The Curiosity Challenge

With the arrival of NASA’s Mars Science Lab on Monday, The dawn of a new chapter in determining whether or not life can exist beyond Earth human curiosity will take another great step forward as the aptly-named research device touches down on the Martian surface.

Obviously nicknamed Curiosity, this scientific marvel will not be actually looking for life, but seeking to discover how and where Martian life might have evolved in times past, based in part on recently achieved new discoveries of life in extreme earth environments, giving hope that a range of potential habitats for life beyond the planet could also once have existed elsewhere in the solar system.

Mars could once have supported life, according to leading Mars Program scientist Michael Meyer, and the curiosity rover will be looking hard for signs of past surface water, a key ingredient for life as we know it on any planet.

The past ten years have seen many, increasingly more sophisticated robotic probes returning dramatic evidence of Mars atmosphere having dramatically changed in times past, from a warm, wet world to the cold, dry and acidic desert which is the modern red planet.

This Curiosity rover is seeking evidence of  organic carbon, key ingredient in the life-recipe, providing living things with structure, and key to finding it on Mars will be in finding places where it could have been preserved, in the process finding identify environments that might have been habitable.  

Earliest earth record of microbial life dates back to the time – 3.5 billion years ago – when Mars was still a warm and wet planet, as evidenced in the 1958 discovery of single-celled micro-organisms inside a chert, a glass-type rock.

Chert is not likely to be found at the Curiosity landing site, but is not life’s only preservative, and other materials, such as clays, could also be very revealing for this billion dollar robot laboratory, designed to spend two to three years exploring an ancient crater and an unusual mound, known as Mount Sharp, thought to be the remains of sediment that once filled the crater, and layered, which sampling of which will help show how the environments have changed over the past few billion years.

Due to touch down on Mars around 1.30AM on Monday August 6th, this incredible machine, if successfully deployed, be the most far-reaching examination of what may be billions of years of  Martian time, no longer simply looking for water, but addressing a far more difficult scientific challenge, in trying to establish evidence of Mars having once been not only habitable, but also host to life in some form.