Friday 2 December 2011

mars - What is the next planned mission that can discover life on another planet?

The Exomars rover of ESA and Roscosmos would be the obvious answer. To be launched in 2018. It will drill 2 meters deep and as far I know is the only mission since the Vikings in the 1970's, to explicitly be equipped to find biosignatures, signs of life. But the Russians, who will land the rover, have had a very poor Mars mission success rate, ESA cooperates with them since NASA abandoned the project a few years ago, and ESA's only own landing attempt on Mars failed too, Beagle 2. And some biologists think it is more challenging to detect sparse exotic microbial life than what that rover is capable of. It weights about 1/3 of MSL Curiosity, and underground life can maybe be very local.



I want to recommend the blogger Robert Walker who writes at great length and well informed, still interestingly speculative, about possibilities for life on Mars, what one maybe should be looking for.



I should add that since 1960 SETI uses telescopes to pick up evidence of interstellar life which is powerful enough to somehow change its environment to make itself astronomically detectable. That's the other main potential except for probes in the Solar system. But not even SETI people sit up waiting for it any more.

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