Key Sentence:
- With the advent of the new space race, the Japanese Space Agency has announced an essential step in the search for evidence of life on Mars.
Which, if implemented, would mean Japan could obtain samples from Martian soil and examine those samples for signs of life years ahead of the US and China.
The AP reported that the Japanese space agency said Thursday that it would launch a robotic rover in 2024 to collect soil samples from Phobos, one of Mars’s moons, and bring the pieces back to Earth in 2029.
The United States and China announced similar missions last year (though they plan to collect samples from the planet itself rather than the moon) but do not plan to return samples at least before 2031 and 2030, respectively. Japan plans to collect Earth from the moon, not Mars itself, as scientists believe it will provide many samples from the planet scattered by sandstorms.
They believe this soil sample will provide vital evidence of life on Mars.
So far, all successful missions have been to Mars rover, but several countries, including the United States and China, have studied plans to send people to the planet. In July 2020, NASA launched the Perseverance rover, which landed at Jezero Crater on Mars in February this year.
Its purpose is to look for possible signs of life on Mars and collect soil and rock samples. Even though he couldn’t collect samples on his first try this month, he would keep trying. The Chinese rover Zhurong landed on Mars in May 2021.
During its first 90 days on the planet, the rover Zhurong traveled nearly 1,000 feet above the earth to look around the earth and look for evidence of life. So far, only the US and China have managed to land a Mars rover on Mars. Japan’s new mission won’t change that, as it aims to travel to the moon on Mars, not the planet’s surface.
However, the faster schedule means the soil samples will arrive on Earth years before the United States or China, so scientists here can examine them for signs of potential life. It was not immediately clear what other plans Japan had for its researchers during the five-year mission, but it will likely spend that time gathering data and looking for evidence of different life on the planet.
300 million, How many miles from Earth is Mars. According to NASA, the rover’s journey to Mars will take about seven months.