Research projects in salt pans in Portugal and Cape Verde could help China discover life on Mars, a Portuguese scientist who heads an astrobiology unit in Macao told Lusa.
André Antunes attended, at the end of April, the first International Conference on Deep Space Exploration Sciences, organized in Hefei, capital of east China’s Anhui province, which has a special area dedicated to the aerospace industry. .
One of the topics under discussion, explained the Coimbra researcher, was the collection of soil samples from Mars as part of the next Chinese space mission, Tianwen-3, scheduled to launch in 2030.
By 2026, China wants to decide the exact place where it will look for “signs of life,” explained the head of the astrobiology unit at the State Reference Laboratory for Lunar and Planetary Science at the Macao University of Science and Technology (MUST).
André Antunes was among the scientists who defended the commitment to collect salt crystals in Hefei, because “they have an excellent capacity to conserve water and organic matter, microorganisms, inside, like a kind of time capsule.”
“That is why studies of saline environments are such a high priority for astrobiology”, to form “a better notion of the limits of life” in extreme conditions, stressed the Portuguese.
Despite the delays caused by the pandemic, André Antunes revealed that the field work, carried out with the University of Minho, made it possible to isolate new species of microbes that “survive and thrive” in the Aveiro salt flats and on the island of Salt, in Cape Verde. .
One of the aspects that has aroused the most interest in the MUST team is the possible use of microorganisms to transform the dust that plagues the red planet into “space bricks”, says the researcher.
“One of the things that makes life more expensive and complicated in relation to space exploration missions is that everything has to be sent” from Earth, recalled André Antunes.
The Chinese space agency wants to collect 500 grams of soil from Mars and bring it back to Earth in a single mission, “which may seem a bit more risky at first,” admitted André Antunes.
But the scientist recalled that China’s missions to Mars, including an orbital spacecraft, a lander and the Zhurong robot, exploring the red planet since 2021, have been “tremendously successful.”
Last week, Chinese researchers revealed that Zhurong discovered evidence of the existence of liquid water, including crusts, cracks, grains and other marks created by water on the surface of Mars.
Source: TSF
