It will be four years in a few days a duo consisting of the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter He left Earth and headed for the red planet. About six and a half months later, when we had covered an approximate distance of 200 million kilometers, many of us were thrilled to know that the trip had ended successfully (and even more so when we saw the images of its landing) and that both vehicles were already ready to take over all tasks of the MARS 2020 mission.

In these years Endurance worked at a good pace, although an issue with one of its tools was discovered earlier this year. Ingenuity had planned five flights on the surface of Mars, but after they were completed, mission control found that they could extend its life much longer than originally planned. So much so that even though an accident broke one of its blades and thus ended it, it said goodbye to the service after completing a whopping 72 flights.

This type of mission always tends to address multiple goals, and in the case of MARS 2020, the goals for Perseverance were (and in fact still are, as the rover remains very active) to collect various samples of the planet’s surface and find signals that allow us to verify whether there could have been life on the red planet at that time. This is the reason for choosing the mission site, Crater Lake, because it is known to have contained a lake in ancient times, and the relationship between water and life is well known.

When the rover explored for almost three and a half years, the most promising discovery occurred because, according to NASA Perseverance has discovered a rock that could be confirmation that there was life on Mars in the ancient past. Of course, the US space agency is very cautious, stating that what appear to be signs of fossils may also have other origins unrelated to the presence of life on the planet.

We must also remember this as we have done on other occasions we are talking about microbial life formsand that when we talk about the past, we mean billions of years when conditions on Mars were most favorable for life. In other words, to be more clear, we’re not talking about complex life forms, much to the chagrin of conspiracy theorists, who have apparently already begun publishing news that NASA is hiding the Perseverance findings from us (and strangely, do so at the exact moment the agency made this announcement) .