Mars rover mission has UC connections

The world’s most advanced rover will begin looking for evidence of ancient life on Mars with the help of a University of Cincinnati astrobiologist.

The six-wheeled rover called Perseverance touched down safely on the red planet Friday after a seven-month voyage. Its mission: to look for signs of ancient life and collect samples for future study on Earth.

Czaja isn't UC's only tie to the next Mars mission.

Three UC College of Engineering and Applied Science graduates contributed to the Herculean feat of engineering. Sophia Mitchell, Rebecca Perkins and Stephanie Mitana played a role in preparing the rover and its complicated landing system called a sky crane.

A capsule containing the rover entered the Martian atmosphere, deploying a parachute to slow its descent. The capsule then ejected the rover and sky crane, a framework that used rockets to hover over the Martian surface before gently lowering the rover to the ground with cables.

Mitana worked on the sky crane system. Mitchell served as lead systems engineer for the gas dust removal tool on the rover's robotic arm. Previously, Mitchell worked with the Curiosity rover project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Perkins started her career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2012 and worked on the rover system that deploys tubes to collect mineral samples.

Czaja is an expert in Precambrian paleobiology, astrobiology and biogeochemistry.

He hopes to apply his expertise studying ancient life on Earth to help NASA do likewise on Mars. For a study published last month, Czaja photographed Earth's oldest known land fossils as part of an international research team.

He studies the early evolution of life on Earth in his geology lab at UC. In 2012, shortly before joining UC, he stayed up late to watch the landing of Curiosity on the surface of Mars. With the words “touchdown confirmed,” the control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory erupted into jubilant whoops and hugs.

Now he will be part of NASA’s next chapter of Mars exploration.

Czaja served on a NASA committee, the Returned Sample Science Board, that helped to choose Perseverance’s landing site called Jezero Crater. The 28-mile-wide crater contains what scientists say is a former river delta near the Martian equator.

“It’s a very good choice because the crater formed very early in Mars history,” Czaja said.

“We spent the last seven months since the launch planning how the mission will run depending on where we land in Jezero Crater,” Czaja said. “That way we can get to the science as soon as possible.”

Best of all, scientists believe it was full of water at one time.

“It was a crater lake,” Czaja said. “Water flowed flowed off the landscape into the crater and deposited a mass of sediment at the mouth of the river, like the Mississippi River Delta.”

Perseverance and the NASA team will undertake the most thorough and sophisticated examination for life on Mars to date.

Among other tasks, Perseverance will look for fossils long buried in the clay of the delta, Czaja said.

“If microbes were living there, they would fall onto the lake bottom and get buried. The fine-grained particles act to seal everything in and trap it. This happens on Earth,” he said.

Compared to Earth, the surface of Mars has seen far less erosion and active geological disturbance from plate tectonics. So if any evidence of life were deposited in those lake bottoms, it likely is still there, he said.

Jezero Crater also holds tantalizing possibilities for geologists as the possible site of former hot springs. Czaja and his students have studied hot springs in places like Yellowstone National Park to gain insight into ancient life on Earth.

“There are so many big questions we have about this place,” he said.

When you think of a fossil, you might imagine trilobites or the hard shells of brachiopods or even dinosaurs. But Czaja said the fossils Perseverance can search for are microscopic — single-celled organisms like those found on Earth that gave rise to nature’s varied splendor.

“It’s probably not reasonable to think you’ll find fossils that you can see with the naked eye,” he said. “But you can’t have larger organisms without microbial life. So if life was on Mars, you would expect to find evidence of microbial life.”

Perseverance is the largest, heaviest rover NASA has ever built. It’s one of the world’s most advanced autonomous robots.

“The more autonomous the rover can be, the better,” Czaja said. “It will be much faster than the last rover, Curiosity. It can cover much more distance in a shorter time because it has a better autonomous navigation system.”

NASA landed the rover Curiosity on Mars in 2012. It continues to provide images of Mars as it, too, searches for evidence of past microbial life. NASA said Curiosity is taking a “summer road trip” to navigate around a treacherous mile-long sand pit so it can continue its exploration.

Previously, NASA explored Mars with the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which landed in 2004. In 1997, NASA deployed the rover Sojourner from the lander Pathfinder. Sojourner recorded 16,500 images of Mars during its three-month mission.

“I hope we can find evidence of ancient life on Mars,” Czaja said. “But I’m also looking forward to the discoveries we will make that we never even expected.”

Featured image at top: An early rendering of Perseverance on Mars. Illustration/Christian Mangano/NASA