(MENAFN – Gulf Times) The Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars this month, marks a new leap towards answering fundamental questions about our solar system, including where another we find DNA. The rover moves on the surface of Mars looking for signs of life, making its own oxygen, launching a helicopter, and collecting soil and rocks for a follow-up mission in 2028. If all nothing as expected, Nasa, with European help The Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft, will return ground samples in the spring of 2032 of the first Martian material to visit Earth.
The discovery of DNA on Mars would not be a complete surprise. Although permanence was built in the clean room of the Spacecraft Assembly Spacecraft (SAF) facility at NASA’s Jet Deployment Laboratory (JPL), even that condition cannot be made 100% free of microbial or human DNA background. We know about ‘microbial hitchhikers’ from the first interplanetary missions in the 1960s, when scientists like Carl Sagan raised the problem. It is an ongoing, inevitable threat to space science. Given that scientists have to build the spacecraft one layer at a time, peeling skin and saliva droplets over years of construction, it is almost certain that some California DNA has just landed on Mars.
Therefore, when the samples reach Earth in 2032, they must go through planetary-level genetic filtration to regulate any DNA that may be present in the SAF at the time of rover construction from 2015-20 , as well as any other fragment of DNA seen on Earth up until the launch of the spacecraft in July 2020. This is an ongoing project between our laboratory at Weill Cornell Medicine and JPL. By placing the DNA found in, around, and on the SAF during the construction of robots, we create a genetic map to avoid or reduce forward or backward contamination (where we genetic material elsewhere, or genetic material from elsewhere. land here).
Ever since the first two Soviet studies on the surface of Mars landed in 1971, and then the U.S. Viking 1 landed in 1976, some fragments of microphone and possibly human DNA appear to have been end of the red planet. And with the global dust storms on the planet, this DNA is almost certainly found in several places across the surface.
Fortunately, we live in an amazing time for genetics. The low cost of DNA sequences allows us to build a genetic catalog of ever-growing life on Earth, genetic maps of SAF cleanrooms, and the planet-scale genome maps (MetaSUB and the Earth Microbiome Project). Furthermore, in a 2016 mission with astronaut Kate Rubins, we showed that we can classify DNA in space and match it to images of novel organisms on Earth. Anything that can survive in space, on a spaceship, or in a very bad situation on Earth is a right candidate for life surviving on Mars. Finally, instead of inadvertently sending DNA to Mars, we do it deliberately, for a reason.
After all, it is possible to deliver technologies to Mars. They can bring out the best in humanity, and we already have the physical, pharmaceutical and biological methods to follow. A new book, The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds, features studies conducted on dozens of astronauts, including twins Scott and (U.S. Senator) Mark Kelly, following a one-year mission Scott in space. Based on the findings, there is confidence that humans can travel to Mars, and with a little more innovation and technology, stay there.
We need humans to be able to live on Mars stably, sensibly and safely not so that we can let go of the Earth, but because the best way to make sure our species survives is to do so. able to live elsewhere. Mars is not Plan B: it is Plan A, and it always has been.
We have an ethical duty to prevent the extinction of our own species as well as all others on Earth. No other species (of which we are familiar) receives such a sense of the future it may have, or its ability to preserve life. It is just that we can accomplish this task; and in the long run, in doing so we must make our way to other planets. Syndicate the project
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