Many New Mars Probes Ready to Explore

April 15th, 2008

We can’t get enough of Mars apparently. Over the next few years at least 3 more Mars probes will be landing on the red planet. The Phoenix Lander is on its way to Mars right now, and should arrive at Mars on May 25. After this will come NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, a large rover that will launch next year and arrive in 2010. Finally, the European Space Agency’s ExoMars mission is scheduled for 2014.

The rovers Spirit and Opportunity are still scouting out the surface and sending back images as we speak.

Michael Meyer, a lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program and Luann Becker, a University of California, Santa Barbara geochemist are working on testing for alien life with missions looking for organic chemicals which would provide clues that living organisms are there. Becker has developed the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer, or MOMA. She explains, “MOMA is like a Star Trek tricorder because we can use it to cover the full gambit of measurements that will answer the question of life. Then we’ll be able to address the difficult question of whether something interesting is there.”

This kind of thing has been tried before with the Viking missions of the 1970s, although the results were frustratingly ambiguous. Kind of how I feel when I look at my home gym equipment. Says Meyer, “Part of the controversy was with Viking’s Labeled Release Experiment. The concept was that if we added organics and water to the Martian soil, all the Martian organisms in that soil would go to town eating the organic matter. The organics would in the process be broken down into carbon dioxide gas, and we could measure that.”

Check out some of the images from Mars that have been taken recently.