After seven months traveling through space, NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars last Thursday to begin its mission mapping the Martian terrain and collecting soil samples. Perseverance joins its cousin Curiosity nearly nine years after its landing in 2012 on a mission to discover traces of carbon-based life on the red planet.
“The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith,” said NASA in a recent press release. They also indicate that the Perseverance mission could be a precursor to human exploration of our neighboring planet.
Recently collected evidence suggests that Venus and Mars may have been habitable at one point in our solar system’s history. Scientists hope to learn more about what might have rendered them the desert wastelands that we know today, and perhaps provide us with a clearer picture about the fate of our own world.
While Venus and Mars are now merely treacherous terrains with inhospitable climates, some have theorized that the dangers of Mars may be manageable using advanced technology and terraforming. Tech mogul Elon Musk hopes to see humans become a ‘multiplanetary’ species, and wants to build a city on Mars to kick off civilization’s expansion into the cosmos.
NASA’s Perseverance and Curiosity rovers, along with other missions to Mars by science institutions around the globe could set the stage for the next great leap for mankind — a leap towards inhabiting new worlds, and discovering new possibilities for the future of our civilization as we know it.
