We’re Still Kicking The Can Down The Road On Mars

Keith’s note: (This stream of consciousness bubbled out of my head on a Sunday night) One of the potential victims of the upcoming NASA budget cuts is the Mars Sample Return. Its had its problems with cost and schedule and complexity. But what if you did not need to return the samples from Mars?

The whole idea behind NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is to gather samples and return them to Earth. Once inside a specially secure lab with high Biosafety Level (BSL) sample return facilities, the process of studying the samples could commence.

When asked why this could not be done on Mars, NASA invariably says that this can be done much better on Earth. And besides, there’s no way you could send all of the research hardware Mars much less obtain the same level of analysis.

This was in all of the presentations I read while growing up in the 70s and 70s, and has been in every single presentation I have seen from NASA starting when I worked at NASA Headquarters Life Science Division – as a biologist. It was hard to argue with this stance when we only had the somewhat inconclusive twin Viking lander‘s data – derived from the two amazingly compact labs they had on the surface of Mars.

NASA has always wanted to explore Mars – with robots and then humans. It is a given that you cannot argue with. Usually the robotic plan focused upon building knowledge and then bringing samples back to Earth. If there was life then human missions would need ot take that into account. If not (based on a very small sample collection) then the mission design might be simpler – or at least different.

I can recall meetings and documents wherein the need for a preliminary assessment of life/no life on Mars was seen as a moving target. Some people felt that it would be irresponsible and unethical to send humans to Mars if life was found since there might be a biohazard risk for the crew. Others felt that it would be irresponsible and unethical to send humans to Mars if life was found since there was a chance we’d contaminate things and obscure the science (and maybe infect Mars).

Others felt that bringing anything from Mars (or any other world that is possible inhabited would risk our home world’s biosphere. Their compromise was to build a special space station where the samples could be studied. No one ever got to the point of explaining what would happen to infected crew members.

Usually the stance taken on the forward and back contamination was far more measured with much less arm waving. So they then set to the task of how to do this. As you can imagine the more times you asked engineers to design a Mars Sample Return mission the more variations you got. If things were too heavy then you split it into parts. If it was too expensive then you got other counties to participate. And if things still got too expensive then you’d fiddle with the part you had and usually end up with some thing that was even more complex and still too expensive.

Recently the current re-configured iteration of a Mars Sample mission involved lander and a little rover to pick up things that Mars Perseverance left in sample caches. They’d then rock them into orbit where another spacecraft would take them back to Earth. At somepoint helicopters started to appear in the scenarios based on the unexpected resilience of the Mars Ingenuity helicopter.

Eventually the design reviews and program reviews and external advisory groups all converged on the obvious: no matter how you tweaked things it was still too expensive and begging to experience delays. So NASA paused everything to do a sanity check.

Back to the humans on Mars thing. If you were in the camp wherein you needed to see some sample analysis on the life/no life issue before committing to sending humans then you’d need to wait far beyond the notional targets of the 2020s or 2030s – or now the 2040s. Indeed, if you went ahead with some of the human missions on their timelines they’d land humans on Mars before the Mars Sample Return Mission even left Mars – so the astronauts could just pick up the rocks instead. You see where this is going.

Add in the fact that the Science Mission Directorate already had looming budget issues for all of the things it wanted to do and it was time to rethink everything. The process was supposed to provide an answer as early as this summer. But then the new Administration’s early budget fears became reality and the MSR mission seems to be slated for outright cancellation.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s presence within the new Administration and success of SpaceX Starship testing prompted him to push for a mission to Mars with a departure in late 2026. Other than having some of his company’s robots on board not much else is known. If this all works there is one obvious thing to consider: the sheer volume and mass that such a vehicle could drop onto the suface of Mars.

As I noted earlier, one of the basic show stoppers for analyzing samples on Mars – in situ – was the ability to condense the things we have on Earth down to a size that could work – remotely – on Mars. Viking’s lab was a miracle 50 years ago. While we now land larger more sophisticated things on Mars now, they are not all that much larger in relation to the twin Viking Orbiter/Lander missions.

What if mass and volume – and power (they will bring Tesla solar panels no doubt) were no longer as much of a limitation? What if you could send more than one of the same payload design or several variants that work differently but do the same thing? In other words both similar and dissimilar redundancy? Add in a large communications system and you’d be able to bypass the current system using existing orbiters. Or maybe throw a high speed Starlink constellation out of the Starship on the way to Mars.

Of course someone has ot pay for this but it seems that SpaceX is going on its own dime. They may have operational science to do but maybe some NASA payloads to accomplish some or all of the MSR science plan might be possible.

Let’s forget Starship scenario and go back to what we know. We’ve used several modes to land things on Mars – the inflatable bags and the skycrane. The Spirit and Opportunity rover designs were stunningly successful. So copy them, add new instruments, and send a dozen of them to Mars all at once. Make sure they have complementary and overlapping capabilities in case one or more fail.

You could also send humans to Mars – almost. Just don’t land them – at least not right away. We have a proven ability to have humans live and be productive in microgravity for several years at atime. You could start building a Gateway-like presence in Mars orbit – using a dedicated constellation of Starlinks you’d be able to do telescience with rovers and robots on the surface with minimal latency.

And with humans calling the shots you would not need to invest lots of capabilities into autonomy on the rovers (although it would be smart to do that since they can operate when humans are sleeping or not in orbit). This also avoids some of the forward- and back contamination issues, allows visitation to special areas that are probably where biosignatures are more likely to be found.

But wait – how you get a ride to Mars is one thing – even if you have lots of luggage space and/or have humans a fraction of a light second away in orbit – is important. But there is still the issue of the sophisticated tools you need on the surface to collect, prepare, image, section, test, and otherwise poke and prod. We’re talking about optical and electron microscopy, NMR/CAT scanning, hyperspectral imaging, radiation and mineralogical assays, and other analyses designed to give the clearest possible story behind what you are looking at.

And if there are biochemical or physical biosignatures (chemical traces, fossils, maybe even living things) then you need to be able to do genomic assays, metabolism studies, growth studies, morphology, taxonomy, and all while under strict measures to make sure you do not cross contaminate anything and that what you study is martian and not terrestrial in any way (other than sterile chemicals).

Once you do all this you need to get that data to Earth as fast as possible. If, when all is said and done, something requiring further study on Earth then you can deal with that by collecting samples for subsequent shipping back to Earth – unless you think humans can do that on the surface. But that’s getting into the humans on Mars thing.

Many of the tools we’d need would require modification in terms of size, power, data, and overall physical robustness to work during a space mission to Mars. Most of these tools exist now in labs around the world.

When it comes to examining actual evidence of past or extant life, then some additional work is needed. Right now genetic studies are making advances in months not years. Nanopore sequencing technology has revolutionized what it takes to figure out a life form’s genetics – and has even been demonstrated in space, Antarctica, and on seagoing expeditions.

Gene chips, CRISPR, and a growing array of other analytical tools allow intricate – indeed intimate – insight into life forms on our home world. But we are talking about another world where life might or might not exist or once existed. That life could be similar to our own, different but somewhat related, or entirely unique. But these new tools used to analyse our world’s biology work on basic physical principles that can be adapted and applied for use elsewhere – even if we are not exactly sure what to look for.

These new nano-analytical genomic techniques are tailored to Earth life. So why not use some of that AI stuff and ask for it to speculate on a range of alternate things to look for based on what we know about life hear and the things we know to be on Mars. And then use our nano-fabrication capabilities to make the sensors and chips for things no one has ever looked for. Plus some nonsense configurations to catch loose ends.

When I’d ask various Mars and Astrobiology people questions lile this they’d say “we can’t build life detectors if we do not know what kind fo life we are looking for.” Duh. If you follow that asymptotic path to the absurd extreme then you’ll never find anything.

On the same day I was sitting in Ecology class in 1977 learning that all life on Earth derives energy directly or indirectly from the sun (full stop), we learned that researchers had discovered an entire – and heretofore unknown – ecosystem around deep oceanic hydrothermal vents powered by chemosynthesis fueled by minerals pumped out of the Earth itself in scalding jets of water. No sun required. That was a potent paradigm shift. Life exists where we never thought to look for it – nor did we ever conceive that it could be like this. Yet there it is. That discovery alone really opened up the notion that life is more pervasive than we ever thought.

Over the past 30 years I have often asked NASA folks in press briefings why they are afraid to say that a mission is looking for life. They go out of their way to say possible signs of past life, indicators of possible past habitability, but they will not say that they are doing life detection. So what happens if they come across an obvious fossil while driving their rover – or as is the case recently possible indications of putative microfossils. More tentative words. Sigh.

#Kicking #Road #Mars