AAO Colloquium.


Friday 6 June 2003

3:30pm AAO Conference Room

The Search for Life on Mars:
Australian Involvement in the ExoMars Project

Jeremy Bailey, AAO

ExoMars is ESA's proposed 2009 mission with the aim of seraching for past or present life on Mars. The mission will involve landing a rover on Mars and using it to drill sub-surface samples at a range of locations, and examine them for evidence of life. An Australian led consortium has recently submitted a proposal in response to the "call for ideas" for this mission. Our proposal is based on Australian expertise in the study of the earliest evidence for life on Earth, much of which is found in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. We have proposed a search strategy for early life on Mars, and have proposed to add to the rover a short-wave IR spectrometer for mineral identification to help choose the best sample locations and to provide geological context for the samples examined.

I will describe the ExoMars mission, how it fits into the International program of Mars exploration, why we believe there is a realistic prospect of finding life on Mars, and how we will search for it.