On February 18, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Mars 2020 mission arrived at the red planet and successfully landed the Perseverance Rover on the surface. Jim Bell is a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University and has worked on a number of Mars missions. He is the primary investigator leading a team in charge of one of the camera systems on Perseverance. We spoke with him in late January for The Conversation’s new podcast, The Conversation Weekly.
Excerpts from the interview:
What is the goal of this mission?
What we are looking for is evidence of past life, either direct chemical or organic signs in the composition and the chemistry of rocks, or textural evidence in the rock record. The environment of Mars is extremely harsh compared to the Earth, so we are not really looking for evidence of current life. Unless something actually gets up and walks in front of the cameras, we are really not going to find…