Lunch Lecture: Searching for life on Mars with the NASA Perseverance rover

In the first Lunch Lecture of the winter, we welcome Keyron Hickman-Lewis, Lecturer in Planetary Exploration at Birkbeck, University of London. His research focuses on life detection in geological materials, primarily Earth’s earliest traces of life from southern Africa and Western Australia. He will share insights from his research on Mars.

Mars appears to have been habitable early in its history, more than 3 billion years ago; however, despite the efforts of many spacecraft (and many scientists), evidence for life on the Red Planet has remained elusive. Since 2021, the Perseverance rover has been exploring Jezero crater, once the site of an ancient lake on Mars, with the objectives of reconstructing the environment of the lake and searching for fossilised traces of life that might be preserved in the rock record. He will outline the major discoveries made by the mission thus far, including a recent report of organic materials in association with specific mineral types that has been considered a “potential biosignature” with significant implications for astrobiology (the study of the nature and distribution of life in the Universe). With Mars Sample Return planned for the 2030s–2040s, he will also discuss how we can hope to study these Martian materials on Earth in the near future.

Was there life on Mars? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd725pj0g9ro

Keyron Hickman-Lewis is Lecturer in Planetary Exploration at Birkbeck, University of London. His research focuses on life detection in geological materials, primarily Earth’s earliest traces of life from southern Africa and Western Australia. Since 2020, he has been a participating scientist on the NASA Perseverance rover mission, helping to select and document Mars rocks for future return to Earth. He obtained his degree in Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford, Ph.D. at the CNRS Orléans and Università di Bologna, and was a Research Fellow at the Natural History Museum London and Imperial College London prior to joining Birkbeck.

The presentation will take place in the cafeteria at the University Centre of the Westfjords and will start at 12:10. The presentation will also be streamed via a Zoom link, which can be found here: https://eu01web.zoom.us/j/69947471079

The lunch lecture will be held in english