Perseverance has come to Mars. An applause from NASA’s control room confirms the rover’s touch of Mars, which sent the first image of the red planet’s abyss. Perseverance is ‘safe’ in the soil of Mars. Vollar controllers confirmed that “NASA’s diligent rover, ingenious helicopter was attached to its belly and landed safely on Mars” and engineers began analyzing the data.
“Italy has a key role to play in space exploration and the perseverance rover of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission is the first chapter in the ambitious Mars model return program,” ASI President Giorgio Sokokia underlined in Reynolds24.
“We will look for traces of life on Mars, and the rover of perseverance will be able to search for these ‘traces,'” said Theresa Fornaro, a Neapolitan researcher at the INAF in Florence, one of the world’s thirteen ‘Mars 2020 participating scientists’. “It will be my role to understand the data from the tools on the rover and to see if there are any ‘symptoms’ in life.”
Fornaro explained, “It is very plausible that at the same time, identical cells on Earth grew on Mars. We did not expect these life forms to form as they did on Earth because Mars died so quickly. Radiation wiped everything out.”
“We did not expect life to form on Mars – Fornoro concluded – but there were single-celled microbes, it could be, and we expect these traces.”
