what is the thesis statement of the research report life on mars

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What Is The Thesis Statement Of The Research Report Life On Mars?

Many students look for an excellent way to start a research paper on life on mars. However, to write a good thesis statement on the topic, a student must understand what a thesis statement is and its importance. This article aims to enlighten you on how to write a great thesis statement and give you some suggestions on thesis statements ideas you can use for your upcoming essay. But first: a thesis statement appears in the introductory paragraph and presents the essay’s main topic. In your life on mars paper, the thesis statement should introduce the reader to what you’ll be talking about. Your thesis statement is the most crucial part of an essay because it also sets the tone for the rest of the paper.

What Can You Write About in Your Life on Mars Thesis?

How to start thesis statement of the research report life on mars, why introduction to research report on life on mars matters, topics to write in your life on mars research paper thesis statement, let’s help you write the best life on mars thesis statements and papers.

There are three approaches you can use to write a thesis statement about life on Mars. They include giving detailed explanations, arguing your facts, and analyzing the topic. Here’s more to that:

• Explanatory thesis statement: This is where the writer gives a detailed account of a particular topic on life on mars. It requires you to be accurate on facts you write down and present evidence. These thesis statements do not support or oppose any claim.
• Argumentative thesis statement: Such a thesis statement requires you to express a specific view on life on Mars. After that, back or oppose your idea while supporting your stand. You need plenty of research to back your opinion. An example is ‘There can be no life on Mars.’
• Analytical thesis statement: It requires analysis of a particular topic, defining it, noting its various features, and evaluating it. Such thesis statements are suitable for writing papers where data analysis dominates.

An introduction to a research report done correctly will help you structure your argumentative, analytical or explanatory essay . Here are the steps to follow when writing your thesis statement on the research report on life on Mars:

• Conceptualize your thesis statement. It’s always a good idea to brainstorm and have the statement ready before writing. Have the relevant research to help you develop the body of your essay. In this case, read about life on Mars from several materials to establish points to write about.
• Answer a certain question. Your thesis statement should be an answer to a specific question. It should inform the reader what you’ll be writing about. For instance, a thesis statement such as ‘How life on mars negatively affects human life’ tells the reader that you intend to write about the adverse effects of mars on human life.
• Go straight to the point. A good thesis statement should be brief. While a couple of sentences may be acceptable, you should express your point in one sentence. For instance, an ideal thesis statement would be’ Human life on Mars is not possible.’

The introduction of any research report informs the reader of the paper’s contents. It gives some information on the subject that will be discussed. An excellent example of an introduction ought to:

• Provide the reader with background information about Mars.
• Talk about features of Mars similar to other planets like Earth.
• Briefly explain what you intend to write.

Are you figuring out what to write? The following are some examples regarding life on Mars that you can use as inspiration in your paper:

• How life on Mars would positively influence human life
• Analysis of the future possibilities of life on Mars
• Mars has the potential to support human life
• Evidence supporting the hypothesis of life on Mars

Feel free to reach out and learn more about thesis statements and relevant information to help you write a thesis. More so, we’ll write a variety of papers, from essays, homework, assignments, to dissertations, and guarantee quality essays with thesis statements that stand out.

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“Is there life on Mars?” is a question people have asked for more than a century. But in order to finally get the answer, we have to know what to look for and where to go on the planet to look for evidence of past life. With the Perseverance rover set to land on Mars on February 18, 2021, we are finally in a position to know where to go, what to look for, and knowing whether there is, or ever was, life on the Red Planet.

Science fiction aside, we know that there were not ancient civilizations or a population of little green people on Mars. So, what sort of things do we need to look for to know whether there was ever life on Mars? Fortunately, a robust Mars exploration program, including orbiters, landers, and rovers, has enabled detailed mapping of the planet and constrained important information about the environment.

We now know that there were times in the ancient past on Mars when conditions were wetter and at least a little warmer than the fairly inhospitable conditions that are present today. And there were once habitable environments that existed on the surface. For example, the Curiosity rover has shown that more than three billion years ago, Gale crater was the location of a lake  that held water likely suitable for sustaining life. Armed with information about the conditions and chemical environments on the surface, the Perseverance rover is outfitted with a science payload of instruments finely tuned for extracting information related to any biosignatures that might be present and signal the occurrence of life .

Panoramic view of the interior and rim of Gale crater. Image generated from pictures captured by the Curiosity rover.

But where should we go on Mars to maximize the chances of accessing the rocks most likely to have held and preserve any evidence of past life? To get at that answer, I co-led a series of workshops attended by the Mars science community to consider various candidate landing sites and help determine which one had the highest potential for preserving evidence of past life. Using data from Mars orbiters coupled with more detailed information from landers and rovers, we started with around thirty candidate sites and narrowed the list over the course of four workshops and five years. Some sites were clearly less viable than others and were weeded out fairly quickly. But once the discussion focused on a couple of different types of potentially viable sites, the process became much tougher. In the end, the science community felt—and the Perseverance mission and NASA agreed—that Jezero crater was the best place to look for evidence of past life on Mars.

This image shows the remains of an ancient delta in Mars' Jezero Crater, which NASA's Perseverance Mars rover will explore for signs of fossilized microbial life. The image was taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera aboard the ESA (European Space Agency) Mars Express orbiter. The European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, operates the ESA mission. The High Resolution Stereo Camera was developed by a group with leadership at the Freie Universitat Berlin.

What is so special about Jezero crater and where is it? Jezero crater is ~30 miles (~49 km) across, was formed by the impact of a large meteorite, and is located in the northern hemisphere of Mars (18.38°N 77.58°E) on the western margin of the ancient and much larger Isidis impact basin. But what makes it special relates to events that happened 3.5 billion years ago when water was more active on the surface of Mars than it is today. Ancient rivers on the western side of Jezero breached the crater rim and drained into the crater, forming a river delta and filling the crater with a lake. From the study of river deltas on the Earth, we know that they typically build outwards into lakes as sediment carried by the associated river enters the lake, slows down, and is deposited. As this process continues, the delta builds out over the top of lake beds and can bury and preserve delicate and subtle signatures of past life. These “biosignatures” are what Perseverance will be looking for when it lands on the floor of the crater and explores the ancient lake beds and nearby delta deposits.

Perseverance will use its instruments to look for signs of ancient life in the delta and lake deposits in Jezero crater and will hopefully allow us to finally answer the question of whether there was ever life on Mars. In addition, Perseverance will begin the process of collecting samples that could one day be returned to Earth. The importance of sample return cannot be overstated. Whether or not evidence of past life is found by Perseverance’s instruments, the legacy enabled by samples the rover collects will be the “scientific gift that keeps on giving”. Once returned to Earth by a future mission, these Mars samples can be subjected to more detailed analysis by a much wider set of instruments than can be carried by Perseverance . Moreover, sample archiving can preserve material for future analysis here on Earth by new and/or more detailed instruments that may not yet exist. So even if Perseverance does not find evidence of past life, it will collect samples that, once returned to Earth, could provide new insight into the evolution of Mars and whether there was ever life on the Red Planet.

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• Published: 21 February 2023

Life on Mars, can we detect it?

• Carol R. Stoker   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7265-292X 1  

Nature Communications volume  14 , Article number:  807 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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• Biochemistry

Searching for evidence of life on Mars is a major impetus for exploration. A new study published in Nature Communications finds that current Mars mission instruments lack the essential sensitivity to identify life traces in Chilean desert samples that strongly resemble the martian area currently under study by NASA’s Perseverance rover.

Almost half a century ago the NASA Viking landers searched for evidence of life in Mars soils by attempting to detect active metabolism and measuring organic compounds by heating to vaporize them for detection via Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS). When no organic compounds were detected even at levels of parts per billion 1 , this provided a puzzle. Since organic compounds are continuously delivered to Mars by meteorites, comets, and interplanetary dust particles they should be ubiquitous and comprise up to 2% of Mars soil 2 . But where are they? This curious lack of organics argued both against a biological interpretation for results of the metabolism experiments, and for the presence of strong soil oxidants that actively destroy these compounds 3 . However, decades later the Viking GC-MS results were explained by the presence of high levels of perchlorate salts in the Martian soil 4 that oxidized organics during pyrolysis in the Viking GC-MS instrument 5 .

While Viking lander results seemed unpromising for surface life in the cold, dry martian conditions, data from Viking orbiters and later missions showed that Mars had surface liquid water early in its history (3 to 4 billion years ago) 6 where life may have thrived. This led later NASA rover missions to seek evidence of ancient habitable environments hosting organic remnants of life. The SAM ( Sample Analysis on Mars ) instrument on the Curiosity rover detected organics in ancient lakebed deposits 7 , 8 , but they are found at low levels (parts per billion) and appear to be highly altered. The Perseverance rover, now exploring an ancient illuvial fan river delta, has detected aromatic organic compounds using fluorescence spectroscopy 9 . But in these cases, the simple organics detected could have been delivered to Mars from space so proving a biological origin is impossible.

The paper by Azua-Bustos et al. 10 in Nature Communications describes analysis of samples collected from “Red Stone”, an alluvial fan river delta more than 100 million years old in the Atacama Desert of Chile, Earth’s oldest and driest desert. Red Stone has similar geology to the delta area currently being studied by NASA’s Perseverance rover 11 (Fig.  1 ). The Red Stone location (near the ocean) frequently experiences fogs that provide water for sparse but active microbial life that was detected by DNA extraction and gene sequencing, microscopy, and growth of a few microbial strains cultured from the samples. Most microbes identified consist of “microbial dark matter” i.e., genetic information is from organisms that have not yet been described.

a Red Stone deposit from panorama image courtesy of Armando Azua-Bustos. b A section of the panoramic composite image [image PIA24921_MAIN-20k.jpg] of the Jezero delta captured by the MastCam-Z camera on the Perseverance Rover in June 2022 15 (Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS). The height of both white scale bars are ~2 m.

Samples from Red Stone were also analyzed by instruments that simulate those used on Mars, but even finding organics in these samples was challenging. A GC-MS instrument comparable to but ten times more sensitive than Curiosity rover’s SAM instrument was barely able to detect specific biogenic organic compounds at the limit of detection, suggesting that SAM could not have detected them. There was more success with organic detection after sample extraction with a powerful solvent that was also implemented on the SAM instrument. Indeed, the SAM instrument detected organics in both sedimentary mudstones and dune sands on Mars by using solvent extraction and derivatization (a chemical treatment to make organic compounds easier to detect) 8 .

Red Stone samples were analyzed with a testbed of the MOMA (Mars Organic Molecular Analysis) instrument 12 planned for the European ExoMars rover payload. No organics were detected when flash pyrolysis was used, but a few organic molecules were identified in evaporite samples when they were first extracted with a solvent and derivatized.

Red Stone samples were also analyzed with the SOLID-LDChip (Signs of Life Detector-Life Detector Chip) 13 , an instrument based on the technology of immunoassay that is commonly used in biomedicine. SOLID was designed for life detection on Mars but no scheduled missions plan to use it. Interestingly, the LDChip detected evidence of cyanobacteria that were not seen in the modern microbiota so Azua-Bustos et al. 10 posit these biosignatures were deposited along with the delta sediments at least 100 million years ago.

This Red Stone sample analysis 10 shows how critical it is to test instruments designed for life detection on other planets by using samples from relevant Earth analogs prior to selecting them for flight missions. If the biosignatures can’t be detected in Earth samples, where both current and ancient life is clearly documented, we should not expect these instruments to be capable of detecting evidence of life from Mars’ early history.

Azua-Bustos et al. 10 argue that detection of ancient life signatures will require sample analysis in sophisticated terrestrial laboratories. This same view has led to the current plans for searching for life: the Perseverance rover is collecting samples that are to be retrieved and brought to Earth by a future mission 14 . But any biological activity in these samples presumably took place billions of years ago, and only a few small samples can be brought to Earth for study. It remains to be seen if unambiguous signatures of life can be found in those limited samples. We must be cautious about interpreting absence of strong evidence of life as evidence of its absence!

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A small segment of a panorama comprised of Perseverance Rover MastCam-Z images (image PIA24921_Main-20k.jpg) taken June 2022. The full panoramic image is available for download at https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/26978/detailed-panorama-of-mars-jezero-crater-delta/ .

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Stoker, C.R. Life on Mars, can we detect it?. Nat Commun 14 , 807 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36176-x

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Research brief: Exploring extremes in the search for life on Mars

Credit: Joseph Heili, Tanner Hoog, and Aaron Engelhart

People might assume the search for life on Mars ended when NASA’s first rovers sent back images of the planet’s barren, inhospitable surface. However, as scientists broaden their understanding of the extreme conditions in which life can flourish here on Earth — and expand their notions of what extraterrestrial life might look like — the search for life on Mars continues.  In recent years, NASA missions have found evidence of abundant perchlorate salts on the Martian surface. Perchlorate salts can collect and combine with water from the atmosphere to form concentrated solutions called brines. Because liquid water is so essential to life, NASA has described their strategy in searching for life on Mars as "follow the water." As a result, perchlorate brines have attracted a lot of attention.

In  new research  published in the journal Nature Communications, investigators at the College of Biological Sciences studied in the lab how the unique geochemical environment on Mars could shape life in the past or present. The team, led by Assistant Professor  Aaron Engelhart , looked at two types of ribonucleic acids (RNAs — molecules that are essential to known living organisms) and protein enzymes from Earth to see if and how they functioned in perchlorate brines. They found:

• All the RNAs worked surprisingly well in perchlorate brines. 
• Protein enzymes didn’t function as well as RNAs in perchlorate brines. Only the proteins that evolved in extreme environments on Earth — in organisms that live at high temperatures or in high salt — could function.
• In perchlorate brines, RNA enzymes can do things they don’t normally do on Earth, such as generating new molecules that incorporate chlorine atoms. This reaction had not been observed by scientists before.

“Taken together, these results show that RNA is uniquely well-suited to the very salty environments that are found on Mars, and could be found on other bodies in space,” said Engelhart. “This extreme salt tolerance could influence how life may have formed on Mars in the past, or how it is forming in the conditions on Mars today.”

The team is continuing to investigate the chlorination chemistry they found, as well as other reactions RNA can perform in high-salt conditions.

The research was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Research Corporation for Science Advancement and the National Science Foundation.

Read the full news release on the U of M news page .   

123 Snyder Hall 1475 Gortner Ave St. Paul , MN 55108 United States

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Assessment of Mars Science and Mission Priorities (2003)

Chapter: 13. conclusions, 13 conclusions.

It is humankind’s nature to explore our surroundings if it can be done. Fifty years ago, exploring Mars was not one of the things anyone could do. Those who were curious had to be content with fuzzy images of the planet, quivering in the oculars of telescopes. But that is far from the case today. Forty years ago, spacecraft began to be sent to the planets, and since then, the art of space exploration has become increasingly refined and discoveries have multiplied. We now have the capability, in principle, of reaching and exploring any object in the solar system. At the top of the list of targets of exploration is Mars, the most Earth-like, most accessible, most hospitable, and most intriguing of the planets. Two years ago, in October 2000, NASA recognized this by setting the study of Mars apart in a structured Mars Exploration Program. The present document reports on COMPLEX’s study of the program.

COMPLEX has compared the elements of the Mars Exploration Program with the research objectives for Mars that have been stressed by advisory panels, including this one, for more than 23 years. The committee found that correspondence between the two is not perfect. Currently, NASA focuses on the search for life, and its prerequisite, water, as the main drivers for Mars research, and has favored missions and experiments that support these goals. The space agency is not now in a position to ask direct questions about life on Mars, and has not been since the Viking mission in the 1970s, but the missions supported are designed to find the areas most promising for water and life, and to investigate in situ their chemical and petrographic potential for extant or fossil life.

Since NASA operates within budget constraints, this emphasis on one particular scientific objective necessarily comes at the expense of others. COMPLEX considered the question of whether NASA’s priorities are too heavily skewed toward life-related investigations. The committee decided, however, that this is not the case. The emphasis on life is well justified; the life-related investigations that are planned range over so much of Mars science that they will result in broad and comprehensive gains in our knowledge; and the areas most neglected as a consequence of this emphasis (see Chapter 12 ) will, to some extent, be investigated by projected missions of our international partners.

COMPLEX endorses the program NASA has set up, though the committee has also pointed out several areas of high scientific priority that the program does not address. This report stresses the uniquely important role of sample return in a program of Mars research, and urges that sample-return missions be performed as early as possible. Discussions and recommendations related to sample return appear in Chapters 7 and 12 . A more general review of the conclusions of this report is contained in the Executive Summary.

FIGURE 13.1 The study of Mars has come very far. This map is a reminder of how the planet was perceived in 1967. SOURCE: Mariner 69 Mars Chart, NASA MEC-2.

Our understanding of the most Earth-like planet beyond our own has increased dramatically in 35 years of spacecraft research (see Figure 13.1). Most of us will live to see an even greater increment of knowledge result from execution of the Mars Exploration Program that this report describes.

Within the Office of Space Science of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) special importance is attached to exploration of the planet Mars, because it is the most like Earth of the planets in the solar system and the place where the first detection of extraterrestrial life seems most likely to be made. The failures in 1999 of two NASA missions—Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander—caused the space agency's program of Mars exploration to be systematically rethought, both technologically and scientifically. A new Mars Exploration Program plan (summarized in Appendix A) was announced in October 2000. The Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration (COMPLEX), a standing committee of the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council, was asked to examine the scientific content of this new program. This goals of this report are the following:

-Review the state of knowledge of the planet Mars, with special emphasis on findings of the most recent Mars missions and related research activities;

-Review the most important Mars research opportunities in the immediate future;

-Review scientific priorities for the exploration of Mars identified by COMPLEX (and other scientific advisory groups) and their motivation, and consider the degree to which recent discoveries suggest a reordering of priorities; and

-Assess the congruence between NASA's evolving Mars Exploration Program plan and these recommended priorities, and suggest any adjustments that might be warranted.

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Writing Life on Mars: Posthuman Imaginaries of Extraterrestrial Colonization and the NASA Mars Rover Missions

• First Online: 01 January 2022

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• Jens Temmen 6  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing ((PSLW))

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Focusing on three different life narratives and practices of Mars colonization—the NASA rover missions, the technoliberal campaign to settle the red planet by space entrepreneur Elon Musk, and the critical activist project “Planetary Personhood”—Jens Temmen analyzes how, in the context of climate change debates, human colonization of other planets has been reframed as inevitable and necessary to ensure the survival of humanity. Temmen’s contribution focuses on how these “astrofuturist” narratives negotiate the utopian vision of space colonization as a transformative posthuman experience of escape from the terrestrial limits placed on humanity, and it discusses whether life writing as a format allows for a thorough and critical posthuman inquiry of humanity’s anthropocentrism.

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Ganser, “Astrofuturism,” 36.

Ibid., 35, 37.

See Ganser, “Astrofuturism,” 36, 40. See Kilgore, “Astrofuturism,” 1, quoted in Ganser, “Astrofuturism,” 35.

Davenport, The Space Barons , 4, 123, 143–144.

See Ganser, “Astrofuturism,” 37, 40. See Redmond, “The Whiteness of Cinematic,” 348.

See Braidotti, The Posthuman , 9.

See Messeri, Placing Outer Space , 2.

See Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover , 20.

Similar to the idea of “greenwashing” products as environmental-friendly, the concept of “double red washing” refers to how the privatization of the space industry is promoted by Musk and others as the only way to achieve the colonization of the red planet, and to how both the privatized space industry and Mars colonization are depicted as progressive measures aiming for greater social justice (see Marx, “Elon Musk is Planning”).

See Braidotti, The Posthuman , 43–44.

Opportunity’s sister rover “Spirit” had shut down in 2009 already.

See “‘My battery is low.’”

See Simon, “Opinion.”

See Butler, “Precariousness and Grievability.”

Butler analyzes how in times of war and crisis, the notion of a grievable death is a political issue of enormous significance. Focusing on 9/11 and the subsequent war in Iraq, Butler describes how public mourning can be used as a way of supporting the war effort and of constructing nationalist (non-)belonging, but also as a mode of dehumanization of the lives that are specifically constructed as ungrievable. Even though Butler’s work is deeply immersed in the specific context of warfare, her assumptions are valid for the way in which the rovers and their demise figure as a ledger for nationalistic sentiments of belonging and pride.

The playlist consists of the music that NASA staffers had sent to Opportunity along with its wake-up command after the storm had crippled him and includes songs such as David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?,” “Staying Alive” by the BeeGees, as well as Wham!‘s “Wake Me up Before You Go-Go.”

Simon, “Opinion.”

See Messeri, Placing Outer Space , 19.

Messeri, Placing Outer Space , 19.

See Messeri, Placing Outer Space , 5, 19, 34.

Braidotti, The Posthuman , 2.

Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover , 20.

See Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 2.

The way that the rovers seem to break barriers between technology, human, and animal, make them comparable to other posthuman icons, such as the cloned sheep Dolly, which, according to Braidotti, is an entity “no longer an animal but not yet fully a machine,” 74. The rovers, no longer a machine but not yet fully human, seem to be on that same spectrum.

Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 6. See Markley, Dying Planet , 270.

Braidotti, The Posthuman , 43–44.

See Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover , 7, 170–171.

Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover , 25.

Ibid., 171.

Ibid., 176.

Keeling, “Queer OS,” 157.

See Braidotti, The Posthuman , 9, 124, 125–126. See Mbembe, Necropolitics .

Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 1, 6. Atanasoski and Vora’s work focuses predominately on self-reproducing robots which are projected to be a vital part of the first steps to Martian colonization, but which have not yet been constructed or deployed (see ibid., 2). The way that NASA frames the current Mars rovers as links in human evolution, allows, I would argue, for a broadening of Atanasoski and Vora’s argument to apply here as well.

See Messeri, Placing Outer Space , 18, 68.

See Messeri, Placing Outer Space , 18. See Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover , 31–32. A prominent and striking example is the influential essay by aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin, titled “The Significance of the Martian Frontier,” which advocates for Martian colonization through frontier discourses in general and by directly drawing on Frederick Jackson Turner’s infamous frontier thesis in particular, 13.

The concept of terra nullius is a core tenet of settler colonialism that relies on framing the Indigenous populations of newly “discovered” lands as less-than-human and therefore without claim to their own land (see Robertson, Conquest by Law ).

Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 2.

See Temmen, “From HI-SEAS to Outer Space.”

See Saraf, “‘We’d Rather Eat Rocks.’”

See Messeri, Placing Outer Space , 68.

Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 6.

Even though space agencies around the globe rely (and have relied for a long time) on private industry contractors, space travel is not a privatized business, but regulated on a national and international level. Private businesses can partner with national agencies, but they cannot conduct space travel on their own. While Musk and others have become important players as contractors, their vision includes completely privatizing space travel, which would, in their perspective, break a detrimental nation-state monopoly on space travel.

Davenport, The Space Barons , 4.

Ibid., 4–5.

See Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth , 175–176.

Messeri, Placing Outer Space , 18.

Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 11.

Davenport, The Space Barons , 1–2.

See Davenport, The Space Barons , 2.

Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 1.

See Davenport, The Space Barons , 49–60, 117.

“When Slow Violence Sprints.”

Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth , 176.

See Braidotti, The Posthuman , 5–6. See Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 221–222.

See Heise, Sense of Planet , 25. See Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 16.

Nonhuman Nonsense, “Planetary Personhood.”

See New Zealand Parliamentary Counsel Office, “Te Urewera Act 2014.”

See Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 14.

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Temmen, J. (2021). Writing Life on Mars: Posthuman Imaginaries of Extraterrestrial Colonization and the NASA Mars Rover Missions. In: Batzke, I., Espinoza Garrido, L., Hess, L.M. (eds) Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77973-3_8

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• How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples

How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples

Published on January 11, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on August 15, 2023 by Eoghan Ryan.

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . It usually comes near the end of your introduction .

Your thesis will look a bit different depending on the type of essay you’re writing. But the thesis statement should always clearly state the main idea you want to get across. Everything else in your essay should relate back to this idea.

You can write your thesis statement by following four simple steps:

• Start with a question
• Write your initial answer
• Develop your answer
• Refine your thesis statement

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Table of contents

What is a thesis statement, placement of the thesis statement, step 1: start with a question, step 2: write your initial answer, step 3: develop your answer, step 4: refine your thesis statement, types of thesis statements, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about thesis statements.

A thesis statement summarizes the central points of your essay. It is a signpost telling the reader what the essay will argue and why.

The best thesis statements are:

• Concise: A good thesis statement is short and sweet—don’t use more words than necessary. State your point clearly and directly in one or two sentences.
• Contentious: Your thesis shouldn’t be a simple statement of fact that everyone already knows. A good thesis statement is a claim that requires further evidence or analysis to back it up.
• Coherent: Everything mentioned in your thesis statement must be supported and explained in the rest of your paper.

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The thesis statement generally appears at the end of your essay introduction or research paper introduction .

The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts and among young people more generally is hotly debated. For many who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education: the internet facilitates easier access to information, exposure to different perspectives, and a flexible learning environment for both students and teachers.

You should come up with an initial thesis, sometimes called a working thesis , early in the writing process . As soon as you’ve decided on your essay topic , you need to work out what you want to say about it—a clear thesis will give your essay direction and structure.

You might already have a question in your assignment, but if not, try to come up with your own. What would you like to find out or decide about your topic?

For example, you might ask:

After some initial research, you can formulate a tentative answer to this question. At this stage it can be simple, and it should guide the research process and writing process .

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Now you need to consider why this is your answer and how you will convince your reader to agree with you. As you read more about your topic and begin writing, your answer should get more detailed.

In your essay about the internet and education, the thesis states your position and sketches out the key arguments you’ll use to support it.

The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education because it facilitates easier access to information.

In your essay about braille, the thesis statement summarizes the key historical development that you’ll explain.

The invention of braille in the 19th century transformed the lives of blind people, allowing them to participate more actively in public life.

A strong thesis statement should tell the reader:

• Why you hold this position
• What they’ll learn from your essay
• The key points of your argument or narrative

The final thesis statement doesn’t just state your position, but summarizes your overall argument or the entire topic you’re going to explain. To strengthen a weak thesis statement, it can help to consider the broader context of your topic.

These examples are more specific and show that you’ll explore your topic in depth.

Your thesis statement should match the goals of your essay, which vary depending on the type of essay you’re writing:

• In an argumentative essay , your thesis statement should take a strong position. Your aim in the essay is to convince your reader of this thesis based on evidence and logical reasoning.
• In an expository essay , you’ll aim to explain the facts of a topic or process. Your thesis statement doesn’t have to include a strong opinion in this case, but it should clearly state the central point you want to make, and mention the key elements you’ll explain.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.

The thesis statement is essential in any academic essay or research paper for two main reasons:

• It gives your writing direction and focus.
• It gives the reader a concise summary of your main point.

Without a clear thesis statement, an essay can end up rambling and unfocused, leaving your reader unsure of exactly what you want to say.

Follow these four steps to come up with a thesis statement :

• Ask a question about your topic .
• Write your initial answer.
• Develop your answer by including reasons.
• Refine your answer, adding more detail and nuance.

The thesis statement should be placed at the end of your essay introduction .

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June 26, 2024

Mars Rocks Will Change How We See Life on Earth

Despite an eye-watering price tag, bringing pieces of Mars back to Earth promises to revolutionize our understanding of life’s place in the early solar system

By Robin Wordsworth

Mars looms large in this mosaic based on images from NASA's Viking orbiter. The linear features (center) are Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system, which cuts across nearly a quarter of the planet's circumference.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

At a recent workshop in Washington, D.C., on the science of NASA’s Mars Sample Return (MSR) program, the mood was excited but tense. The space agency had just dropped a bombshell announcement that it was looking for “outside the box” proposals from private industry to reboot its troubled plan of bringing back Martian rocks to Earth. None of us were exactly sure what this meant, so we tried to focus on the science, but speculation on the fate of the U.S. Mars program was hard to avoid.

Bringing back rocks from another planet will be the most ambitious thing that NASA has attempted since the Apollo program. Pursued in partnership with the European Space Agency, MSR is a key stepping stone in the path towards sending humans to Mars, and eventually to other places in the solar system. But the eye-watering estimated price tag for the original MSR plan —between $8 and $11 billion , all to retrieve a few kilograms of rock, soil and Mars air no earlier than 2040—has left many policy makers, and even a few scientists, wondering if the benefits really outweigh the costs.

Outsourcing some of the heavy lifting to companies such as SpaceX and Lockheed Martin could perhaps be a faster and cheaper way to bring MSR’s precious cargo back home. But there’s no avoiding the fact that doing big things in space is always expensive: adjusted for inflation the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) cost about $10 billion , while the entire Apollo program cost more than $250 billion . In these and many other cases, sharp criticisms of the high cost faded with hindsight, as the true impact of each project’s monumental achievements became clear. Because MSR’s scientific, technological and even political implications are so far-reaching, I believe we’ll see it in just the same way in years to come.

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Mars is scientifically important because it allows us to study what makes a planet habitable over time. The Red Planet had rivers, lakes and possibly even oceans in its early history, but because of its small size and distance from the sun, it cooled and lost much of its atmosphere within the first billion years of its life. This transformed Mars into a much harsher place, but it had the fortuitous side-effect of preserving the planet’s ancient habitable past right on its surface. Plate tectonics and erosion have chewed up most of our home planet’s ancient rock record, but on Mars we have a window into the early solar system that goes back four billion years—the same time life was first emerging on Earth.

Explaining why Mars had ancient rivers and lakes is a long-standing problem in planetary science. As far back as 1972, Carl Sagan and George Mullen noted that because the young sun was fainter than it is today , early Mars should have been extremely cold, unless its climate was radically different. Today, there are several promising solutions to this problem, but still no consensus on which is the correct one.

Sample return will tackle this question head-on, because it will allow us to study ancient Mars rocks as never before, seeking chemical clues on the nature of that world’s early atmosphere and climate. Many samples are already packaged in tubes and awaiting retrieval from the vicinity of Mars’s Jezero Crater, the site of a now-vanished ancient lake where NASA’s Perseverance rover has been operating since 2021.

Perseverance’s in situ studies of the samples already hint at the ancient lake’s highly dynamic environment, and the minerals preserved in these rocks represent a treasure trove for future scientists to examine. For example, measurements of trace isotopes can reveal the composition of the ancient atmosphere, constrain the timing of key geological events and even tell us the temperatures at which minerals in sediments formed. Techniques for this kind of work on Earth are now highly advanced, but they require large laboratories and heavy, finely calibrated instruments, ruling them out for use by robotic landers and rovers.

The early habitability of Mars is particularly important because of its implications for planets and life elsewhere in the universe. The latest observations by JWST are suggesting that just like Mars, many small rocky worlds around other stars have lost much of their atmospheres, too. Solving the problem of Martian habitability can therefore also help us to understand whether life could exist on such planets.

MSR’s most revolutionary possible result would of course be a direct discovery of ancient Martian life. This is far from guaranteed, but it’s entirely possible, as early Mars likely had all the ingredients necessary to kick-start prebiotic chemistry. In a 2021 study California Institute of Technology researcher Danica Adams and her colleagues showed that the early Martian atmosphere could have produced biologically significant quantities of hydrogen cyanide —a compound that despite being toxic to humans was probably essential to the origin of life on Earth. In another recent study, Penn State professor Chris House and colleagues found suspiciously lightweight carbon isotopes in samples of organic material from Gale Crater , where Perseverance’s older sibling Curiosity is still exploring. This enrichment could be a consequence of unusual atmospheric chemistry, or it could have been caused by the presence of ancient microorganisms that preferentially consumed the lighter form of carbon, just as life on Earth does. Detailed study of returned samples will allow us to address these and many other questions about chemistry and life on early Mars.

MSR is ambitious in the way that all great science must be. It will open the door to a huge range of new possibilities in both robotic and human exploration beyond Earth’s orbit. As shown by the recent success of China’s remarkable Chang’e 6 mission, which has just returned the first-ever samples from the far side of the moon , 21st-century planetary science is now a truly international endeavor. The U.S. has led the way in Mars exploration for decades, but Mars too is now a target of interest for multiple countries, including China, which is planning a sample-return mission of its own that would bring back rocks from the Red Planet in the 2030s. Maintaining U.S. leadership in Mars exploration is absolutely possible, but requires foresight and renewed commitment from policy makers, starting now.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Mars: The Exploration of the Red Planet Research Paper

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Mars, the fourth planet in order of increasing distance from the sun and the first beyond the earth’s orbit. Under favorable conditions, it appears in the night sky as a yellowish red object (hence the name “red planet”) of the first magnitude. Mars has long fascinated us because of its many similarities to the earth and because of the possibility that life might exist there. The flyby of the crewless spacecraft Mariner 4 past the planet in 1965 started an era of intense exploration that still continues. Following several crewless flybys and orbiters launched by the United States (Mariners 4, 6, 7, and 9) and by the Soviet Union (Mars 3, 4, 5, and 6), the first successful soft landing of a spacecraft on another planet was achieved on July 20, 1976, when the U.S. spacecraft Viking 1 landed on the surface of Mars. Since then, Mars has been visited by several unpiloted craft, including the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft in 1997 and the Mars Global Surveyor from 1997 to 2006. (Squyres, 12) When images from these two probes were compared, scientists began to suspect that water had once flowed at several locations. Since 2004, NASA’s (National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s) Mars Exploration Rovers twin robot-geologists Spirit and Opportunity have explored the harsh Martian environment in search of water. The Phoenix Mars Lander, which safely reached the planet’s the North Pole in 2008, will analyze the icy soil for evidence of past microbial life. Mars is now perceived as a planet of spectacularly diverse topography with huge volcanoes, deep canyons, dry riverbeds, and extensive sand seas. While evidence of life there continues to be elusive, Mars remains interesting for geologic, chemical, and meteorological comparisons with the earth (Paolo, p.89).

Telescopic Observations

Following the first telescopic observations of Mars by Galileo in 1610, the planet has been observed continually, with changes in its appearance noted and mapped. Mars is too distant for any surface relief to be discerned through the telescope. All that is seen are bright and dark markings, which may be in the atmosphere or on the surface. Most surface markings are in the equatorial regions, where various dark features contrast with the light areas or “deserts.” The shape and size of most markings change both seasonally and, slowly, over many years. Despite the many changes, the most prominent features are recognizable even on the earliest maps. The markings show poor correlation with topographic features revealed by spacecraft observations. Most are thought to result from thin deposits of windblown debris whose distribution changes with time. Bright polar caps are clearly visible through the telescope, and the larger size of the northern polar cap long has been recognized.

Most of the changes in appearance through the telescope are due to atmospheric effects of various kinds. Large arrays of white clouds commonly form in the middle latitudes and may persist for weeks. Those around the volcanic centers of Tharsis and Elysium most likely form when the air cools as it rises over the high volcanic regions. Other white clouds probably are caused by the daily recycling of water between the soil and the lower atmosphere. Frontal clouds and standing-wave clouds, seen clearly in spacecraft pictures, are probably not visible from the earth. During the fall thick clouds gather in the high latitudes to form polar hoods, which mask the growth of the polar caps. Brightening at the poles in this season is probably the result of both these clouds and the cap itself. Brightening in low areas such as Hellas and Argyre may also result from a combination of surface frost and clouds.

Whereas white clouds generally are brightest when observed in blue light, yellow clouds are brightest in yellow and orange. Yellow clouds occur mostly in the mid-southern latitudes at midsummer when large lateral and vertical temperature gradients cause extreme turbulence, which lifts large amounts of dust into the atmosphere. Activity generally starts in the region 320° W to 30° W and 30° S to 60° S and in most years spreads widely, so that ultimately the whole planet is engulfed in a gigantic dust storm. After the midsummer turbulence declines, dust slowly settles out of the atmosphere and the surface markings reappear. Global dust storms of this type were observed close up in 1971 by the Mariner 9 flyby space probe and in 1977 by the Viking orbiters (Squyres, p. 32).

No other aspect of Mars has aroused such widespread interest and controversy as the so-called canals. The controversy started in 1877 with the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli’s publication of a map of Mars that showed many dark lines on the surface. These he called Canali, the Italian word for both “canal” and “channel.” In the ensuing decades, Mars observers were divided between those who claimed the canals existed and those who claimed they did not. The strongest proponent of the canals was the American astronomer Percival Lowell, who produced ever more intricate maps of linear markings based on observations at the observatory he founded in Flagstaff, Ariz. In a book published in 1908, he aroused considerable popular attention by suggesting that the markings were irrigation canals built by an advanced civilization. As better telescopes were built and instrumental measurements failed to confirm their existence, belief in the canals declined (Furniss, p. 68). The various space probes that have since visited Mars found no evidence for most of the lines on the early maps, with the result that most are now regarded as optical illusions.

Spacecraft Explorations

Most current knowledge of Mars is derived from space-probe observations, initially from the Mariner 9 and Viking missions. In 1965 the U.S. Mariner 4 flyby space probe returned the first close-up pictures of the planet, followed in 1969 by two additional flyby missions, Mariners 6 and 7. All three probes flew over the parts of the planet that most resemble the moon and presented a rather deceptive view of the planet as a moonlike body. The diverse geologic character of the Martian surface was not fully recognized until 1971. During that year Mariner 9 and two Soviet spacecraft, Mars 2 and 3, were placed in orbit around Mars. The Soviet spacecraft was short-lived, and their accompanying Landers failed to return useful data from the surface, but Mariner 9 continued to operate for a year, returning more than 7,000 pictures of the planet. (Paolo, 45) Additional photographs were obtained in 1974 by the Soviet vehicles Mars 4, 5, and 6. In 1976 two Viking spacecraft were placed in orbit around Mars, and two additional spacecraft landed on the surface. The Viking 2 and 1 orbiters continued to function, respectively, until 1978 and 1980, by which time they had taken over 50,000 pictures of the planet and returned a wealth of other data. Contact with the Viking 2 and 1 Landers was lost, respectively, in 1980 and 1982 (Squyres, p. 57).

After a 17-year hiatus in Mars exploration, the United States launched Mars Observer in 1992. Mission objectives were to study geology, geophysics, and climate of the red planet, but it ended in disappointment when contact was lost with the craft just before it entered Martian orbit. In 1996 Mars Pathfinder was launched to demonstrate that an unpiloted spacecraft could deliver and deploy a robotic rover. Not only was the mission a success, but also Pathfinder and its rover, Sojourner, returned unprecedented amounts of information including images, soil analyses, and wind measurements before their final data transmission in September 1997. The next two missions to Mars failed: Climate Orbiter burned up on entering Mars’s atmosphere in September 1999; and three months later Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 were lost on arrival.

These disappointments were followed by a spate of successes, beginning in 1997 when Mars Global Surveyor slipped into Martian orbit. For nine years the probe mapped the red planet returning dramatic evidence of hillside water flows before succumbing to battery failure in 2006. The Mars Odyssey spacecraft, launched in 2001, has captured more than 130,000 images and continues to transmit information about Martian geology, climate, and mineralogy. NASA joined with the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency for the Mars Express mission in 2003 (Paolo, p. 23). Despite losing Beagle 2, its land rover, Mars Express has provided information about various surface features, including buried impact craters, evidence of glacial activity, and the presence of methane gas. The pursuit of geological clues to the possibility of life on Mars continued with NASA’s land rovers Spirit and Opportunity, twin robotic vehicles that rolled off their airbag-encased Landers on opposite sides of Mars in 2004 (Furniss, p. 102). Sporting names selected from more than 10,000 entries in a student essay contest, the two solar-powered rovers have outlived their intended three-month mission and continue to transmit high-resolution, full-color images of Martian terrain, soil surfaces, and rocks. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched in 2005, currently orbits high above the red planet, using a sounding device to search for subsurface water.

In May 2008 the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter relayed photographs of the safe descent of the Phoenix Mars Lander as it parachuted onto the planet’s frozen North Pole. Daily instructions were sent from the earthbound control center, directing the Lander to collect soil samples from the icy surface. Phoenix used its robotic arm to deliver soil and ice samples to its onboard experiment platforms. The samples are to be analyzed in hopes of determining whether the location could have supported microbial life during the planet’s past.

General Physiography

Mars is markedly asymmetrical in the distribution of its surface features. Much of the Southern Hemisphere is heavily cratered like the lunar highlands and includes two large impact basins, Hellas and Argyre. In contrast, much of the Northern Hemisphere is covered with sparsely cratered plains. The planet has two major volcanic regions, the Tharsis region centered at 110° W on the equator and the Elysium region centered at 25° N, 212° W. Extending eastward from Tharsis are several large canyons that together makeup Valles Marineris, while east and north of the canyons are several huge dry riverbeds. The poles are distinctly different from the rest of the planet and appear to have thick deposits of layered sedimentary rocks exposed at the surface. The North Pole is also surrounded by extensive sand dunes.

Densely Cratered Terrain

This terrain is characterized by many large, relatively shallow craters; smooth intercrater plains; and a relatively small number of smaller craters (those less than 30 miles, or 50 km, in diameter). The terrain probably dates from very early in the planet’s history, possibly from 4 billion years ago, when the impact rate was higher than at present. The most extensive cratered areas are in the Southern Hemisphere. Fresh Martian craters differ markedly in appearance from those on the moon and Mercury. Most lunar craters are surrounded by disordered rubble-like ejecta that appears to have been deposited from ballistic trajectories. In contrast, the Martian craters are surrounded by ejecta that appears to have flowed along the ground. The fluid properties of the ejecta have been attributed to the presence in the Martian surface of large amounts of ground ice, which melts on impact and is incorporated into the ejecta. Crater examination by the Opportunity probe has revealed evidence of a watery and possibly habitable past on Mars.

Sparsely Cratered Plains

Plains cover much of the Northern Hemisphere and also occur within large impact basins such as Hellas and Argyre in the south. They are distinguished from the densely cratered terrain by the almost total absence of impact craters larger than 30 miles (50 km) in diameter. The plains have a different appearance in different areas. Around the large volcanoes in Tharsis and Elysium, the plains appear to be a thick succession of lava flows. In other areas, such as Chryse Planitia, where the Viking 1 spacecraft landed, the plains resemble those of the lunar maria, being relatively featureless except for impact craters and low winding ridges. These plains are probably also volcanic. The plains in the high northern latitudes have a variety of poorly understood features. Extensive areas have a polygonal fracture pattern, with individual polygons averaging 6 miles (10 km) across. In other areas are parallel linear markings, low escarpments, and intricate patterns of light and dark. Many of the unique characteristics of the northern plains have been attributed to repeated deposition and removal by the wind of layers of ice-rich debris. The number of impact craters on most of the plains, while considerably smaller than on the densely cratered terrain, is still sufficiently large to indicate an old age, probably in the range of 1 to 4 billion years. The only possible exceptions are the plains around the large volcanoes, which appear younger.

Volcanic and Tectonic Features

The large volcanoes of Tharsis are among the most spectacular features of the planet. The largest, Olympus Mons, is 15.5 miles (25 km) high and more than 340 miles (550 km) across at its base. Three other volcanoes in Tharsis reach approximately the same height. Each is topped by a central caldera, or crater, 50 to 75 miles (80 to 120 km) across, and on the flanks are numerous lava channels, lava tubes, flow fronts, and other features indicative of very fluid lava. Analysis of photographs transmitted by Odyssey in 2007 of the massive Arsia Mons volcano reveals seven black spots that scientists suspect are caves the size of football fields. If so, they would shield their contents from surface radiation and could potentially shelter life (Squyres, p. 78).

The style of volcanism on Mars is similar to that in Hawaii, except that the Martian features are ten times larger. The volcanoes are relatively young and may still be active. Tharsis is also the center of a set of fractures that occur over almost an entire hemisphere of the planet. They appear to have formed as a result of the loading of the crust by the Tharsis bulge.

Volcanoes also occur elsewhere on Mars, but they tend to be older and smaller than those in Tharsis. In 2007 the Spirit rover rolled onto evidence of an ancient volcanic explosion near its landing site dubbed “Home Plate” in Gusev Crater. Analysis revealed high chlorine content in the 2-meter- (6-foot) thick plateau of bedrock, suggesting that fluid basalt lava had come in contact with brine, indicating that water had been involved (Paolo, p. 59).

To the east of Tharsis and aligned along with the radial fractures are several enormous canyons. They stretch from the summit of the Tharsis bulge eastward for approximately 3,000 miles (5,000 km). Individual canyons are up to 125 miles (200 km) across and 1 to 4 miles (2 to 7 km) deep. The walls are steep and in many sections deeply gullied. In some parts, the walls have collapsed to form gigantic landslides several tens of miles across that have traveled more than 60 miles (100 km) along the canyon floor. The canyons are believed to have formed mainly by down faulting, followed by slumping and gullying of the walls (Furniss, p. 62).

Channels pose some of the more puzzling problems of Martian geology. Much of the densely cratered terrain is dissected by small channels that form drainage networks much like terrestrial river valleys. Liquid water, however,

• Furniss, Tim. The History of Space Exploration: And Its Future… Mercury Books London: 2005
• Paolo, Ulivi & Harland, David. Robotic Exploration of the Solar System. Springer Praxis Books: 2008
• Squyres, Steve. Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet Hyperion; Reprint edition: 2007
• “Mars the Abode of Life” by Percival Lowell
• Astronomy Exploration of Planets and Satellites in Comparison With the Earth
• MAVEN Mission on Mars
• The Status of Pluto Needs to Remain as a Planet
• Astronomy: Ancient History of Science
• Cosmology and Astronomical Observation
• Near-Earth Objects and Planetary Defences
• Astronomy: Nature of Life on Other Planets
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IvyPanda. (2021, October 11). Mars: The Exploration of the Red Planet. https://ivypanda.com/essays/explorations-of-mars/

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1. IvyPanda . "Mars: The Exploration of the Red Planet." October 11, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/explorations-of-mars/.

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The Value of Headspace

Apollo’s air samples, more about the mission, news media contacts.

Tucked away with each rock and soil sample collected by the agency’s Perseverance rover is a potential boon for atmospheric scientists.

Atmospheric scientists get a little more excited with every rock core NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover seals in its titanium sample tubes, which are being gathered for eventual delivery to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return campaign . Twenty-four have been taken so far.

Most of those samples consist of rock cores or regolith (broken rock and dust) that might reveal important information about the history of the planet and whether microbial life was present billions of years ago. But some scientists are just as thrilled at the prospect of studying the “headspace,” or air in the extra room around the rocky material, in the tubes.

They want to learn more about the Martian atmosphere, which is composed mostly of carbon dioxide but could also include trace amounts of other gases that may have been around since the planet’s formation.

“The air samples from Mars would tell us not just about the current climate and atmosphere, but how it’s changed over time,” said Brandi Carrier, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “It will help us understand how climates different from our own evolve.”

Among the samples that could be brought to Earth is one tube filled solely with gas deposited on the Martian surface as part of a sample depot . But far more of the gas in the rover’s collection is within the headspace of rock samples. These are unique because the gas will be interacting with rocky material inside the tubes for years before the samples can be opened and analyzed in laboratories on Earth. What scientists glean from them will lend insight into how much water vapor hovers near the Martian surface, one factor that determines why ice forms where it does on the planet and how Mars’ water cycle has evolved over time.

Scientists also want a better understanding of trace gases in the air at Mars. Most scientifically tantalizing would be the detection of noble gases (such as neon, argon, and xenon), which are so nonreactive that they may have been around, unchanged in the atmosphere, since forming billions of years ago. If captured, those gases could reveal whether Mars started with an atmosphere. (Ancient Mars had a much thicker atmosphere than it does today, but scientists aren’t sure whether it was always there or whether it developed later). There are also big questions about how the planet’s ancient atmosphere compared with early Earth’s.

The headspace would additionally provide a chance to assess the size and toxicity of dust particles — information that will help future astronauts on Mars.

“The gas samples have a lot to offer Mars scientists,” said Justin Simon, a geochemist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, who is part of a group of over a dozen international experts that helps decide which samples the rover should collect. “Even scientists who don’t study Mars would be interested because it will shed light on how planets form and evolve.”

In 2021, a group of planetary researchers, including scientists from NASA, studied the air brought back from the Moon in a steel container by Apollo 17 astronauts some 50 years earlier.

“People think of the Moon as airless, but it has a very tenuous atmosphere that interacts with the lunar surface rocks over time,” said Simon, who studies a variety of planetary samples at Johnson. “That includes noble gases leaking out of the Moon’s interior and collecting at the lunar surface.”

The way Simon’s team extracted the gas for study is similar to what could be done with Perseverance’s air samples. First, they put the previously unopened container into an airtight enclosure. Then they pierced the steel with a needle to extract the gas into a cold trap — essentially a U-shaped pipe that extends into a liquid, like nitrogen, with a low freezing point. By changing the temperature of the liquid, scientists captured some of the gases with lower freezing points at the bottom of the cold trap.

“There’s maybe 25 labs in the world that manipulate gas in this way,” Simon said. Besides being used to study the origin of planetary materials, this approach can be applied to gases from hot springs and those emitted from the walls of active volcanoes, he added.

Of course, those sources provide much more gas than Perseverance has in its sample tubes. But if a single tube doesn’t carry enough gas for a particular experiment, Mars scientists could combine gases from multiple tubes to get a larger aggregate sample — one more way the headspace offers a bonus opportunity for science.

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology , including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover is also characterizing the planet’s geology and past climate, which paves the way for human exploration of the Red Planet. JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

For more about Perseverance:

mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

Andrew Good Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 818-393-2433 [email protected]

Karen Fox / Charles Blue NASA Headquarters, Washington 202-285-1600 / 202-802-5345 [email protected] / [email protected]

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The pursuit of finding habitable conditions or life outside our planet has always been fascinating. In terms of habitability, Mars is the most Earth‐like planet within our solar system as it displays the highest Earth similarity index of 0.7 based on physical determinants such as radius, mass, and temperature ...

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Mapping the Red Planet with the Power of Open Science

Mars rovers can only make exciting new discoveries thanks to human scientists making careful decisions about their next stop. The Mars 2020 mission is aimed at exploring the geology of Jezero Crater and seeking signs of ancient microbial life on Mars using the Perseverance rover. Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California used novel mapping techniques to direct both the rover and the flights of the Ingenuity helicopter, which rode to Mars on Perseverance — and they did it all with open-source tools. 

JPL mapping specialists Dr. Fred Calef III and Dr. Nathan Williams used geospatial analysis to help the scientific community and NASA science leadership select Jezero Crater as the landing site for Perseverance and Ingenuity. Before the vehicles arrived on Mars, they helped create maps of the terrain using data from orbiting satellites. 

“Maps and images are a common language between different people — scientists, engineers, and management,” Williams said. “They help make sure everyone's on the same page moving forward, in a united front to achieve the best science that we can.” 

Maps and images are a common language between different people.

Dr. Nathan Williams

NASA JPL Geologist and Systems Engineer

After the mission touched down on Mars in February 2021, the Ingenuity helicopter opportunistically scouted ahead to take photos. The team then generated more detailed maps from both rover and helicopter image data to help plan the Perseverance rover’s path and science investigations.

To enable this full-scale mapping of Mars, Calef created the Multi-Mission Geographic Information System (MMGIS), an open-source web-based mapping interface . Online demos of the software, pre-loaded with Mars imagery taken from orbit, allow visitors to explore the paths of Perseverance, Ingenuity , and the Curiosity rover , a sister Mars mission that landed in 2012.

The open nature of the software was key to the mission’s success. “We have people literally all over the world who are working on the mission, and we need to be able to give them fast and quick access to software and data,” Calef said.

MMGIS aimed to help people understand the full scope of Martian geography. By combining images from orbit and augmenting with images from Perseverance and Ingenuity, the JPL team allows researchers to zoom in to see individual boulders and zoom out to see all of Mars. This variety of viewpoints gives the team a sense of scale and context to properly understand the landscape around the Perseverance rover, and how to optimally achieve their science goals within the available terrain.

The impact of the tools developed by the JPL team went beyond the Mars 2020 mission. The team wanted their software to help other researchers easily visualize their data without needing to be data visualization experts themselves. Thanks to this open-source approach, other teams have now used MMGIS to map Earth and other planetary bodies.

In keeping with this open philosophy, the images taken by Perseverance and Ingenuity over the course of the Mars 2020 mission are freely available to the public. By sharing these data with the rest of the world, the results from the mission can be used to educate, inspire, and enable further research.

It's being able to share data between people ... getting a higher order of science.

Dr. Fred Calef III

NASA JPL Geologist and Data Scientist

As Mars scientists look to the future, with the Perseverance rover team deploying even more advanced tools powered by AI, open science will pave the way for further exploration. JPL is now working on designs for potential future Mars helicopters that are far more capable and complex than Ingenuity. Payload mass, flight range, and affordability are at the forefront of their minds.

Existing open-source tools will help address those concerns. Not only are open-source applications free to use, but the large amount of collaboration in creating and testing them means that they’re often highly reliable.

Ultimately, the JPL team views its work as part of the cycle of open science, using open tools to make its job easier while also developing new features in the tools for others to use in the future. “Every mission is contributing back to the other missions and future missions in terms of new tools and techniques to develop,” Calef said. “It's not just you working on something. It's being able to share data between people ... getting a higher order of science.”

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Analysis of nasa insight data suggests mars hit by meteoroids more often than thought.

A new study led by a Brown researcher reveals the frequency of space rocks pummeling Mars is higher than previously estimated and detects two of the largest impacts ever seen by scientists on the Red Planet.

Mars may be getting bombarded by space rocks at more frequent rates than previously thought. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — NASA’s Mars InSight Lander may be resting on the Red Planet in retirement, but data from the robotic explorer is still leading to seismic discoveries on Earth.

In one of the latest studies using data from the spacecraft, an international team of scientists led by a Brown University researcher found that Mars may be getting bombarded by space rocks at more frequent rates than previously thought. Impact rates could be two to 10 times higher than previously estimated, depending on the size of the meteoroids, according to the study published in Science Advances.

“It’s possible Mars is more geologically active than we thought, which holds implications for the age and evolution of the planet’s surface,” said lead researcher Ingrid Daubar, an associate professor (research) of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown. “Our results are based on a small number of examples available to us, but the estimate of the current impact rate suggests the planet is getting hit much more frequently than we can see using imaging alone.”

As part of the study, the research team used InSight’s highly sensitive onboard seismometer to identify eight new impact craters from meteoroids not previously seen from orbit. The frequency of these cosmic collisions challenges existing notions about how often meteoroids hit the Martian surface and suggests a need to revise current Martian cratering models to incorporate higher impact rates, especially from smaller meteoroids. The findings could ultimately reshape current understandings of the Martian surface — as batterings from small meteoroids continue to sculpt it — and the impact history of not just Mars, but other planets.

“This is going to require us to rethink some of the models the science community uses to estimate the age of planetary surfaces throughout the entire solar system,” Daubar said.

Six of the craters the researchers detected were near the site where the stationary InSight lander set down. The two distant impacts they identified from the data were the two biggest impacts ever detected by scientists, even after decades of watching from orbit. The larger impacts, each leaving a crater roughly the size of a football field, came just 97 days apart, underscoring the higher frequency of these types of geological events.

“This size impact, we would expect to happen maybe once every couple of decades, maybe even once in a lifetime, but here we have two of them that are just over 90 days apart,” Daubar said. “It could just be a crazy coincidence, but there’s a really, really small likelihood that it’s just coincidence. What’s more likely is that either the two big impacts are related, or the impact rate is a lot higher for Mars than what we thought it was.”

The impact crater, formed Dec. 24, 2021, by a meteoroid strike in the Amazonis Planitia region of Mars, is about 150 meters across, as seen in this annotated image taken by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the InSight’s mission was active from November 2018 to December 2022. One of its main objectives was measuring the planet’s seismological shaking. Previously, new impacts on Mars were spotted with before-and-after images taken from cameras in orbit around the planet. The seismometer provided a new tool to find and detect these impacts, many of which might have otherwise gone unnoticed.

“Planetary impacts are happening all across the solar system all the time,” Daubar said. “We're interested in studying that on Mars because we can then compare and contrast what's happening on Mars to what's happening on the Earth. This is important for understanding our solar system, what's in it and what the population of impacting bodies in our solar system looks like — both as hazards to the Earth and also historically to other planets.”

The rates are also important for assessing potential hazards that impacts pose for future exploration missions as NASA sends rovers or even human missions to space.

To pinpoint when and where the impacts occurred on Mars, Daubar and the research team analyzed seismic signals from InSight and then compared that seismic data with images taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The team visually confirmed eight of the events as new craters by examining before-and-after images. This dual approach of using seismic data and orbital imagery allowed them to confirm the seismic signals were caused by impacts and cross-check their findings to ensure accuracy.

This is NASA InSight's first full selfie on Mars. It displays the lander's solar panels and deck. On top of the deck are its science instruments, weather sensor booms and UHF antenna. The selfie was taken on Dec. 6, 2018. Credit: JPL

The InSight lander collected seismic data from its landing until its solar panels were covered in dust to the extent that the lander could no longer generate power.

“This latest paper is evidence of how, even though InSight is no longer active, its data continues to help us understand Mars,” said Mark Panning, InSight’s project scientist at JPL, who was not involved in the research. “We’re excited to see what else is buried in the mission’s seismic readings.”

The current study by Daubar and the research team ties into a companion paper in Nature Communications that uses even more data from InSight to look at all the very high frequency seismic events the lander detected. The companion paper, also published on 28 June 2024, assumes all these events were caused by impacts and finds the resulting estimated rate falls in line with what the researchers from Daubar’s team calculated independently, further strengthening each team’s findings.

“It’s possible that more events that InSight picked up during its mission were actually impacts,” Daubar said. “Next steps are to do more detailed orbital searches to try to confirm this using machine learning techniques. If we can confirm even more impacts, we might be able to find other seismic signals that were caused by impacts, too.”

Along with Brown, the study also involved researchers from the Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace, University of Oxford, Imperial College London, U.S. Geological Survey, ETH Zürich, University of Arizona, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Université Paris Cité.

The work was supported by NASA, CNES, the French Space Agency, and the United Kingdom Space Agency.

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Articles on Life on Mars

Displaying 1 - 20 of 43 articles.

The Mars Sample Return mission has a shaky future, and NASA is calling on private companies for backup

Chris Impey , University of Arizona

NASA’s search for life on Mars: a rocky road for its rovers, a long slog for scientists – and back on Earth, a battle of the budget

Amy J. Williams , University of Florida

For All Mankind’s Happy Valley: why a Martian city could well extend below the surface

Elizabeth Stanway , University of Warwick

Could people breathe the air on Mars?

Phylindia Gant , University of Florida and Amy J. Williams , University of Florida

As the Perseverance rover lands on Mars, there’s a lot we already know about the red planet from meteorites found on Earth

James Scott , University of Otago

Perseverance Mars rover: how to prove whether there’s life on the red planet

Samantha Rolfe , University of Hertfordshire

Mars: Perseverance rover set for nail-biting landing – here’s the rocket science

Andrew Coates , UCL

As new probes reach Mars, here’s what we know so far from trips to the red planet

Tanya Hill , Museums Victoria Research Institute

How to get people from Earth to Mars and safely back again

Chris James , The University of Queensland

Mars: mounting evidence for subglacial lakes, but could they really host life?

David Rothery , The Open University

Perseverance: the Mars rover searching for ancient life, and the Aussie scientists who helped build it

David Flannery , Queensland University of Technology

NASA’s big move to search for life on Mars – and to bring rocks home

Briony Horgan , Purdue University and Melissa Rice , Western Washington University

Meteorites from Mars contain clues about the red planet’s geology

Arya Udry , University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Spotting alien life – how ‘microfossils’ can fool scientists

Alexander Brasier , University of Aberdeen

Tiny specks in space could be the key to finding martian life

Andrew Tomkins , Monash University

Tardigrades: we’re now polluting the moon with near indestructible little creatures

Monica Grady , The Open University

Why the idea of alien life now seems inevitable and possibly imminent

Cathal D. O'Connell , The University of Melbourne

Our long fascination with the journey to Mars

Paulo de Souza , CSIRO

Colonizing Mars means contaminating Mars – and never knowing for sure if it had its own native life

David Weintraub , Vanderbilt University

Sorry Elon Musk, but it’s now clear that colonising Mars is unlikely – and a bad idea

Related topics.

• Astrobiology
• Extraterrestrial life
• Mars exploration
• Perseverance Rover
• Space exploration

Top contributors

Professor in Earth Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Emeritus Professor of Mineral Physics, University of Cambridge

Professor, Griffith University

Professor of Physics, Deputy Director (Solar System) at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UCL

Professor of Astronomy, Vanderbilt University

Professor of Planetary Geosciences, The Open University

Assistant Professor of Geology, University of Florida

Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science and Planetary Exploration, University of Stirling

Associate member of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology, UNSW Sydney

Senior Lecturer in Chemistry, University of Birmingham

Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences, The Open University

Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland

Senior Curator (Astronomy), Museums Victoria and Honorary Fellow at University of Melbourne, Museums Victoria Research Institute

PhD Student in Geosciences, University of Arizona

Director, Space Science and Technology Centre, Curtin University

Professor of Planetary Science and Astrobiology, Birkbeck, University of London; Honorary Associate Professor, UCL

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Thesis Statements

What this handout is about.

This handout describes what a thesis statement is, how thesis statements work in your writing, and how you can craft or refine one for your draft.

Introduction

Writing in college often takes the form of persuasion—convincing others that you have an interesting, logical point of view on the subject you are studying. Persuasion is a skill you practice regularly in your daily life. You persuade your roommate to clean up, your parents to let you borrow the car, your friend to vote for your favorite candidate or policy. In college, course assignments often ask you to make a persuasive case in writing. You are asked to convince your reader of your point of view. This form of persuasion, often called academic argument, follows a predictable pattern in writing. After a brief introduction of your topic, you state your point of view on the topic directly and often in one sentence. This sentence is the thesis statement, and it serves as a summary of the argument you’ll make in the rest of your paper.

What is a thesis statement?

A thesis statement:

• tells the reader how you will interpret the significance of the subject matter under discussion.
• is a road map for the paper; in other words, it tells the reader what to expect from the rest of the paper.
• directly answers the question asked of you. A thesis is an interpretation of a question or subject, not the subject itself. The subject, or topic, of an essay might be World War II or Moby Dick; a thesis must then offer a way to understand the war or the novel.
• makes a claim that others might dispute.
• is usually a single sentence near the beginning of your paper (most often, at the end of the first paragraph) that presents your argument to the reader. The rest of the paper, the body of the essay, gathers and organizes evidence that will persuade the reader of the logic of your interpretation.

If your assignment asks you to take a position or develop a claim about a subject, you may need to convey that position or claim in a thesis statement near the beginning of your draft. The assignment may not explicitly state that you need a thesis statement because your instructor may assume you will include one. When in doubt, ask your instructor if the assignment requires a thesis statement. When an assignment asks you to analyze, to interpret, to compare and contrast, to demonstrate cause and effect, or to take a stand on an issue, it is likely that you are being asked to develop a thesis and to support it persuasively. (Check out our handout on understanding assignments for more information.)

How do I create a thesis?

A thesis is the result of a lengthy thinking process. Formulating a thesis is not the first thing you do after reading an essay assignment. Before you develop an argument on any topic, you have to collect and organize evidence, look for possible relationships between known facts (such as surprising contrasts or similarities), and think about the significance of these relationships. Once you do this thinking, you will probably have a “working thesis” that presents a basic or main idea and an argument that you think you can support with evidence. Both the argument and your thesis are likely to need adjustment along the way.

Writers use all kinds of techniques to stimulate their thinking and to help them clarify relationships or comprehend the broader significance of a topic and arrive at a thesis statement. For more ideas on how to get started, see our handout on brainstorming .

How do I know if my thesis is strong?

If there’s time, run it by your instructor or make an appointment at the Writing Center to get some feedback. Even if you do not have time to get advice elsewhere, you can do some thesis evaluation of your own. When reviewing your first draft and its working thesis, ask yourself the following :

• Do I answer the question? Re-reading the question prompt after constructing a working thesis can help you fix an argument that misses the focus of the question. If the prompt isn’t phrased as a question, try to rephrase it. For example, “Discuss the effect of X on Y” can be rephrased as “What is the effect of X on Y?”
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? If your thesis simply states facts that no one would, or even could, disagree with, it’s possible that you are simply providing a summary, rather than making an argument.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? Thesis statements that are too vague often do not have a strong argument. If your thesis contains words like “good” or “successful,” see if you could be more specific: why is something “good”; what specifically makes something “successful”?
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? If a reader’s first response is likely to  be “So what?” then you need to clarify, to forge a relationship, or to connect to a larger issue.
• Does my essay support my thesis specifically and without wandering? If your thesis and the body of your essay do not seem to go together, one of them has to change. It’s okay to change your working thesis to reflect things you have figured out in the course of writing your paper. Remember, always reassess and revise your writing as necessary.
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? If a reader’s first response is “how?” or “why?” your thesis may be too open-ended and lack guidance for the reader. See what you can add to give the reader a better take on your position right from the beginning.

Suppose you are taking a course on contemporary communication, and the instructor hands out the following essay assignment: “Discuss the impact of social media on public awareness.” Looking back at your notes, you might start with this working thesis:

Social media impacts public awareness in both positive and negative ways.

You can use the questions above to help you revise this general statement into a stronger thesis.

• Do I answer the question? You can analyze this if you rephrase “discuss the impact” as “what is the impact?” This way, you can see that you’ve answered the question only very generally with the vague “positive and negative ways.”
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? Not likely. Only people who maintain that social media has a solely positive or solely negative impact could disagree.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? No. What are the positive effects? What are the negative effects?
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? No. Why are they positive? How are they positive? What are their causes? Why are they negative? How are they negative? What are their causes?
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? No. Why should anyone care about the positive and/or negative impact of social media?

After thinking about your answers to these questions, you decide to focus on the one impact you feel strongly about and have strong evidence for:

Because not every voice on social media is reliable, people have become much more critical consumers of information, and thus, more informed voters.

This version is a much stronger thesis! It answers the question, takes a specific position that others can challenge, and it gives a sense of why it matters.

Let’s try another. Suppose your literature professor hands out the following assignment in a class on the American novel: Write an analysis of some aspect of Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn. “This will be easy,” you think. “I loved Huckleberry Finn!” You grab a pad of paper and write:

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a great American novel.

You begin to analyze your thesis:

• Do I answer the question? No. The prompt asks you to analyze some aspect of the novel. Your working thesis is a statement of general appreciation for the entire novel.

Think about aspects of the novel that are important to its structure or meaning—for example, the role of storytelling, the contrasting scenes between the shore and the river, or the relationships between adults and children. Now you write:

In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain develops a contrast between life on the river and life on the shore.

• Do I answer the question? Yes!
• Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose? Not really. This contrast is well-known and accepted.
• Is my thesis statement specific enough? It’s getting there–you have highlighted an important aspect of the novel for investigation. However, it’s still not clear what your analysis will reveal.
• Does my thesis pass the “how and why?” test? Not yet. Compare scenes from the book and see what you discover. Free write, make lists, jot down Huck’s actions and reactions and anything else that seems interesting.
• Does my thesis pass the “So what?” test? What’s the point of this contrast? What does it signify?”

After examining the evidence and considering your own insights, you write:

Through its contrasting river and shore scenes, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn suggests that to find the true expression of American democratic ideals, one must leave “civilized” society and go back to nature.

This final thesis statement presents an interpretation of a literary work based on an analysis of its content. Of course, for the essay itself to be successful, you must now present evidence from the novel that will convince the reader of your interpretation.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Anson, Chris M., and Robert A. Schwegler. 2010. The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers , 6th ed. New York: Longman.

Lunsford, Andrea A. 2015. The St. Martin’s Handbook , 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s.

Ramage, John D., John C. Bean, and June Johnson. 2018. The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing , 8th ed. New York: Pearson.

Ruszkiewicz, John J., Christy Friend, Daniel Seward, and Maxine Hairston. 2010. The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers , 9th ed. Boston: Pearson Education.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Analysis of NASA InSight data suggests Mars hit by meteoroids more often than thought

by Brown University

NASA's Mars InSight Lander may be resting on the Red Planet in retirement, but data from the robotic explorer is still leading to seismic discoveries on Earth.

In one of the latest studies using data from the spacecraft, an international team of scientists led by a Brown University researcher found that Mars may be getting bombarded by space rocks at more frequent rates than previously thought. Impact rates could be two to 10 times higher than previously estimated, depending on the size of the meteoroids, according to the study published in Science Advances.

"It's possible Mars is more geologically active than we thought, which holds implications for the age and evolution of the planet's surface," said lead researcher Ingrid Daubar, an associate professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown.

"Our results are based on a small number of examples available to us, but the estimate of the current impact rate suggests the planet is getting hit much more frequently than we can see using imaging alone."

As part of the study, the research team used InSight's highly sensitive onboard seismometer to identify eight new impact craters from meteoroids not previously seen from orbit.

The frequency of these cosmic collisions challenges existing notions about how often meteoroids hit the Martian surface and suggests a need to revise current Martian cratering models to incorporate higher impact rates, especially from smaller meteoroids.

The findings could ultimately reshape current understandings of the Martian surface—as batterings from small meteoroids continue to sculpt it—and the impact history of not just Mars, but other planets.

"This is going to require us to rethink some of the models the science community uses to estimate the age of planetary surfaces throughout the entire solar system," Daubar said.

Six of the craters the researchers detected were near the site where the stationary InSight Lander set down. The two distant impacts they identified from the data were the two biggest impacts ever detected by scientists, even after decades of watching from orbit. The larger impacts, each leaving a crater roughly the size of a football field, came just 97 days apart, underscoring the higher frequency of these types of geological events.

"This size impact, we would expect to happen maybe once every couple of decades, maybe even once in a lifetime, but here we have two of them that are just over 90 days apart," Daubar said.

"It could just be a crazy coincidence, but there's a really, really small likelihood that it's just coincidence. What's more likely is that either the two big impacts are related, or the impact rate is a lot higher for Mars than what we thought it was."

NASA's InSight's mission was active from November 2018 to December 2022. One of its main objectives was measuring the planet's seismological shaking. Previously, new impacts on Mars were spotted with before-and-after images taken from cameras in orbit around the planet. The seismometer provided a new tool to find and detect these impacts, many of which might have otherwise gone unnoticed.

"Planetary impacts are happening all across the solar system all the time," Daubar said.

"We're interested in studying that on Mars because we can then compare and contrast what's happening on Mars to what's happening on the Earth. This is important for understanding our solar system, what's in it and what the population of impacting bodies in our solar system looks like—both as hazards to the Earth and also historically to other planets."

The rates are also important for assessing potential hazards that impacts pose for future exploration missions as NASA sends rovers or even human missions to space.

To pinpoint when and where the impacts occurred on Mars, Daubar and the research team analyzed seismic signals from InSight and then compared that seismic data with images taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The team visually confirmed eight of the events as new craters by examining before-and-after images. This dual approach of using seismic data and orbital imagery allowed them to confirm the seismic signals were caused by impacts and cross-check their findings to ensure accuracy.

The InSight lander collected seismic data from its landing until its solar panels, as expected, were covered in dust to the extent that the lander could no longer generate power.

The current study by Daubar and the research team ties into a companion paper in Nature Communications that uses even more data from InSight to look at all the very high frequency seismic events the lander detected.

The companion paper, also published on June 28, 2024, assumes all these events were caused by impacts and finds the resulting estimated rate falls in line with what the researchers from Daubar's team calculated independently, further strengthening each team's findings.

"It's possible that more events that InSight picked up during its mission were actually impacts," Daubar said. "Next steps are to do more detailed orbital searches to try to confirm this using machine learning techniques. If we can confirm even more impacts, we might be able to find other seismic signals that were caused by impacts, too."

Along with Brown, the study also involved researchers from the Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace, University of Oxford, Imperial College London, U.S. Geological Survey, ETH Zürich, University of Arizona, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Université Paris Cité.

Journal information: Science Advances , Nature Communications

Provided by Brown University

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Life on Mars and the Imagination of Scientists

Around this time seven years ago I was trying to figure out a topic for my Master’s thesis. It could have been anything at all, so long as it fit under the wide umbrella of science writing. After a few dead ends (sumo wrestling, Amish science) I finally chose to write about the hunt for life on Mars.

My advisor wasn’t keen on the idea, and it was way, way out of my wheelhouse. But I pushed on anyway, for three reasons I can remember. Astrobiology   has only been considered a legitimate scientific endeavor since the ’60s. So every study felt fresh and exciting. It’s also inherently multidisciplinary — requiring geologists, climate scientists, astrophysicists, engineers, DNA experts, microbiologists and even philosophers — which meant my story would have lots of different voices. Perhaps most important, all of those voices are focused on one Big Question: Are we alone in the universe?

For the same reasons, astrobiology is perfect for science education, or so argues a new study in the journal Astrobiology . Researchers from the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia, surveyed high schoolers before and after completing a one-day museum program in which they pretended to be scientists involved in Mars rover missions . The study found that this simulation corrected some of the students’ misperceptions about science and scientists.

These effects, though, were small. Overall the study was quite depressing, especially on one point: Even after completing the program, around two-thirds of the students said they didn’t think that scientists are creative or use their imaginations.

This is a massive problem. And fixing it will take a lot more than flashy rovers and the promise of aliens.

Somebody in the humanities might legitimately ask why I think this is a problem. Some kids like science, some like art, big deal?

Fuel their curiosity with your gift

Liking science isn’t the issue.   Consider a 2007 survey of 15-year-olds from some 25 countries. The students rated how much they agreed with a bunch of statements about science (from 1, Disagree, to 4, Agree). In every country surveyed, the average rating of “School science is interesting”   was above the neutral score of 2.5. In the new Australian study, too, the teenagers liked science. They were recruited to the study, in fact, because they had signed up for a one-day museum program.

But kids can’t picture themselves doing science for a living. Another statement in that same 2007 survey was, “I would like to become a scientist.” The average rating from developed countries* was around 2 for boys and a dismal 1.5 for girls. Similarly, a 2010 study followed 33 students in California who in 10th grade said they were “very interested” in a science career. By 12th grade, 45 percent had lost interest.

So how come kids who like science don’t want to become scientists? One big reason, according to many studies, is they don’t think it’s a creative job. In-depth interviews with high school and college students (whether from New York , Europe , or   New Zealand ) have revealed that the students often believe that science and creativity are incompatible. Seriously.

This couldn’t be farther from the truth, of course, and that’s the lesson the Australian researchers were hoping to get across with the Mars programs. The researchers surveyed 230 teenagers who participated in one of two museum programs: Pathways to Space at the Powerhouse Museum, in Sydney, and Mission to Mars at the Victorian Space Science Education Centre, in Melbourne. Both programs seem super-fun. In Pathways, students plan a rover mission and then execute it in a “Mars Yard” that looks strikingly like the real thing (which you can see in this short   video ). In Mission to Mars, students role-play being astronauts or mission control engineers, and analyze data picked up by a rover in a simulated martian crater.

The students’ responses perfectly illustrate the broader issues in science education that I outlined above. Before the one-day program, only 17 percent of the kids agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, “Science is boring.” Yet just 15 percent agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, “I want to become a scientist,” and only about 30 percent agreed or strongly agreed that scientists use their imagination and creativity throughout their investigations. After the day with the rovers, there was a statistically significant increase in the creativity rating, to about 35 percent. But   there was no change in the number of kids who wanted to be scientists.

My intention here isn’t to disparage what seems like a wonderful outreach program — if I lived in Australia I’d try to sign up for it myself. It would be crazy to expect a day-long field trip, however awesome, to immediately change a teenager’s career plans or philosophical outlook.

Still, the reason the program is great isn’t because it introduces kids to the exciting, multidisciplinary and provocative field of astrobiology. All fields of science, after all, are similarly   wondrous   and inspirational.

What we need to focus on instead is why the imagination of scientists doesn’t get through to most of the world’s young minds, even to those who are interested in science .

Are science journalists not describing it? Are science teachers ignoring it? Are scientists themselves too shy or modest or data-centric to spend much time talking about their creative process?

How can we fix this?

Interestingly, ratings from students in developing countries were much higher, around 3.

Images from   Ben Heine , cigcardpix , and   NASA Goddard

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What is the thesis statement of the research report Life on Mars? (1 point) Responses But, in fact, the truth might be hidden in this ordinary-looking piece of meteorite known as Rock 84-001. But, in fact, the truth might be hidden in this ordinary-looking piece of meteorite known as Rock 84-001. Deep Space is the last great frontier. Deep Space is the last great frontier. Some imagined the answer would come from a spaceship carrying aliens from a faraway civilization. Some imagined the answer would come from a spaceship carrying aliens from a faraway civilization. Some scientists theorized that the seeds for life on Earth were planted by microorganisms from Mars. Some scientists theorized that the seeds for life on Earth were planted by microorganisms from Mars. Skip to navigation

Some scientists theorized that the seeds for life on Earth were planted by microorganisms from Mars.