NASA plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface in the near future. Next year, four astronauts will walk around the moon.
“We don’t need to go back to the moon just for the moon’s sake. We come back to learn new things. So we can go to Mars and beyond,” Administrator Bill Nelson said.
The Perseverance rover is exploring the Jezero crater on Mars, which was once a lake on the red planet. Scientists believe that in the distant past there may have been life there.
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“It takes samples and drills with this drill, creates these cigar-sized core samples, and seals them in these titanium tubes,” Nelson explained. “Right now we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to go back and get them and bring them back to Earth so we have an idea of whether or not there was life there.”
NASA is now working with several companies to develop a plan for the return mission, which could happen in 2030. The agency is also working with Firebird Diagnostics in the search for life on Mars.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said NASA is preparing for the possibility of finding life in space. (Getty Images)
“NASA’s mission is to go out, among other things, and find out whether we’re alone or not,” said Firebird Diagnostics founder Steven Benner.
His company sells so-called alien DNA. It uses synthetic properties and has helped NASA understand what possible forms of alternative DNA might exist.
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“A big question is how molecular biology could be done if it was done by an organism that didn’t share a common ancestor, a common ancestry with you and me,” Benner said.
DNA has also helped discover diseases such as Covid-19, cancer and HIV here on Earth. Human DNA has four nucleotides, or building blocks. Benner’s synthetic material has up to eight. They allow for more sensitive testing and eliminate false positives.
This image provided by NASA shows an illustration of NASA’s Perseverance rover landing safely on Mars. (Xinhua/NASA/JPL-Caltech via Getty Images)
“It allows you to get that needle in a haystack without having to worry about all the background information,” Benner said.
Nelson says the search for life on other planets helps us better understand who we are in the universe.
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“If you ask me directly, do I think there are aliens here on Earth? I do not think so. I don’t know absolutely. And I don’t think the US government is hiding anything from anyone. But if you ask me, ‘do I think there’s life out there in space?'” Nelson said. “I put this question to our NASA scientists, ‘how many possibilities are there in the vastness of this universe that there is another planet like Earth that would be habitable for life like anything we know?’ They said at least a trillion.”
Nelson says that while the chances are that life exists in space, whatever it is, it probably exists so far away that it won’t be detected for a long time. However, NASA is still preparing for this possibility.
Former U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, now NASA administrator, speaks during a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on April 21, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Saul Loeb-Pool/Getty Images)
“Even if you could travel at the speed of light to a distant world, the nearby ones are a thousand light years away,” Nelson said. “That doesn’t mean we can’t have some understanding of what’s out there.”
Nelson has asked NASA scientists to use artificial intelligence in the spacecraft’s software.
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“In a spacecraft like Voyager, which is in interstellar space, which is outside our solar system, if it encounters another spacecraft, it can in real time learn to communicate with that other spacecraft,” Nelson said. “That’s what we do at NASA. They make the impossible possible. There’s a bunch of wizards here.”
