NASA has plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface in the near future. Next year, four astronauts will orbit the moon.
“We don’t need to go back to the moon just for the moon. We’re going back to learn new things. So we can go to Mars and beyond,” said Administrator Bill Nelson.
The Perseverance Rover is exploring the Jezero crater on Mars, which was once a lake on the red planet. Scientists believe that life may have existed there in the distant past.
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“It’s sampling and drilling with this drill, creating these core samples the size of a cigar and enclosing them in these titanium tubes,” Nelson explained. “We’re trying to figure out now how we’re going to go back and get them and bring them back to Earth so we can get an idea of whether or not there’s life there.”
NASA is now working with several companies to develop a plan for the return mission, which could happen in the 2030s. The agency is also working with Firebird Diagnostics on the search for life on Mars.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said NASA is preparing for the possibility of discovering life in space. (Getty Images)
“NASA’s mission is to go out, among other things, and find out whether or not we’re alone,” 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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“It’s a big question how molecular biology could be done if it was done by an organism that doesn’t have a common ancestor, a common origin, with you and me,” Benner said.
DNA has also helped discover diseases like 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 more sensitive testing and eliminate false positives.
This image made available 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 the 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 don’t think so. I absolutely don’t know. And I don’t think the US government is hiding anything from anybody. But if you ask me, ‘do I think there’s life out there in cosmos?'” Nelson said. “I ask our NASA scientists this question, ‘how many possibilities in the vastness of this universe are there that there is another planet like Earth that would be habitable for life as we know it?’ They said at least a trillion.”
Nelson says that while the odds are that life could exist in space, whatever it is, it likely exists far enough 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 confirmation 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 kind of understanding of what’s out there.”
Nelson has urged NASA scientists to use artificial intelligence in spacecraft software.
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“On a spacecraft like Voyager, which is out in interstellar space, which is beyond our solar system, if it came to another spacecraft, it could learn in real time to communicate with that other spacecraft,” Nelson said. “That’s what we do at NASA. They make the impossible possible. It’s a bunch of wizards here.”