André Antunes attended the first International Conference on Deep Space Exploration Sciences at the end of April, organized in Hefei, the capital of Anhui province, in eastern China, where there is a special zone dedicated to the aerospace industry.
One of the topics discussed, the Coimbra-based researcher explains, was collecting soil samples from Mars as part of the next Chinese space mission, Tianwen-3, scheduled to launch in 2030.
By 2026, China wants to pinpoint the exact location 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 Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST). . .
André Antunes was one of the scientists who defended the commitment to collect salt crystals in Hefei, because “they have an excellent ability to retain water and organic matter, microorganisms, inside, like a kind of time capsule”.
“That’s why studies of saline environments are such a high priority for astrobiology,” to “get a better sense of the limits of life” in extreme conditions, the Portuguese underlined.
Despite delays caused by the pandemic, André Antunes revealed that fieldwork, conducted with the University of Minho, enabled the isolation of new species of microbes that “survive and thrive” in salt pans in Aveiro and on the island of Sal, in Cape Verde. .
One of the aspects that has generated the most interest among the MUST team is the possible use of microorganisms to convert the dust plaguing the red planet into “space rocks,” the researcher said.
“One of the things that makes life more expensive and makes life more difficult with regard to space exploration missions is that everything has to be shipped from Earth,” remembers André Antunes.
The Chinese space agency wants to collect 500 grams of Martian soil and return it to Earth in a single mission, “which may seem a bit riskier at first,” admitted André Antunes.
But the scientist recalled that China’s missions to Mars, including an Earth-orbiting spacecraft, a lander and the Zhurong robot, which have been exploring the red planet since 2021, have had “huge success”.
Last week, Chinese researchers revealed that Zhurong has found evidence of the existence of liquid water, including crusts, cracks, grains and other marks created by water on the Martian surface.
Source: DN
