Tuesday, April 5 2005 18:48 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Kolkata: National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) spirit and opportunity rovers, currently beaming images from Mars, are not well equipped to answer the age-old question of life on the red planet and the unfinished task could be accomplished through next mission in 2009, a leading geologist said in Kolkata today (Apr 5, 2005).

"This mission neither has a biological laboratory nor is technologically equipped to address the question of life on Mars. The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission to take off in 2009 would be far more sophisticated and can probably give us answers we have been looking for," Dr Amitabha Ghosh, heading NASA's Atmospheric Science Team of the mission, said.

To be rocketed towards Mars in 2009, the billion plus dollar project would have an analytical set of instruments as well as a core drill and a crusher that deliver ground samples for detailed onboard study.

Being dubbed as a 'discovery-driven' mission, it would try to understand the ability of Mars, past or present to sustain life, Ghosh said.

Carrying a set of scientific instruments, MSL's tasks include identifying organic compounds such as proteins, amino acids, other acids and bases that attach themselves to carbon backbones the essentials for life.

The geologist, who has been on the Pathfinder, Odyssey and Explorer Rover Missions, said that contrary to popular perception, the NASA team's main objective was not tracking signs of life on the red planet during any of these missions.

"Absolutely not. The 'life on Mars' issue had never been our priority' you could say it was just a fringe curiosity in all our studies. But the 2009 mission would be all about habitability," the scientist, awarded for his outstanding contribution to NASA missions in 1997 and 2004, said.

The 34-year-old IIT, Kharagpur alumni said that the NASA team had obtained four indirect evidences of life on Mars by far but they were "very, very premature" to predict existence of any form of life on the red planet.

"We have found things like the jarosite and goethite rocks, huge concentration of salts at the Opportunity landing site hinting at a salt water body. But one cannot conclude too much from that. However, one can infer that they are certainly very habitable environments," he said.

MSL, designed to operate one full Martian year (equivalent of two earth years), can rotate across 10 times the payload of a Spirit or Opportunity-class rover and has the capability to core into soil, rock or ice to understand its chemistry.

The golf cart-sized rover, to touch down on Mars in 2010, would have an array of tools including a multi-spectral, stereo-imaging camera, a LASER-induced remote sensing device for chemistry and micro imaging, a Mars handles imager to image rocks and soil, X-ray spectrometer, high-resolution colour video imager to shoot the landing and a sample analyser.

"With that kind of precision equipment, it would be a lot easier to say just how habitable the planet was in the past or whether that faraway world can now serve as a haven for life," Ghosh said.