Despite an eye-watering price tag, bringing pieces of Mars back to Earth promises to revolutionize our understanding of life’s place in the early solar system
Mars looms large in this mosaic based on images from NASA's Viking orbiter. The linear features are Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system, which cuts across nearly a quarter of the planet's circumference.At a recent workshop in Washington, D.C., on the science of NASA’s Mars Sample Return program, the mood was excited but tense.
. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Sample return will tackle this question head-on, because it will allow us to study ancient Mars rocks as never before, seeking chemical clues on the nature of that world’s early atmosphere and climate. Many samples are already packaged in tubes and awaiting retrieval from the vicinity of Mars’s Jezero Crater, the site of a now-vanished ancient lake where NASA’s Perseverance rover has been operating since 2021.
MSR’s most revolutionary possible result would of course be a direct discovery of ancient Martian life. This is far from guaranteed, but it’s entirely possible, as early Mars likely had all the ingredients necessary to kick-start prebiotic chemistry. In a 2021 study California Institute of Technology researcher Danica Adams and her colleagues showed that the—a compound that despite being toxic to humans was probably essential to the origin of life on Earth.
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