Jacqueline’s Space: Astrophysics and Humanity’s Battle Against Impatience

In a world becoming ever more instantaneous and on demand, astrophysicists may be the final hold out in humanity’s battle against impatience. 

Forget same day delivery or even same decade delivery – NASA, alongside the European Space Agency, have set in motion a plan to land Martian rock samples back on earth with an earliest arrival date of 2031. If all goes to plan, these rocks could uncover key information about the red planet’s geological history, and perhaps, signs of life.

NASA took a giant step forward in this decade-long plan Wednesday, Sept. 1. NASA announced that Perseverance, its car-sized Martian rover that landed on Mars in February, collected its first ever rock sample. 

Perseverance drilled the sample out of a rock that rests on a ridge in Jezero Crater, an area believed to be an ancient river delta. The .5 inch by 2.4 inch sample is now stored in one of the 43 sample tubes Perseverance will continue to fill over the next year.

Of course, this is just step one in a long journey. According to NASA, once Perseverance has filled about half of these tubes, it will stash the samples at an identifiable location on the Martian surface. In 2026, NASA plans to launch the Sample Return Lander, which will descend onto the planet with a rover to collect the samples. An ascent vehicle will lift them into orbit where an Earth-return orbiter will be waiting to march the samples millions of miles across space.

Ten years after their collection, after being transferred from machine to machine, if everything goes right, the samples will land on Earth, into the awaiting hands of eager scientists.

The journey seems long and treacherous, but this first successful sampling is really the beginning of the end, the last leg in a centuries-long ultramarathon humanity has been running since we first turned our eyes to the sky. 

Mars, and the possibility of life on the planet, has always captured human imagination. In the 1800s, telescopes turned this fiery red dot into a landscape. Scientists, like Giovanni Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell, observed and mapped lines on the surface. They believed the lines were intricate canals built by intelligent life, and, since then, science fiction and pop culture swarmed with stories and imaginative descriptions of these “Martians.”

NASA’s missions to the planet, beginning with Mariner 4 in 1965, dispelled the notion of intelligent life with their images of the desert landscape, but the question of life on Mars began to transform. Rovers found evidence of the former presence of water now molded into the planet as riverbeds and lake basins. And if there was water, then there could be life.

After many years of wonder, this sample, now riding inside Perseverance, may finally hold the key to humanity’s enduring question about life on other worlds. In this scientific discipline of astrophysics, that measures distance in the speed of light, these next 10 years of collecting, launching and waiting are the final, hopefully victorious, lap. 

Often, we get caught up in the world of now. We want to know now, and, almost always, this desire can be filled in a near instant. 

This impatience stems from our finite view of life, with no time to wait. We are so focused on our own existence, our maximum 100 years to impact the Earth.

But Perseverance’s work is built upon centuries of study and wonder about this Red Planet. No one who saw canals on Mars and conjured up the idea of intelligent life is alive today, but they made the path. This is generational effort. 

Astrophysicists can teach us how to wait. For now, they are delighting in Perseverance’s other firsts: the first recorded sounds of the bangs and rattles of a metallic rover traversing the Martian landscape, the first audio recording of winds blowing on the surface of another planet and the flight of Perseverance’s tiny helicopter companion, Ingenuity. They are also planning and preparing to get ready to welcome those small but vital samples to their new home.

And this work today is preparing us for the next step. Humans are not on Mars – yet – but in the tracks Perseverance leaves in the sand, we have made our goal known: we are on our way.

Hale is the editor-in-chief. Follow her on Twitter at @HaleJacquelineR.

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