Martian Missives - The Race for Mars

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So Europe does still have a role in exploring Mars - albeit at a distance. Nasa on the other hand are also having to make some tricky decisions about whether the champagne glass is half full or half empty, because as I go to press, they are having problems contacting, Spirit, the first of their Mars Exploration Rovers, which had landed successfully on the surface of Mars on the 4th January. It remains to be seen whether it is just a technical glitch or something more serious. I will keep my fingers crossed for the former.

Meanwhile, the second rover is due on the surface of Mars on the 25th. Though given the glitches with the first Rover, there will still be a few sweaty palms in Nasa's control centre that are likely to remain for the duration of the mission. Even after it has (hopefully!) successfully beamed back its first communications. The two rovers are targeted to sites on opposite sides of Mars that appear to have been affected by liquid water in the past. The first landing site is at Gusev Crater, a possible former lake in a giant impact crater, and the second at Meridiani Planum, where mineral deposits (hematite) suggest Mars had a wet past.

It is worth bearing in mind that even if the Rover's don't find any evidence for life, or even water on Mars (assuming that at least one of them works!); that this is very far from the end of the story. They are only designed to travel 40 metres (about 44 yards) in a single day, for a total of up to one 1 kilometer (about three-quarters of a mile) during the duration of their 90 day mission. Imagine dropping a similar exploration vehicle in the middle of the Sahara desert. How much water or life would it be likely to find? So, considering the worst-case scenario, that the explorers find nothing to get the biologists excited (or the rovers explode). It does not necessarily mean that it doesn't exist. It is a bit like looking for a proverbial needle in a haystack; and given that the haystack is about half the size of Earth, unless we have got extremely lucky with the placement of the landers it is probably more than likely that no conclusive evidence will be found.

Credit NASA The first use of the tools on the arm of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit on the 20th Jan 2004

If it is though it could be the start of a whole new chapter in human history. This sounds dramatic, and rightly so, because it is. If we find conclusive evidence that life has existed on another planet, in however basic a form, then it is nothing short of a revolution in placing ourselves within the context of the Universe. We will know that we are not alone, and apart from anything else it would be likely to be the only jus