GROUNDED

THE SPACE PROGRAM ENNOBLED AMERICAN CULTURE AND ADVANCED AMERICAN SCIENCE. DONALD TRUMP HAS CHOSEN TO END THAT ERA OF AMBITION.

- ROSS ANDERSEN

A test model of the Perseverance rover, designed to explore the surface of Mars, sits in a garage at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, near Pasadena, California, in October.

Jamie Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

The Atlantic

On Mars, in the belly of a rover named Perseverance, a titanium tube holds a stone more precious than any diamond or ruby on Earth. The robot spotted it in 2024 along the banks of a Martian riverbed and zapped it with an ultraviolet laser. It contained ancient layers of mud, compressed into shale in the 3.5 billion years since the river last coursed across the red planet. Inside those layers, the rover found organic compounds. Its camera zoomed in and noticed leopard-like spots. Scientists had previously observed similar spotting patterns, but not on Mars. They'd seen them on Earth, in muds that once teemed with microbes.

The rover tucked a core sample about the size of a piece of chalk into a treasure chest in its chassis. There the rock will remain until a future robot parachutes down onto the Martian surface, grabs the chest, and launches it back to Earth. If scientists are able to inspect it in person, and they find that Mars was indeed once alive with microbes, we would know that life on our planet is no cosmic one-off. We would have reason to believe that it has emerged on many of the hundreds of billions of planets that exist in our galaxy alone. The cosmos that we look up into at night would no longer seem a cold void. It would shimmer with a new vitality.