Life on Mars and names from Earth

What if there is life on Mars? How would the public react? Would we, the earthlings, able to handle such an extraterrestrial concept? NASA chief scientist Jim Green doesn’t think so.


“It will be revolutionary,” Green told the Telegraph. “It will start a whole new line of thinking. I don’t think we’re prepared for the results. We’re not.”

The agency’s Mars 2020 rover, set to launch next summer, will be the first to collect samples of Martian material to send back to Earth. But if scientists discover biosignatures of life in Mars’ crust, the findings could majorly rock astrobiology, said Green, the director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA.

“What happens next is a whole new set of scientific questions,” he said. “Is that life like us? How are we related?”


The Mars 2020 rover, along with the European Space Agency’s ExoMars rover, will drill into the Martian crust. The surface of the Red Planet is believed to be radioactive, so if there is life on Mars, it likely lives below ground.

“We’ve never drilled that deep,” he told the Telegraph. “When environments get extreme, life moves into the rocks.”

The principle’s been proven on our home planet: After drilling miles into the Earth, researchers found more life in the Earth’s crust than on its surface, he said.

“The bottom line is, where there is water there is life.”


And if the agencies’ new rovers find proof that water once flowed on Mars, he said, the confirmation could come weeks or months of landing — so buckle up, space lovers. The realm of possibility might get much wider very soon.

NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will launch in July 2020 and land at the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater in February 2021 (Mars is 140 million miles from Earth, after all). It’s equipped with two high-definition cameras and a detachable helicopter to take aerial images of the planet’s cliffs, caves, and craters.


Meanwhile, more than 10 million people from around the world have signed up to have their names etched onto a microchip aboard NASA's Mars 2020 rover which will launch for the Red Planet next year.

Earlier this year, NASA asked the public to submit their names, which would then be sent to the Microdevices Laboratory at the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.


There, scientists will use a beam of electrons to etch the names onto silicon chips in lines of text smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair. These chips will be then be attached to the rover before it is sent to Mars.

The country with the largest number of name submissions is Turkey with more than 2.5 million. In second place is India with just over 1.7 million names, while the United States takes up third place with around 1.4 million submissions.