NASA is about to land on Mars, and these Canadians are part of the mission

Watch the moment NASA celebrates rover landing Watch the reaction at NASA headquarters after the Perseverance rover successfully lands on Mars.

ottawa — As NASA’s latest Mars rover is set to make landfall on the red planet this week, several Canadians have been hard at work for years to help make it happen.

NASA’s Perseverance rover is scheduled to land on Mars on Thursday, where it will seek to identify signs of ancient life and collect soil samples in tiny vials, which could then be returned to Earth in future missions.

While hundreds of people from around the world are involved in making the mission a success, several Canadians are making key contributions to the project now, and more will be in the future.

Here are a few of the Canadians involved in the Mars 2020 rover mission:

Tim Haltigin, Canadian Space Agency

Haltigin is a senior mission scientist in planetary exploration at the Canadian Space Agency, meaning he is involved in all of Canada’s missions in the solar system.

For the Perseverance mission, Haltigin is a member of the international team that designed the science program to see how scientists are going to study the samples once they’re brought back to Earth.

“The great thing about bringing samples back from elsewhere in the solar system is that effectively what we're doing is that we're turning the spacecraft into every laboratory on Earth and potentially expanding our science team to every scientist on Earth for the next 50 to 100 years,” Haltigin said in an interview with CTVNews.ca.

“It's tremendously exciting that we're going to be able to study these samples to understand the history of Mars, to understand the environment when it was formed, and potentially even to look for signs of life.”

Haltigin also managed the Canadian laser on board the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft that mapped the asteroid Bennu to identify the best place for it to land. The spacecraft successfully landed on the asteroid back in 2018 and in Oct. 2020 began it’s return flight to Earth, where it is expected to land in 2023.

Haltigin began working on the Mars 2020 mission about six years ago, and said his work should continue until around 2033.

“I'm really helping to build the overall program to understand how all the pieces fit together … and really ensuring that scientists around the world, including in Canada, will have access to those samples when they come back to Earth,” he said.

Kim Tait, Royal Ontario Museum

Tait is a geologist and senior curator at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

On a day-to-day basis, she looks after different soil and rock samples. For this mission, she will be part of the team that looks after the samples of Martian soil once they arrive back on Earth in the 2030s.

“The Mars 2020 mission that lands tomorrow on Mars is actually the first step in a series of launches and missions to return the samples back to Earth,” Tait told CTVNews.ca in an interview.

While the mission is expected to answer several questions about Mars itself, Tait said the samples could also work to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding our own planet.

“The best chance for us to understand Earth is to go to Mars and learn about that really early rock record that we have lost on Earth,” she said. “Earth is such a dynamic planet that we have plate tectonics and volcanoes and water, which is really exciting for life, but for understanding that first billion years of the history of our planet, we have to go somewhere else.”

This will be Tait’s first time working with a Mars landing mission in an academic setting, but she was also a part of the OSIRIS-REx mission.

While Tait’s team will be among the first people to examine the samples once they return to Earth, she added that researchers will be using these samples for decades to come.

“Samples returned from the Apollo mission even 50 years later are still giving us information and scientific advancements that we're learning about the Moon now,” she said. “I think having these materials back here on our planet not only will be for me to study, but for generations in the future as well.

Richard Leveille, McGill University

Leveille is an adjunct professor in McGill University’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

For the Mars 2020 mission, Leveille is a co-investigator with the team that will be controlling the SuperCam, one of the seven major tools on the Perseverence rover.

The SuperCam is able to examine rocks and soils using its camera, laser and spectrometres to seek out organic matter in the soil that could be related to past life on Mars.

“We tell the instrument to shoot at those targets, we get the information back and we start using that to interpret the geologic context that the rover is in,” Leveille told CTVNews.ca.

“Once we have that information, we can direct the rover.”

Once the rover is positioned in a spot the team deems worth investigating, it can use a robotic arm and other instruments to further investigate the area and collect samples for analysis in the future.

“We have so much more capabilities with our instruments and laboratories here on Earth than we do with the rover,” Leveille said. “Even with the best rover you've got going around -- which is Perseverance -- we're somewhat limited with what we can do on Mars.”

This will be Leveille’s second Mars mission, having also worked with the Curiosity rover as part of the team in control of the ChemCam.

“(It) sounds like SuperCam and indeed it's a similar instrument,” Leveille said. “SuperCam is the successor to ChemCam. It's even better or more superior.”

Chris Herd, University of Alberta

Chris Herd is a geologist at the University of Alberta and one of the world’s leading experts in the geology of Mars and Martian meteorites.

During the Perseverance rover mission, Herd is serving as a participating scientist and “expert in Returned Sample Science,” according to his biography on the University of Alberta website.

“My whole role on the mission it to help the mission decide when to stop and take samples and have documentation,” Herd told CTV News Calgary. “It’s a huge honour to me to be chosen to play this huge role in the mission.”

Herd said his team will be working one full Mars day ahead of the rover while locating where to send it for sample collection.

“We are going to have all the images, the mineral data and chemical information and all that documentation with each and every sample that we collect,” Herd said. “That is the thing that will make those samples so much more scientifically valuable than any other sample from Mars.”

While the ultimate goal is to find evidence of ancient life on Mars, Herd said even the absence of any evidence would provide a noteworthy discovery.

“It tells us there were environments that were habitable but not inhabited on Mars,” he said. “That really highlights something about the uniqueness of the life on Earth as a consequence.”

Mariek Schmidt, Brock University

Schmidt is an associate professor of Earth Sciences at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont. who will serve as a participating scientist with the Mars rover mission.

Schmidt will be primarily focused on using a tool called the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL), which has an X-ray and camera capable of taking pictures of soil at a very close-up angle.

Using the PIXL, scientists are able to measure the chemical makeup of Mars’ rocks and soil.

“I’m one of hundreds of scientists on the mission and it’s a collective effort to try describe the geology,” Schmidt told Newstalk 610 last week. “One of the principle things we’re looking for is to see if we can find samples that might indicate evidence of past life.”

Given that this is Schmidt’s third Mars mission, she said from experience that the landing -- known as the “seven minutes of terror” -- is the most nerve-wracking part of the mission.

“There’s a lot of stress and there’s been so much work that builds up to that point, so there’s this relief when it actually lands,” she said.

Schmidtsaid her work begins almost immediately after the rover lands and is inspected for any damage stemming from the landing.

Farah Alibay, NASA

Alibay is a systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.

According to a profile of her on NASA’s website, Alibay was born in Montreal, but went to high school and university in England where she studied aerospace engineering at the University of Cambridge.

Following a few internships at NASA, Alibay was offered a job at the JPL where she works to this day.

“I fell in love with the place, and couldn’t wait to go to work every day and work with some of the most visionary people I’ve ever met,” she said of her internship at the JPL. “From landing SUV-sized rovers on Mars to navigating spacecraft around other planets, there’s nothing that can stop them.”

As part of the Mars Perseverance mission, Alibay will be a member of the team in control of the rover after it lands on Mars.

“I’m part of the team that will be getting the keys to the rover after we land,” she wrote on Instagram.  “My role today as the Surface Attitude Positioning and Pointing chair (SAPP aka surface GNC) is to establish what orientation we’ve landed in and to figure out when we’ll be able to communicate with the rover using our High Gain Antenna (HGA).”

With files from CTV News Calgary