Science & Environment
Life on Mars: NASA’s Insight Lander finds evidence of…
Well, the Insights Lander which has been on Mars since 2018, has shown the presence of liquid water below the surface of the planet. Water is considered essential for life, and geological studies show the planet’s surface had lakes, rivers and oceans more than 3 billion years ago.
The findings of the lander have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
How did water reach or form on Mars?
The study has found that the volume of liquid water predicted beneath the surface is “more than the water volumes proposed to have hypothesized ancient Martian oceans.
Scientists hypothesize that water might have infiltrated from the surface to below just like it happens on the Earth. “On Earth, groundwater infiltrated from the surface” to deep underground, one of the authors, Vashan Wright of the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We expect this process to have occurred on Mars as well when the upper crust was warmer than it is today.”
The study found that large reservoirs of liquid water in fractures 11.5 kilometres (7.15 miles) to 20km beneath the surface best explained the InSight measurements.
What is InSight Lander?
The Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) was a NASA Discovery Program mission that placed a single geophysical lander on Mars to study its deep interior.
“It addressed one of the most fundamental issues of planetary science: understanding the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system (including Earth) more than four billion years ago. The mission ended in December 2022 after more than four years of collecting unique science on Mars,” NASA says about this ambitious mission.
InSight was launched on May 5, 2018.
Is life possible on Mars?
The red planet is a stubborn one in hiding secrets and scientists are curious enough to find it out. In 1996, NASA scientists published a paper outlining possible chemical traces of life-forms in a Martian rock that fell to Earth. Known colloquially as the Allan Hills meteorite, or by its official number, ALH84001, it had been collected in Antarctica more than a decade earlier. “It contained chemical traces similar to those left behind by Earth microbes; some photographs even revealed microscopic features that looked something like bacteria,” scientists have said.
One of the major goals of the Mars 2020 mission was to find life on Mars, NASA says.
How many Mars missions have happened so far?
The earliest attempt to reach Mars and study the possibility of life happened in 1960. After multiple failures, the first successful mission to Mars was NASA’s Mariner 4 in 1965, which provided the first close-up images of the Martian surface. Since then, several missions have followed, including NASA’s Viking 1 and 2 in the 1970s, which were the first to land on Mars and send back detailed images and data.
The 1990s saw the arrival of the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Pathfinder missions, which delivered groundbreaking information about Mars’ geology and climate. In the 2000s, missions like NASA’s Mars Odyssey and the European Space Agency’s Mars Express expanded our understanding of the planet.
The 2010s brought significant milestones with NASA’s Curiosity rover and InSight lander, each contributing valuable scientific data. India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (Mangalyaan) in 2014 marked a notable achievement by making India the first country to successfully orbit Mars on its maiden attempt.
Currently, several Mars missions have been successful and some are still operational.
India’s Mangalyaan
India is a frontrunner in this ambitious mission. India’s Mangalyaan, officially named the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), represents a significant achievement in space exploration. Launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on November 5, 2013, Mangalyaan was India’s first interplanetary mission. Its primary objective was to explore Mars, studying its surface, morphology, and atmosphere. The spacecraft successfully enters Mars’ orbit on September 24, 2014, making India the first country to achieve this feat on its maiden attempt.
