University of Hawaii scientists on rover team hope to uncover signs of life

When the NASA rover finally landed on Mars on Thursday morning, the high-fives and cheers weren’t confined to the ground controllers at the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

“We were were jumping up and down,” said University of Hawaii researcher Shiv Sharma.

Sharma was among a handful of UH scientists who gathered on the Manoa campus to watch the landing on a big-screen television.

A member of the Mars rover’s 300-plus scientific team, Sharma is co-­investigator on one of the seven camera systems mounted on the Perseverance rover, whose mission is to search for evidence of past life on the red planet over the next two years.

>> PHOTOS: NASA rover Perseverance lands on Mars

The SuperCam uses remote optical measurements and laser beams to determine the composition of samples encountered on Mars. It will assist in selecting rocks and soil for returning to Earth at a later date for analyzing for any signs of past life.

Also watching Thursday was fellow Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology researcher Sarah Fagents, who is co-investigator and volcanologist for the team in charge of the Mastcam-Z, a mast-mounted multispectral camera that can focus on a feature as small as a housefly across the length of a football field.

“I’m most excited to get over towards the delta deposits because that’s one of the outcrops, one of the areas, that have the greatest potential for containing sediments that have signs of ancient life in it,” Fagents said.

Others from UH involved in the project are Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology research faculty members John Porter and Tayro Acosta-Maeda, plus grad students Eleni Ravanis, Francesca Cary and Evan Kelly.

“We have been waiting for this day for a long time,” said Sharma, a UH faculty member since 1980. “So everybody was so happy to see that it landed safely.”

The researchers will spend the next two years on the project, and if Perseverance is still operating, the research might continue if funding is available.

“There will be a lot of discovery, I hope,” Sharma said.