NASA’S NEW MARS ROVER IS ABOUT TO EMBARK ON A HUNT FOR ANCIENT ALIEN LIFE

July 30th, a six-wheeled NASA rover the size of an SUV will embark on its journey to Mars — the beginning of a quest to decode the secrets of the Red Planet’s past. Equipped with a suite of instruments and a sophisticated drilling system, the rover is tasked with answering a question that has confounded scientists for centuries: has Mars ever hosted life?

The rover, named Perseverance, is one of NASA’s most ambitious planetary missions to date. Not only is the bot designed to analyze Martian rocks for signs of past life, but the rover will also cache dozens of samples to leave somewhere on the Martian surface. These samples will weather the next decade on Mars, awaiting the day that another robotic spacecraft arrives, picks them up, and blasts off. The samples will then travel back to our planet, where eager scientists will be waiting to receive them.

It’s all part of a herculean operation known as Mars Sample Return. The goal is to bring pristine pieces of Martian material back to Earth where we can study them in sophisticated labs. “If you want to confirm that life exists beyond the Earth, you probably cannot do it with any instruments that can be flown today,” Kenneth Farley, the project scientist for Perseverance and a professor at the California Institute of Technology, tells The Verge. “You really have to bring samples back to the lab.”

Perseverance is just the first — extremely complicated — step in that sample return process. If successful, Perseverance will neatly package dozens of samples of the Martian surface that may one day see Earth. They may tell us if life existed on Mars or if it’s always been a barren planet. “This is really a unique — really a once-in-a-lifetime — opportunity to get samples from a known location on Mars,” Tanja Bosak, a professor of geobiology at MIT who is a participating scientist on the mission.