Perseverance Does the Impossible Again
Mars 2020 Collecting Sample (Artist’s Concept). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
I was somewhat remiss in this week’s Throughput in not mentioning the planned landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars. In my defense…uh…I got nothing.
But yesterday indeed saw the successful deployment of our second giant rover to the surface of Mars. Following the same insane technique that her predecessor Curiosity did, the Perseverance managed a performance for the ages, setting down for a prefect landing in the Jezero Crater. This video, from Curiosity, explains the technique used to land these massive laboratories on the red planet.
Perseverance has a new suite of instruments, including a mini-helicopter called Ingenuity that will be the first human spacecraft to fly on an alien world. In the Jezero crater, she will look for signs of past habitability of Mars, look for signatures of early Martian life and collect rocks to be gathered and returned to Earth on a future mission.
Hello, world. My first look at my forever home. #CountdownToMars pic.twitter.com/dkM9jE9I6X
— NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) February 18, 2021
I think the day is coming when we will have conclusive proof that life once existed on Mars. Not for long — the planet lost its core heat, then its magnetic field and then most of its atmosphere before things could really get going. But I think it is inevitable that we will find evidence of some very early microbial life. That discovery, if it happens, will fundamentally change our place of the universe. And it will make the possibility that we are not, in fact, alone in the universe all the more likely.
I will never not be amazed that human beings can do things like this. Sending a rover to an alien world tens of millions of miles away and having it guide itself through such a complex landing maneuver. The vision, the boldness, the skill, the audacity — it is the human race at its best. And now the miracles will multiply as the spacecraft’s instruments come online and it begins to explore. I would think it impossible if I hadn’t watched it myself.
My sons and I watched the life stream. It took a little while for them to temper their expectations of watching the whole thing with a third person view. The simulations we watched in advance were super cool but I think led them to believe that is what we’d be seeing. As we watched all the folks in Mission Control, I explained that they were going to celebrate like they won the Super Bowl if all went well. And they did! My older son even remarked on how they said, “TOUCHDOWN!” My littlest guy was bouncing off the couch… he’s pretty space obsessed. They were first underwhelmed and then amazed by the initial images and we look forward to seeing what new images, video, and even audio (for the first time ever, I read???) will be available in the coming days.
If you have kids, Mark Rober has been a fun YouTuber to follow. He worked at JPL and other very impressive organizations and now seems to spend his time making needlessly elaborate science experiments while keeping an appropriate focus on the science part. He did a preview video on Perseverance that helped make the whole thing a little more accessible for my guys.Report
How confident do you think the NASA folks were in the landing being a success? I know the 7 Minutes of Terror thing is real… but I’m wondering how real it is. What were its odds of success? Or, perhaps more accurately, what would a top NASA person peg the odds at?Report
Did you see Hidden Figures? I”d say at least that confident.Report
We keep this up and we might actually get good at it. 😉Report
Worth noting is that there were some improvements in the system even this time around — there was a moment where they talked about the “vision system” being engaged, which meant that Perseverance was able to identify features on the ground and make sure that it wasn’t going to land on top of a rock. The previous system (Curiosity) only had a radar altimeter, which meant they had to send it to a very flat area (with the result that there wasn’t much interesting terrain to look at for a long time.)Report
The processors get faster and faster. The software gets better and better. More sophisticated peripherals. How much processing power you can buy for a couple of hundred dollars is staggering.
This past Monday, after 24 successful booster recoveries in a row, a SpaceX Falcon 9 missed the landing barge out in the Atlantic badly. That booster was on its sixth mission. SpaceX has an indefinite delay on their next launch (one was scheduled for Wednesday, two days after the miss) while they investigate to see why they missed.Report
Yay Perseverance! I have a legitimate question: Every time space exploration/Mars/etc. comes up, someone says “discovery of even microbial life will prove we are not alone in the universe.” Suggesting, to me, that someone is saying that we are “alone in the universe.” I have done some Goggling and can’t come up with anyone who actually says that. Can someone point me to an actual quote?Report
What I mean by that is that it makes it more likely that there is intelligent life out there. If microbial life is very common in planets within the habitable zone of stars, it makes it far more likely that some of that life had a stable enough environment to evolve into intelligent life.Report
I’ll say it.
Math, biology and probability say that there is likely alien life existing on other planets.
Astronomy and physics says that what alien life exists out there is so far away and the speed of light (the fastest speed we’ve been able to find in nature so far) is so slow that said alien life it might as well be non-existent to us as a practical matter.
We may not be literally alone in the universe; but we might as well be.
I don’t believe little grey men have visited Earth. All available evidence suggests, starkly, that we are alone and that is unlikely to change. All we have is us.Report
I think “prove” is doing the work there.
Are we alone? Some people say yes, some people say no. Proof of the former answers the question definitively.Report
I think maybe my comment has been slightly misunderstood. I’m pretty certain we are not “alone.” Odds seem very strongly in favor of life “out there.” My question was about the fact that often there is at least a suggestion of a debate going on about the uniqueness of life on Earth. Who is positing that we are the only life form in the universe? Anyone? I can’t find an actual quote from that side of the discussion and was hoping for help.Report
Monotheists?
If “Contact” taught me anything it’s that Christians will goto great lengths to deny aliens.Report
That’s not a tenet of Monotheism. Many monotheists openly speculate about what extra-terrestrial beings/life might be like… heck stodgy old CS Lewis wrote an entire trilogy about it.
I’m not sure “Contact” is a reliable source of Monotheistic belief.
Somewhat tongue in cheek… I’m not sure Mormons are Monotheistic…but they certainly are multi-celestial.
I’m sure we could find some monotheists somewhere who hold the belief dogmatically, but, alas, we can find monotheists who hold just about any belief dogmatically.Report
You got me curious.
https://glocalities.com/latest/reports/majority-of-humanity-say-we-are-not-alone-in-the-universe
Not sure how reliable this particular poll is but 61% yes, 17% no, and 21% I-don’t-know supports your position that “We’re alone” isn’t a particularly popular notion.
That said, definitive proof would be scientifically important.
… and now I wanna see a politician run on a “We are alone!” platform.Report
“We are alone in the universe, and that is why we have to mandate the improvement of standards for the test and measurement tools we use to calibrate our kidney dialysis machines!”Report
Kazzy; Thanks for the link. So 17% in this rather large study said “No way” to alien life. Interesting. But I would still like to see a quote from somebody publicly arguing that point rather than just responding to a survey. I can’t help but wonder where the reluctance to believe in life out there comes from. Maybe religion? Or maybe just: “this is a boring topic; check the blank and get on with my day.”Report
I imagine a few potential sources for the reluctance:
1. “I’ll believe it when a see it!”
2. Conflating “life” with “intelligent life.”
3. A response to very public claims of alien life, as in…
“I was abducted! And look… crop circles!”
“Ridiculous… there’s no aliens. Science debunked all that crap.”
I think you’re right that few people are going to die on the hill of “We are alone!” so I wouldn’t anticipate seeing many public statements to that effect.Report
The German Tank Problem, as described by Wikipedia, is:
I give you: Earth.
What’s N?Report
Are we counting planets with intelligent life as these items? If so, does Earth even merit being on the list? Discuss…Report
Also, upon further thought, I am fairly confident that there are zero German tanks on exoplanets.Report
The solution to the German Tank problem, even for a sample of one, doesn’t apply here because we can’t see Earth’s sequence number.
More generally, I think every attempt to try to reason out an answer to this question fails for the same reason, namely that we have no rational basis on which to estimate the odds of any particular step in the process. From an extremely biased sample of one (on planets where intelligent life didn’t develop, nobody is asking these questions), no relevant information can be extracted.Report
Let’s say that Earth’s sequence number is “1”.
What’s N?Report
I would think that the best bet would be 1. But again, the fact that we don’t know the sequence number makes it impossible to make any kind of educated guess. We can’t just assume that the sequence number is 1 and get any kind of sensible answer based on that.Report
It also doesn’t apply because we can’t assume a discrete uniform distribution. With only 1 data point we don’t have any evidence of what kind of distribution we’re in.Report
An adjacent, though still interesting, observation:
(Translation provided by Twitter: “The map of reports of a UFO encounter, 1906-2014 seems to tell us everything for itself. I am sure that the lights in the zone of St. Petersburg and Leningrad region are Katya Lel.”)Report
Oooof…. so basically wherever English speaking people tend to be in large numbers and then a thin smattering of others.Report
I thought about writing a post called “If Aliens Exist, They Have A White Supremacy Problem” and then just going for it but…
Eh. It’s Friday.Report
Or maybe the ET’s are studying white supremacy…Report
I’ve seen this debated before and while I am not personally a believer in this stuff I don’t think the writer (tweeter?) makes a particularly compelling point. Americans interpret whatever the phenomenon that causes people to perceive that which they cannot explain in a particular way, probably due to our pop culture as much as anything else. But there are plenty of places where people report things they can’t explain in religious or spiritual or other terms that would sound totally bizarre to most Americans.
My gut tells me that the peculiarly efficient death of religious mystery in American culture is why that map looks like it does, though I have no way to prove it.Report
Also the frequently made observation that as the number of smartphones with cameras has increased, the number of reports of both UFOs and Sasquatch have declined drastically.Report
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy a colonial expedition lands on Mars in 2026. We better get on the stick!Report
I’m sure the plans for the Elon Musk habitat are well passed the development stage.Report