Is there life on Mars?(7)

Not all of those samples will be discarded after investigation. Some will be packed for eventual dispatch to Earth by a project called the Mars Sample Return mission. This is a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, ESA, that involves launching five separate spacecraft over the course of a decade. Perseverance is the first, and its collaboration-related job is to seal samples of Martian rock that its operators think worthy of further investigation into one of around 30 titanium tubes which it carries. As the illustration below presages, it will leave these on the surface to be picked up by an ESA-designed “fetch rover” that could arrive as early as 2028. Once collected, the tubes will be brought back to Earth by a system of relay craft, and their contents analysed.

Perhaps most intriguingly of all, Perseverance will also carry a 1.8kg helicopter, called Ingenuity. If this manages to fly in Mars’s thin atmosphere (which has about 1% of the density of Earth’s at the surface), it will represent the first controlled flight, beyond the landing and lift-off of a spacecraft, to take place on another heavenly body. And if that happens, it will pave the way for more sophisticated drones on future mission to act as scouts.