Lessons from a rover

Spacecraft have been going to Mars since the 1960s, but the question remains whether life ever existed on the Red Planet. In order for NASA scientists to seek that answer, they had to remember to what it was like to be a child and be curious.

“Mars has captured our curiosity since we had a telescope that could gaze at that planet,” says Dr. Moogega “Moo” Cooper. “And that curiosity still stands. Are we alone in the universe? Did life exist there?”

During a keynote address at the 2022 CUNA Lending Council Conference in San Diego, Cooper talked about her role in NASA’s search for determining whether life ever existed on Mars. An engineer with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Cooper was responsible for keeping Mars safe from Earth’s contaminants as a planetary protector on the Mars Perseverance rover mission.

In short, she was tasked with ensuring no “earth germs” were on any part of the rover sent to Mars to collect samples. NASA wanted to avoid introducing new things to the Red Planet’s environment.

 

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