DIX Planetary Science Seminar

NASA's missions to Mars have revolutionized our understanding of the planet's potential for supporting life, with each mission building upon the last to reveal new types of evidence. From the Viking landers' first attempts to detect organics in the 1970s to the Mars Curiosity rover's groundbreaking discovery of complex organic molecules, these missions have established that Mars likely once harbored the key ingredients for life. The Mars 2020 mission has continued this legacy, collecting samples that may hold further clues about Mars' past habitability. This presentation will explore how such findings have shaped our astrobiological perspective of Mars, while highlighting the critical role of the Mars Sample Return campaign to enable more detailed analyses of the first martian samples returned to Earth, with a focus on the search for ancient microbial life.