometimes characterize microbial life on Earth.”
But even if Perseverance cannot locate multicellular fossils, researching the earth, silt and rocks left through the flowing water can tell us how it probably existed beyond life.
“If there has been a river for 10,000 years, it is not enough time to replace life. If you’ve had an ocean for a billion years, that’s a matter of it,” Palucis said.
The Chinese are also sending a rover to Mars as a component of their newly launched Tianwen-1 mission. They’re a little discreet about what exactly he’ll do, but the two Dartmouth researchers didn’t seem too worried. More knowledge is a smart thing for scientists.
It’s quite imaginable that next spring, three other rovers will science on the planet’s surface, if Curiosity continues to set records for staying power. There will also be more orbiters on Mars than I can count, adding one that has just been introduced through the United Arab Emirates from all locations, taking photos and recording data.
It’s unbelievable, given that a century ago we still thought the planet had channels of a declining civilization. On the other hand, it’s also just a drop in a very giant bucket.
“If when we read the geology of the Earth, we only had 4 geologists, we knew so little,” Palucis said.
If you need more geeks in your week, subscribe to David Brooks’ weekly loose newsletter at GraniteGeek.org. You can also pay attention to him communicating his stories on the GraniteGeek podcast, granitegeek.concordmonitor.com/podcast, or contact Chris Ryan on WKXL radio on soundcloud.com/wkxl/
Help us fund COVID-19 reports in our community.