“You have to bring up a very deep core, or glassify the sides of the hole,” she told New Scientist. “It would be wonderful to dig deeply into the Martian surface, but we’re not really there yet with the technology to do so,” says Pamela Conrad, an MSL team member and supervisor for astrobiology at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US. Technological hurdlesīut even if space agencies wanted to drill deeply into Mars, they would have to overcome major technological hurdles. It may be able to drill about 10 centimetres into rock. NASA’s giant roving Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), due to lift off in 2009, will search for organic molecules that signal how habitable the environment is for life. It will be able to drill down 2 metres into the soil. Unfortunately, none of the missions currently being planned by any space agency include a drill that could reach such depths.Įurope’s ExoMars mission, planned for launch in 2011, will search for signs of life – such as fragments of DNA – that may exist at shallower depths. “If they’re frozen in the ice, they could be brought back to animation with a bit of warmth and nutrients,” Dartnell told New Scientist. If living things existed when the sea was liquid – an estimated 5 million years ago, they could still survive in a dormant state at a depth of 7.5 metres, according to the team. Instead, the most promising place for finding life on Mars may be the “frozen sea” – a region near the equator, called Elysium, that appears to have blocks of water ice just beneath the surface (see ‘Pack ice’ suggests frozen sea on Mars). But Dartnell says it would be difficult to land rovers on the steep sides of craters, where the gullies are located. These include gullies that show signs of recent water flow. They believe regions with liquid water or water ice are more likely to host Martian life, since water is an essential requirement for life on Earth. Now, he and colleagues have calculated how far down life would probably be able to survive the barrage of ionising radiation from charged space particles.
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