NASA's new Mars Rover to search for traces of microscopic life from billions of years back

NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, which is set to land on the Red Planet on February 18, 2021, will begin searching for traces of microscopic life from billions of years back. According to a press release, NASA has installed a precision X-ray device called PIXL on the rover which is powered by artificial intelligence (AI). The device is a lunchbox-size instrument located on the end of the Perseverance’s seven-foot-long robotic arm and it will help the rover collect the most important samples. 

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PIXL, short for Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, has the ability to scan rock using a powerful, finely-focused X-ray beam to discover where and in what quantity chemicals are distributed across the surface. Abigail Allwood, PIXL's principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said that PIXL’s X-ray beam is so narrow that it can pinpoint features as small as a grain of salt. Allwood added that the device will allow the scientists to very accurately tie chemicals that they detect to specific textures in a rock. 

According to the press note, the rock textures will be an essential clue when deciding which samples are worth returning to Earth. While giving the example of Earth’s ‘distinctively wrapped rocks called stromatolites’, the US Space Agency said that the scientists will be looking for similar ‘ancient layers of bacteria’. 

PIXL relies on more than a precision X-ray beam alone. NASA informed that the device also needs hexapod, a device featuring six mechanical legs connecting PIXL to the robotic arm and guided by artificial intelligence to get the most accurate aim. Once the rover’s arm is placed close to a rock, PIXL will then be using its camera and lasers to calculate distance. 

Allwood said, “The hexapod figures out on its own how to point and extend its legs even closer to a rock target. It's kind of like a little robot who has made itself at home on the end of the rover's arm”. 

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‘PIXL is a night owl’ 

PIXL can measure X-rays in a 10-seconds burst from a single point on a rock before the instrument tilts and takes another measurement. In a bid to produce one of those postage-stamp-size chemical maps, the device may need to do the same process thousands of times over the course of as many a eight or nine hours. The given timeframe is partly what makes PIXL’s microscopic adjustments so critical. 

Furthermore, as the temperature on Mars changes by more than 38 degrees Celsius over the course of the day, the metal on Perseverance's robotic arm to expand and contract by as much as a half-inch. In a bid to minimise the thermal contractions PIXL has to contend with, the instrument will conduct its science after the Sunsets.

While calling PIXL ‘a night owl’, Allwood said, "The temperature is more stable at night, and that also lets us work at a time when there's less activity on the rover”. 

(Images: NASA JPL/Website) 

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