![]() ![]() Hyodo notes that any impact that kicked up Martian soil wouldn't need to reach high velocities to land on Phobos because the moon is within Mars' gravitational sphere. Phobos is practically hugging Mars, and moves around the planet so quickly that if you were to observe it from the surface, you'd be able to see it rise and set twice every Martian day. For comparison, Earth's moon resides at a distance of around 385,000 kilometers (240,000 miles). Phobos has the closest orbit of any known moon to its parent body, circling the red planet at a distance of just 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles), about the same as the distance between Tokyo and Honolulu. If these impacts were to hit in just the right spot, at just the right angle and just the right time, there's a chance the ejected material would make it to Phobos, Mars' curious, potato-shaped moon. The atmosphere mostly takes care of that and alters the rock as it burns through the air.īut Mars is scarred by impacts from drifter asteroids that slammed into the surface over the planet's life. "Martian meteorites don't have any signatures of Martian life," says Tomohiro Usui, a planetary scientist at JAXA. Unfortunately for would-be Martian hunters, no microbes lurk within the stuff that makes it to Earth. If the asteroid death blast doesn't melt the rock and the microbes to mere atoms, there's a chance they can float into the cosmos. Just like a human sneeze contains microbes, the material ejected by a planet may also contain microscopic life - or the remnants of it. Over 300 meteorites discovered on Earth originated from the planet next door. If the debris survives its plunge through Earth's atmosphere, it smacks into the ground as a meteorite. ![]() Some of it can even arc across the gap between Mars and Earth, traveling tens or hundreds of millions of miles between the two planets. Much of the planetary snot will fall back to the surface, but if the asteroid impact is powerful enough, the sneeze will fling dust and rock into space. The remains of these unwitting spacefaring organisms have been untouched for millions of years and, soon, could be plucked from Phobos' face and returned to Earth. Scientists at JAXA, and other astronomers, hypothesize that on this curious moon they may find signs of ancient microbes that were catapulted off the surface of Mars and flung across the cosmos. ![]() With its Martian Moons Exploration mission, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, later this decade will touch down on a world no spacecraft has visited before: Phobos, one of Mars' mystifying moons. Today, its most advanced rover, Perseverance, rolls along the base of a dried-out lake bed known as Jezero, drilling into rocks and collecting samples that may be returned to Earth in the 2030s.īut another space agency, about one-tenth the size of NASA, is thinking outside of the planet-sized box in its search for Martian life. The agency has sent five rovers to the surface of the planet since 1997. Uncovering the gravesites has long been the holy grail for astrobiologists and a chief science goal of NASA's Mars exploration program. There may be a vast cemetery of tiny organisms buried beneath the red planet's exterior. As the spring dried, the silica would have entombed the still-living microscopic beasts within, frozen like Han Solo in carbonite, burying them underneath Mars' hostile surface. The chemical mix of a hot spring, rich in the mineral silica, is the perfect preservation material. Volcanic activity resurfaced areas of the planet, including Gusev, eradicating any life that may have been present (and that's a big may).īut if there were microbial communities present in those temperate waters, they may still linger in the rock left behind. Its landscape morphed, its waters dried up. Over billions of years, Mars' atmosphere slowly disappeared. Gusev crater is, today, a hollowed-out desert carved into the face of the red planet. It follows that in similar locations on Mars where water was once present, life may have found a way to thrive in the muck. Not just because of the throngs of tourists fumbling with iPhones to snap photos, but because their waters are brimming with bacteria, fungi and viruses. In its earliest days, places like Mars' Gusev crater, formed by a gigantic asteroid impact around 4 billion years ago, were likely home to hot springs. Ancient Mars is believed to have been home to hot springs similar to those found in places like Yellowstone National Park. ![]()
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