Searching for life on Mars with the Rosalind Franklin rover

Special events

Participant

Jorge Vago
European Space Agency (ESA)

When

2025/03/12
18:30

Place

Kutxa FUndazioa Kluba, Tabakalera

Organizers

DIPC, Kutxa Fundazioa

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• The head scientist of the ExoMars program of the European Space Agency (ESA) Jorge Vago will give a public lecture at Kutxa Fundazioa Kluba, 1st Floor, Tabakalera, on 12 March in collaboration with DIPC.
• The meeting and subsequent dialogue will be led by DIPC Ikerbasque researcher Juan Manuel Garcia Ruiz, a scientist and expert in the origin of life and leader of the European Protos consortium.
• The conference is in Spanish and free of charge until full capacity is reached

Finding evidence of life beyond our planet is one of the most important scientific challenges of our time.

From its inception in 2002, ExoMars was conceived to answer a specific fundamental question: Was there ever life on the red planet? There is evidence that Mars harboured large amounts of water in the past, but the Martian surface is, at present, an arid desert exposed to strong radiation that makes life an impossibility, at least on the surface.

In 2028, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Exomars intends to send the Rosalind Franklin rover to Mars, a state-of-the-art mobile station equipped with a whole series of scientific gadgets to study the Martian subsoil. The aim of the mission is to go down to a depth of two metres to take samples, analyse their composition and search for evidence of past, and who knows, maybe present, life.

The scientific and technological challenge is enormous. To guarantee the best conditions and ensure the scientific team's ability to search for physical and chemical biotraces, it has been necessary to embark a 2 m deep drill, a careful choice of mission payload, as well as a field survey to establish the scientific potential and age of the landing site. The exploration strategy has identified the main targets, the number of trips required and the way in which the instruments will be used together.

This presentation will explain what distinguishes the Rosalind Franklin mission: how we can obtain, process and study samples; how we evaluate the evidence for or against a possible biological presence; and the types of formations of interest offered by the landing site, Oxia Planum.