Is there life on Mars?(14)

It will be a sophisticated spacecraft, if the details revealed about the mission’s landing system are accurate. Zhang Rongqiao, the chief designer, told Chinese television-viewers in 2019 that the lander would separate from the craft’s main body at an altitude of 70 metres and hover until it found a safe landing spot. Cameras and laser scanners will help this lander avoid obstacles as it makes its way to the surface.
Whether the lander will be capable of the sorts of biology-detecting activity planned for Perseverance and, after it, Rosalind Franklin, is unclear. But even if it is not, those other two vehicles, combined with the forthcoming ESA and NASA Mars sample-return mission, do now offer a realistic possibility of answering the question of whether there is, or was, life elsewhere than on Earth. A failure to find it would be a disappointment, although the search would no doubt go on, both on Mars and elsewhere. But an answer in the affirmative, even were that life only bacterial and extinct, would surely transform humanity’s view of itself as profoundly as did the discoveries of Nicolaus Copernicus and Charles Darwin.