God Willin’ And The Ancient Creek Don’t Rise
“I am Mars’ sole survivor. There is a reason for that.”
— J’onn J’onzz , aka Martian Manhunter, of DC Comics
While Superman’s a household name, most Americans probably don’t know that he may not have been the Justice League’s most powerful member. That distinction may go to the above-quoted Martian Manhunter, who, unlike Superman, comes from a real-life planet; one NASA’s Perseverance rover is currently searching for signs that it did support life (even if not as advanced as J’onn J’onzz).
Hardly our first rover on the red planet, its novel mission is informed by prior determinations that parts of Mars used to be endowed with the necessary warmth to sustain liquid water, on which life depends. Specifically, it’s exploring Jezero Crater, the now-vacant home of a lake that evaporated several billion years ago, a victim of Mars’ lesser gravity. Heavier and more sophisticated than any of its predecessors, the 1.1-ton Perseverance is equipped with lasers that permit it to analyze the chemical composition of rocks and a radar system whose waves are able to penetrate the ground, permitting it to identify chemical signatures, including those of fossilized microbes that may have died of thirst when their home joined the Martian atmosphere.
It will be slow going for the rover, its mission expected to take two years. But it’s going to keep busy. In addition to the all of the analysis that it will undertake while crawling along, it will perform the first leg in a relay that will hopefully return small pieces of Mars back to earth. Drilling rock samples, it will seal them in tubes that it will then leave on the surface for eventual pickup by a European Space Agency rover, which will then transfer the tubes to a rocket that will take them into space and hand them off to an orbiting spacecraft that will bring them back to Earth some time around 10 to 15 years from now.
Additionally, Perseverance has already accomplished a different component of its mission. Take a listen to the first ever recordings of Martian sound: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/audio/. It’s no Edison’s recitation of “Mary had a little lamb,” but hey!
Further, Perseverance did not make the trip all by itself; it carried a helicopter named Ingenuity, which also survived the landing. Now it will need to detach itself from Perseverance’s underside and charge itself with its own solar panel. Hopefully, it will then perform the first powered flight in the history of the thin Martian atmosphere, perhaps buoyed by the remnants of the river delta that once occupied Jezero.
And if Ingenuity fails to take flight, hey, there’s always J’onn J’onzz.
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