Interesting corollary to the #Perseverance discovery in the Bright Angel formation on #Mars making headlines 1 1/2 months ago: at a public talk in Bochum as part of a mathematics outreach event - https://www.mathematik.de/dmv/gauss-vorlesungen -> https://transfer.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/de/gauss-in-bochum - former NASA Chief Scientist James Green (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_L._Green) gave the new paper a 4 on the 7 step Confidence of #Life Detection scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_of_Life_Detection_Scale. That is unless someone figures out how to make the features and minerals Percy found abiologically without heat, then it would drop to 3. If on the other hand the respective sample makes it back to Earth after all in some #MarsSampleReturnMission the rating could jump up to 5 or 6 after lab analysis.

Green also remarked that the sample tubes dropped by Percy are up for grabs for *any* spacefaring nation capable of doing a MSRM - including China though they don't plan to go after the Percy samples with their upcoming #Tianwen3 mission (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianwen-3) as far as he has heard. And regardless of where they'll get their own samples they could advance the case for life, perhaps even extant, on Mars a lot - which Green feels has been all but made in the past decades of Mars research anyway. Oh, and he also thinks terraforming Mars is quite viable ...

🇨🇳 #China's #DeepSpace program

• 2028: #Tianwen3 to collect samples of #Mars 🔴, return them to Earth
• 2029: #Tianwen4 to explore #Jupiter 🪐 and its moon #Callisto
• 2030: Habitat to simulate long-duration human #spaceflight
• 2033: #Venus atmosphere sample return
• 2038: Mars 🔴 research station to study #ISRU ⚒️
• 2039: Triton, #Neptune's largest moon, subsurface explorer for its ocean 🌊

#NASA, for the first time since the 1960s, has a credible challenger.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/03/china-sets-dates-for-some-of-its-most-ambitious-planetary-missions