Wait – they never before sent a probe equipped with a microscope?!
From the same article:
I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions yet.
We have sent microscopes, but we haven’t been doing it that long. The problem with optical microsopes on a martian probe is sending the data back. The optical microscope aboard the Phoenix was one of the last ones we sent (2008), but could only do a resolution of 16 micrometers per pixel to be sent back to earth. Bacteria are about 80 micrometers in size, so that would be only 5 pixels long. How would you know it’s a bacteria if it’s only five pixels? I suppose you could look for movement of five-pixel sized blobs, but I don’t see how you could find anything conclusive at that resolution. The Phoenix also carried an atomic force microscope capable of a much smaller resolution, but to do that you would have to fix the bacteria to a substrate, which would obviously destroy any chance of detecting movement.
Obviously, the Viking probes had even larger limitations to their ability to compress and transmit data, so any optical microscope they might have carried would be largely worthless in detecting life. In fact, the first optical microscope to be sent to Mars was on the Beagle 2, a British probe which crashed on the surface back in 2003 and was lost.
I still volunteer to go there and look myself.
Maybe we can work something out. But first:
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Can you handle a microscope?
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How long can you hold your breath?