The Poor Design of the Latest Mars Mission

This week NASA successfully landed a new rover on Mars, and the mission (called Perseverance) will be part of a search for life on Mars. Is this a cause to rejoice? No, it is not, because unfortunately the mission has a poor design. Because of this poor design, you will not be hearing any "NASA discovered life on Mars" announcement anytime in the next few years. 

Here is how a NASA page describes the mission:

"The Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover will search for signs of ancient microbial life, which will advance NASA's quest to explore the past habitability of Mars. The rover has a drill to collect core samples of Martian rock and soil, then store them in sealed tubes for pickup by a future mission that would ferry them back to Earth for detailed analysis."

Get the idea? The Perseverance Rover does not have instruments capable of clearly detecting microbial life (the only type of life that may be possible on Mars), unless by some great stroke of luck such microscopic life left unambiguous visible signs of itself (an effect we have not seen in quite a few years of previous Mars rover exploration). The specs for one of its key instruments says that it "can see features as small as a grain of salt," which is not good enough to detect microbes. The specs for another instrument mentions only being able to see things as small as 7 square millimeters. 

So the plan is to just have the rover dig up dirt in particular areas, store the dirt in tubes, and then dump the tubes on the ground, in hopes that maybe later some currently unfunded mission -- manned or unmanned -- will retrieve such tubes and bring them back to Earth (where the samples can be scanned with instruments like electron microscopes that can view at microscopic resolutions).  

This is an absurd way to spend money looking for extraterrestrial life. The Perseverance Rover mission cost billions, and some future mission (not even funded) that might retrieve these surface “caches” would cost billions more. The chance of actually finding clear evidence that life once existed on Mars through the partial help of this mission would be very, very small, because of the hostility of the surface of Mars, the difficulty of reaching previously dumped soil caches and returning them to Earth, the high chance of finding merely ambiguous evidence (discussed below), and because of the very high unlikelihood of life originating on any particular planet by any abiogenesis chance processes. There would be a high risk that the samples would never be returned, because no one has ever done anything like retrieving samples from another planet and returning them to Earth.

A manned mission to Mars could retrieve these “sample caches,” but why would the astronauts even go to the trouble of searching for them, when it would be much easier for them to just drill themselves to get a soil sample wherever they were on Mars? 

The design of the Perseverance Rover is absurdly poor compared to the design originally proposed for a European mission that will land on Mars in 2023. The original design for that mission was to land a heavy rover equipped with some instruments of serious power that could have detected microbes in the soil or past signs of life. But it seems that this mission (originally named ExoMars) has now been scaled down to be much lighter, and have much less instrument power. The latest design for this rover (now called the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover) is a stripped-down design that doesn't carry the powerful instruments previously planned. Now instead of being billed as a mission to find life, the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover is now being merely billed as a mission to find building blocks of life on Mars. 

What this means is for quite a few years you will not be reading any announcement that life has been found on Mars, thanks to the incompetence of our Mars mission planners, who keep sending rovers to Mars, but keep failing to have those probes capable of finding microbes (past or present) if they exist on Mars. 

By the year 2026 it will be about 50 years of sending spacecraft to Mars without landing any powerful life-searching instruments on Mars (the last attempt at such a thing being the 1976 Viking mission). You just have to wonder: do these guys really want to resolve the issue of whether Mars has or once had life?  They don't seem to be designing Mars landers as if they really wanted to answer that question.  Perhaps what's going on is something like this:

(1) Maybe the Mars mission designers suspect there is scarcely a snowball's chance in hell of any type of life on Mars.

(2) Maybe they also realize that the sooner we find out Mars is lifeless, the quicker people will lose interest in Mars, and regard it as just a boring dead rock (a place we shouldn't waste any more money on). 

(3) So maybe our spacecraft designers are trying to string things out as long as possible, so that spacecraft designers can keep busy sending things to Mars, without there being some negative tests that force scientists to say that Mars doesn't have life and never had life (a conclusion that might cause the public to no longer support sending spacecraft to Mars). 

The preceding is merely a speculation.  Another possibility is that the bad design of the Perseverance mission is one of those cases when a bad design comes from a committee compromise. The Perseverance mission includes a drone-like device called a helicopter. We can imagine some designers saying "we should concentrate on searching Mars for life" and other designers saying "no, we want to have fun flying a drone around on Mars." So we may have ended up with the Perseverance mission design as a kind of compromise, in which we got merely a half-measure life-searching capability, and also the drone. 

Committee compromises have resulted in some of the worst designs in the history of innovation.  Conversely, the Apollo 11 spacecraft was a great design. There were no conflicting goals there. The designers wanted to do exactly one thing (land a man on the moon, and return him), and they created a great design to do just that one thing. 

At the CNN website we have a story that epitomizes the kind of fawning credulous cheerleading that goes on in the coverage of science news, rather than the critical tough-minded journalism we need about science topics.  After enthusing that the landing of the Perseverance rover was "the happy moment we all needed," we are assured that the rover is "essentially part of us" because "nearly 11 million people submitted their names to hitch a ride with Perseverance on silicon chips."  More poor design, since you easily could have had the IRS supply a computer file with the names of every tax-paying citizen, allowing every taxpayer to say, "My name is on Mars."  And who cares whether there are microscopic bytes on Mars with someone's name?

The reporter of this story has got so emotional that it seems all objectivity has been lost. We read this:

"For me, it's become a very personal thing. Following the journey of this rover from concept to amazing reality has been an inspiring one. Along the way, I've met so many of the people who have dedicated years of their lives this mission. It's impossible not to feel caught up in their motivations, hopes and passion to explore...It's impossible not to feel some inexplicable bond to this 6-wheeled robot."

But some of us who aren't so misty-eyed and choked up by the rover landing have noticed the poor design of this Perseverance mission. As part of the hype of the mission, a former NASA administrator has made the false claim that "the building blocks of life exist all over Mars." The building blocks of macroscopic life are cells, and the building blocks of microscopic life are protein molecules and nucleic acids. No one has found any cells or protein molecules or nucleic acids on Mars.  The building blocks of the building blocks of microscopic life are the twenty amino acids used by living things, and the four nucleotides used by nucleic acids.  None of these 24 things has been found on Mars.  The organic compounds referred to by this former NASA administrator are merely carbon compounds with no biological function.  For many decades our scientists have been making baloney claims that "building blocks of life" are all over the place in outer space. Such claims were false when they were made so often fifty years ago by Carl Sagan, and are just as false today.  The fact that none of the real 24 building blocks of the building blocks of microscopic life has been discovered on Mars is one of the strongest reasons for thinking Mars has never had living things of any type. 

The NASA mission overview page here doesn't even sound like the mission planners have any hope of detecting current life on Mars.  We merely hear of looking for "signs of past microbial life." One problem with that is that microbes do not leave visible fossils.  So any "signs of past microbial life" (presumably got from returning soil samples using a follow-up mission) would probably be inconclusive ambiguous evidence that failed to prove that life once existed on Mars. A relevant science news story states the following:

"When it comes to finding fossils of very ancient microbial life —whether on Earth or on other worlds, such as Mars — the odds are just not in our favor. Actual microbial life-forms are much less likely to become safely fossilized in rocks compared with nonbiological structures that happen to mimic their shapes, new research finds. The finding suggests that Earth’s earliest rocks may contain abundant tiny fakers — minuscule objects masquerading as fossilized evidence of early life — researchers report online January 28 in Geology."

It is interesting that the issue discussed above is one that should cause us to doubt all claims that life on Earth is billions of years old, since the evidence cited for such claims could easily be misidentifications. Conversely, we have decent fossils from the Cambrian Era about 540 million years ago.

In an opinion piece at www.nbcnews.com, astronomer Seth Shostak gives us some rather silly talk about what would happen if "long-expired Martian bacteria" were to be discovered.  He says this: 

"The discovery of long-expired Martian bacteria would permanently change humanity’s view of its own importance....it would be a near-certainty that in other places among the trillion planets of the Milky Way, life has evolved to a state of self-aware intelligence....Suddenly, we would confront the likelihood that everything we accomplish has parallels in the actions of unseen others, and that what we find beautiful and worthwhile must have a billion other definitions elsewhere."

This is very wrong.  The half-life of DNA is about 521 years. If some soil returned from Mars was deemed to have long-expired life dating from many millions of years ago, we would have no or very little extant DNA allowing us to tell whether such DNA arose independently on Mars, whether life from Earth had come from Mars, or whether life on Mars had come from Earth. Although it sounds incredible, scientists think it quite possible that life could naturally travel between Earth and Mars, during very rare events such as a comet skimming though an upper atmosphere containing microbes, and then eventually landing on another planet.  So if we got some Martian soil that seemed to have evidence of microbes that lived millions of years ago when Mars was wet, evidence that would be ambiguous and debatable, this would never prove that life had independently arisen from separate events on Earth and Mars.  Even if you had proved that microbe life had independently arisen on Earth and Mars, that would not show a likelihood that large-scale life such as mammals had arisen more than once, and would not show a likelihood that self-aware life had arisen more than once. We still lack any credible theory of how mere microbes could give rise to gigantically organized large-sized organisms, and we still lack any credible theory of how minds like humans could naturally arise, contrary to the unfounded boasts of Darwinism enthusiasts who lack any theory explaining mountainous levels of biological organization in mammals, and lack any credible theory explaining the origin of minds like ours.  

As a method for searching for extraterrestrial life, trying to return soil samples from Mars in a two-part mission is a case of getting ridiculously little "bang for the buck."  The total cost of those two Mars missions would be in excess of 4 billion dollars.  Only a single area of a single planet would be checked; the result would probably be negative or ambiguous or inconclusive; and the best possible outcome would be some microbes of interest only to specialists. By comparison, for one fortieth of the cost  (only 100 million dollars) the privately funded Breakthrough Listen project is searching for intelligent life in more than a million solar systems, by listening for radio messages. So why is the US spending so much on Mars missions, and so little on searching for extraterrestrials by using radio telescopes? It's largely because NASA is a privileged fiefdom that we have got in the very bad habit of giving 20 billions of dollars to each year.  NASA is like some billionaire's daughter who believes she is entitled to a weekly allowance of a million dollars. You would think that with all that money doled out to it, we would always get solid mission designs. 

It is interesting that the Perseverance rover has landed on Mars at a time when the US death toll from COVID-19 approaches 500,000.  But we haven't heard about any large-scale US investigation into the origin of COVID-19. It seems the US government has billions to spend on missions that might (after many years) tell us something about the origin of probably-nonexistent and long-extinct microbes on Mars, but that such a government doesn't have much interest in funding a full investigation into the origin of a definitely existing microbe that has killed almost half a million people here in the US. Very strange.  And what if some sample returned from Mars were to have microbes? It might lead to some pandemic worse than COVID-19.