NASA has plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface in the near future. Four astronauts will fly around the moon next year.
“We don’t need to go back to the moon just for the sake of the moon. We go back to learn new things. To get to Mars and beyond,” Administrator Bill Nelson said.
The Perseverance rover is exploring the Lake 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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“He gets the samples and drills with this drill, creates these cigar-sized core samples and fuses them into these titanium tubes,” Nelson explained. “Right now we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to go back and get them and bring them back to Earth to get an idea of ​​whether or not life was there.”
NASA is now working with several companies to develop a plan for a return mission that could take place in the 2030s. The agency is also working with Firebird Diagnostics to 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, among other things, is to get out there 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 share a common ancestor, a common ancestry, with you and me,” Benner said.
DNA has also helped detect 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 of them. They enable more sensitive testing and eliminate false positives.
This image provided 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 put a needle in a 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. ask me, ‘I think out there in space is life?'” Nelson said. “I ask our NASA scientists this question: ‘How many possibilities are there in the vastness of this universe that there is another planet like Earth that would be habitable for life as we know it?’ trillion.”
Nelson says that while the probability that life could exist in the universe, whatever it is, probably exists so far away that it won’t be discovered for a long time. However, NASA is still preparing for this possibility.
Former U.S. Senator 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 far distant world, the nearby ones are thousands of light years away,” Nelson said. “That doesn’t mean we can’t have some kind of understanding of what’s out there.
Nelson asked NASA scientists to use artificial intelligence in spacecraft software.
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“In a spacecraft like Voyager that’s in interstellar space that’s outside of our solar system, if it were to get on another spacecraft, it could learn to communicate with that other spacecraft in real time,” Nelson said. “That’s what we do at NASA. They make the impossible possible. There’s a bunch of wizards here.”