NASA sent its Perseverance rover to Mars in early 2021 to look for signs of alien life on the planet. Astronomers knew that if there weren’t any life forms dwelling on the Red Planet in the present, we could still assume that the situation might have been completely different in the past.
The Perseverance mission just revealed the “Image of the Week,” and it’s perhaps something totally different from what we all expected. No, the rover didn’t find any little green men, nor some sort of nest of them. We still have a lot more to wait for that moment, if it will ever occur.
Rock gets stuck inside the rover’s wheels
According to SciTechDaily.com, the controversial image shows nothing more than a rock that got stuck in the Perseverance rover’s wheels.
Otherwise, NASA’s Perseverance rover has achieved some pretty impressive milestones until now. We can think about more than 100,000 images returned, 18 flights of the Ingenuity helicopter of NASA, samples of Martian rock collected, and more.
The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory spoke about the purpose of the Perseverance rover as follows:
A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover is characterizing the planet’s geology and past climate and paving the way for human exploration of the Red Planet. Perseverance is the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).
Mars has some striking similarities with Earth, which makes astronomers suspect that something has to have lived at some point in time on the Red Planet as well. Both planets have weather and seasons, mountains and valleys, and they’re located in the “Goldilocks Zone” of the Solar System, etc.
Luckily or not, only time will tell for sure if Mars was once inhabited or not.
