MOVE OVER, MARS ROVER: NASA PREPARES TO PUT A CHOPPER ON THE RED PLANET

Next year, NASA will launch something incredible: the next Mars mission. While it does not include humans quite yet, it is something very cool.

Mars 2020 is the first mission in decades specifically designed to search for life on the red planet, moreso biosignatures, or evidence of the presence of life – little patterns left in the Martian soil that could only be made by a living organism. The most likely scenario of a living organism on Mars would be microscopic bacteria that live underground to shield themselves from the planet’s harsh environment.  

Mars has a thin atmosphere and not much of any magnetic field to shield from radiation coming from the sun, so life on the surface is unlikely.  From photos of the surface it is quite clear to see that there are no large cultures of anything alive. Previous missions such as Curiosity discovered evidence that at one point, there was liquid water on Mars, the key building block for life as we know it.

So, Mars 2020 is in a sense a followup mission to run further tests.  

Missions like Curiosity were akin to “a chem lab on wheels” wandering the surface, but Mars 2020 is a different type of mission. It is similar to a mine on wheels, probing the red planet. It will drill deep into the surface of Mars and collect what are called cores, small rock and soil samples that are intended to be left on the surface for later pick-up and return to Earth. They will later be studied, likely using techniques that haven’t even been invented yet to search for these biosignatures.  

Many researchers remain skeptical of a breakthrough. Whatever the case, not only will these samples be the first Mars rocks returned to Earth, but there are some extremely valuable things to learn from them. Mars is a time capsule, a largely unchanged snapshot of its state around the same time life on Earth was developing. The issue with studying that time period on Earth is rocks from that era are not preserved, being subjected to our weather and other major changes.  

As a result, in a truly poetic sense, we have to look to the sky to find our origins on the ground. Mars 2020 will be our binoculars into the past, as well as into the future. 

But that is just a glance at the rover used in the mission. Mars 2020 packs another small device that is truly revolutionary – a helicopter. Yes, you read correctly, a small, Martian helicopter, the first powered flight conducted on another planet.  

The engineering of this tiny helicopter is truly mind-boggling. Given the very thin atmosphere, flying this device is equivalent to flying a helicopter above the Earth at 100,000 feet altitude. For perspective, never has a non-rocket jet airplane flown at that height. So, the blades of the helicopter will spin five times faster than helicopter blades on Earth. As well as the need to cut as much weight as  possible, the name of the game in spaceflight engineering, the project team does gain an advantage in the sense that  gravity on Mars is just 38% of that on Earth.

The helicopter will have the ability to fly on its own power, take photos of large areas, transmit data to the rover, and then send that data back to Earth. It will serve a multitude of purposes. First, it can cover much more ground than a rover in a far shorter time. Opportunity, a previous Mars rover, nosed around for 14 years and only covered about the distance of a marathon (26.2 miles). This helicopter will ideally travel much farther in far shorter time.  

It also can take vitally important aerial shots of Mars, something seldom accomplished by anything that close to the surface. We can get remarkably valuable data on everything from areas the rover will be safe to travel in, to scientific data, and even scout potentially future landing sites for human and rover expeditions alike.  

From cores of the Martian surface destined to for eventual study on Earth, to missions designed for research into the origins of life on Earth as well as potential alien life on other planets, to a novel helicopter checking out the red planet, Mars 2020 is shaping up to be absolutely “Earth-shattering” undertaking, directed from 33.9 million miles away.

Mars 2020 is scheduled to launch in July of next year. Only time will tell what groundbreaking things we will discover about ourselves, and even potential extraterrestrial life on Mars.

At its root, Mars 2020 will seek to answer the long-held question: Is there life on the red planet?