The long-awaited mission that might rework our understanding of Mars

March 17, 2022, was a tough day for Jorge Vago. A planetary physicist, Vago heads science for a part of the European Space Agency’s ExoMars program. His group was mere months from launching Europe’s first Mars rover—a objective that they had been working towards for almost 20 years. But on that day, ESA suspended ties with Russia’s house company over the invasion of Ukraine. The launch had been deliberate for Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome, which is leased to Russia.

“They told us we had to call the whole thing off,” Vago says. “We were all grieving.”

It was a painful setback for the beleaguered Rosalind Franklin rover, initially authorized in 2005. Budget woes, companion switches, technical points and the COVID-19 pandemic had all, in flip, induced earlier delays. And now, a conflict. “I’ve spent most of my career trying to get this thing off the ground,” Vago says. Complicating issues additional, the mission included a Russian-made lander and devices, which the member states of ESA would wish funding to interchange. They thought-about many choices, together with merely placing the unused rover in a museum. But then, in November, got here a lifeline, when European analysis ministers pledged 360 million euros to cowl mission bills, together with changing Russian parts.

When the rover lastly does, hopefully, blast off in 2028, it is going to carry a collection of superior devices—however one specifically may make an enormous scientific impression. Designed to investigate any carbon-containing materials discovered beneath Mars’s floor, the rover’s next-generation mass spectrometer is the linchpin of a method to lastly reply essentially the most burning query concerning the Red Planet: Is there proof of previous or current life?

“There are a lot of different ways that you can search for life,” says analytical chemist Marshall Seaton, a NASA postdoctoral program fellow on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and coauthor of a paper on planetary evaluation within the Annual Review of Analytical Chemistry. Perhaps the obvious and direct route is solely in search of fossilized microbes. But nonliving chemistry can create deceptively lifelike constructions. Instead, the mass spectrometer will assist scientists search for molecular patterns which might be unlikely to be fashioned within the absence of dwelling biology.

Hunting for the patterns of life, as a substitute of constructions or particular molecules, has an additional advantage in an extraterrestrial surroundings, Seaton says. “It allows us to not only look for life as we know it, but for life as we don’t know it.”

Packing for Mars

At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center outdoors Washington, DC, planetary scientist William Brinckerhoff exhibits off a prototype of the rover’s mass spectrometer, referred to as the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer, or MOMA. Roughly the scale of a carry-on suitcase, the instrument is a labyrinth of wires and metallic. “It’s really a workhorse,” Brinkerhoff says as his colleague, planetary scientist Xiang Li, adjusts screws on the prototype earlier than demonstrating a carousel that holds samples.

This working prototype is used to investigate natural molecules in Mars-like soils on Earth. And as soon as the true MOMA will get to Mars, roughly in 2030, Brinckerhoff and his colleagues will use the prototype—in addition to a pristine copy stored in a Mars-like surroundings at NASA — to check tweaks to experimental protocols, troubleshoot points that come up through the mission and facilitate interpretation of Mars knowledge.

This newest mass spectrometer can hint its roots again almost 50 years, to the primary mission that studied Martian soil. For the dual 1976 Viking landers, engineers miniaturized room-size mass spectrometers to roughly the footprint of at present’s desktop printers. The devices have been additionally on board the 2008 Phoenix lander, the 2012 Curiosity rover and later Mars orbiters from China, India, and the US.

Anyone visiting Brinckerhoff’s prototype should first cross a show case with a dismantled copy of the Viking instrument on mortgage from the Smithsonian Institution. “This is like a national treasure,” Brinckerhoff says, enthusiastically mentioning parts.

Mass spectrometers are indispensable instruments which might be used for analytical chemistry in laboratories and different services worldwide. TSA brokers use them to check baggage for explosives on the airport. EPA scientists use them to check consuming water for contaminants. And drugmakers use them to find out chemical constructions of potential new drugs.

Many sorts of mass spectrometers exist, however every “is a three-part instrument,” explains Devin Swiner, an analytical chemist on the pharmaceutical firm Merck. First, the instrument vaporizes molecules into the fuel section, and in addition offers them {an electrical} cost. These charged, or ionized, fuel molecules can then be manipulated with electrical or magnetic fields in order that they’ll transfer by means of the instrument.

Second, the instrument kinds ions by a measurement that scientists can relate to molecular weight, to allow them to decide the quantity and kind of atoms a molecule comprises. Third, the instrument information all of the “weights” in a pattern together with their relative abundance.

With MOMA aboard, the Rosalind Franklin rover will land at a Martian website that roughly 4 billion years in the past seemingly had water, an important ingredient for historic life. The rover’s cameras and different devices will assist to pick samples and supply context about their surroundings. A drill will retrieve historic samples from as deep as two meters. Scientists hypothesize that’s far sufficient, Vago says, to be shielded from cosmic radiation on Mars that breaks up molecules “like a million little knives.”

Space-bound mass spectrometers should be rugged and light-weight. A mass spectrometer with MOMA’s capabilities would usually occupy a number of workbenches, however it’s been shrunk considerably. “To be able to take something that can be as big as a room to the size of like a toaster or a small suitcase and send it into space is a very huge deal,” Swiner says.