Original version

BBC World Service South Asia

Science in Action

Science In Action

Factual: Science & Nature

Factual: Science & Nature: Science & Technology

The BBC brings you all the week's science news.

BBC World Service Australasia

BBC World Service Online

BBC World Service schedule for American satellite radio and the Caribbean

BBC World Service Americas and the Caribbean

BBC World Service

BBC World Service News Internet

BBC World Service Europe and the Middle East

BBC World Service East Asia

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa Schedule

BBC World Service East and Southern Africa

BBC World Service West and Central Africa Schedule

BBC World Service West and Central Africa

Science In Action: NASA rover heads for Mars ancient lake

Magazines & Reviews

CROP.-.jpg

30/07/2020 GMT

NASA rover heads for Mars ancient lake

BBC World Service - Science In Action, NASA rover heads for Mars ancient lake

NASA 2020 rover launched on fresh search for life on Mars

NASA’s new quest for life on Mars; 100 million year old microbes woken up; ocean map pioneer Marie Tharp; the origins of Covid-19

NASA launches its new robotic mission to Mars.  The rover, Perseverance, will land in a 50 kilometre wide crater which looks like it was filled by a lake about 4 billion years ago – the time when life on Earth was getting started.  Mission scientist Melissa Rice explains why this is one of the most promising places on Mars to continue the search for past life on the red planet.

Japanese and US scientists have revived microbes that have been buried at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean for 100 million years.  Sampled from compacted mud 70 metres below the seafloor and beneath 6 kilometre of water, Yuki Morono and Steve D’Hondt admit they struggle to understand how the bacteria have survived for so long.  

Science in Action celebrates the little unknown oceanographer Marie Tharp who in the late 1950s discovered the mid-Atlantic ridge which helped to launch the plate tectonics revolution in earth sciences.  It would be Tharp’s 100th birthday this week. 

New research this week suggests that coronaviruses capable of infecting humans have been in bats for 40 to 70 years, and that there may be numerous and as yet undetected viruses like the Covid-19 virus in bat populations with the potential to cause future pandemics.    Their message is that we should be sampling and testing wild bat colonies much more extensively than currently.   Their findings provide further evidence against the unfounded claim that the Covid-19 virus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.   Roland Pease talks to Dr Maciej Boni at Pennsylvania State University.

(Image: NASA's Perseverance Mars rover. Credit:  Illustration provided by Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via REUTERS)

Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Science In Action

NASA rover heads for Mars ancient lake

Genres

Formats

Brand

BBC World Service South Asia

About BBC World Service