NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has dropped a major claim regarding the discovery of ancient life on Mars.
In a recent interview with Benny Johnson, Isaacman pointed to the enormous size of the universe, including two trillion galaxies and countless habitable but undiscovered exoplanets, as a solid reason to expect extraterrestrial life.
When Johnson asked him what his opinion was on the existence of life beyond Earth, the head of NASA said: “There are two trillion galaxies and how many stars are there? And how many of them have exoplanets in a Goldilocks zone? There has to be life somewhere.”
“I would say there is a chance there is life – everywhere,” he added.
While talking specifically about Mars and the possibility of ancient life on the Red Planet, he claimed, “If we can get to Mars and bring back samples, I’d say there’s a better 90 percent chance that we could prove there was some microbial life on Mars.”
Isaacman also spoke about the mission called Europa Clipper, designed to investigate the traces of ancient life and biosignatures on Jupiter’s moon Europa.
In July 2028, NASA will launch a very ambitious mission called Dragonfly to explore Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.
Although NASA has previously explored Titan with the Cassini orbiter and the Huygens lander in 2005, this mission is unique because it involves a robotic helicopter aircraft, essentially a large, nuclear-powered drone-like octocopter.
“If you found the biosignatures there, it would change the whole equation, leading to important discoveries in human history,” Isaacman said.
Last month, the Perseverance rover found the underground remains of a 4-billion-year-old water delta, providing some of the most compelling evidence yet of Mars’ watery past.
