(WWJ) – Nearly two years ago the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover landed on the Red Planet with the goal of making some big discoveries.
Well, it appears Perseverance is on the cusp of doing just that.
On this week’s episode of “All Over the Space,” Mike Murray from the Delta College Planetarium in Bay City tells WWJ’s Erin Vee the rover has finally moved into an area of the Jezero crater where there’s an ancient river delta where water once flowed, creating a lot of debris.
And where you have water, you’re hopefully gonna be able to find signs of microbial life, fossilized, perhaps. So this is the area we’ve been looking forward to getting into, ever since landing. Now that it’s in that area, Perseverance is finding some really interesting soil samples,” Murray said.
He says the rover has been collecting soil samples, putting them in small vials and leaving them on the surface.
“Because, hopefully by the end of the decade, both the European Space Agency and NASA is going to have a joint mission to land and pick these vials up and bring them back to Earth for a much more detailed analysis,” he said.
The future analysis of those samples could answer a question we’ve long had – are we alone in the universe?
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That question comes as Dr. Frank Drake died at age 92 earlier this month. Murray says Drake was “probably the founder of SETI – the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.”
“I’m not talking about the search for flying saucers or aliens. I mean, he was the first to really establish a scientific study of the probability of whether intelligent life could exist in the Milky Way Galaxy or not,” he said.
Murray and Vee also had a discussion on the release of the U.S. Space Force’s official theme song, as well as some upcoming events at the planetarium.
More information on the Delta College Planetarium in Bay City can be found online. Follow the planetarium on Facebook and Instagram for the latest news and updates.
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