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The NASA rover mission scouring Mars for ancient life has a connection to Sudbury.

Raymond Francis, who graduated from Western University in 2014 with a PhD in computer engineering and planetary science, is an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Francis, whose aspirations include becoming a Canadian Space Agency astronaut — maybe even one of the first on the red planet — is part of the team helping guide the rover Perseverance through Mars’s Jezero crater, which scientists say was a lake 3.5 billion years ago.

It is the first time a Mars rover will be collecting rock and soil, which will be stored until they can be returned to Earth.

“If ever there was life on Mars, this is the time it may well have arisen,” Francis said. “We would be elated if we found signs of ancient life on Mars. No one is expecting current life, but we explicitly have a goal of finding signs of life.”

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Jezero, which means lake in Slavic languages, is named after a settlement.

“The lake was there for a long time, because the river flowing into had enough time to build up a delta, the kind you find at the mouth of the Mississippi or the Nile,” Francis said.

“Deltas are also a good place to preserve signs of life, because they are constantly setting down new sediment. If there are living things in that lake, they can get buried in the sediment and preserved.”

But even if they don’t find life, the research into Mars’s environment, history and evolution would be incredibly valuable, he said.

“Any lake like this on Earth 3.5 billion years ago was probably full of microbes,” Francis said. “If this one on Mars was not, it tells us something about the difference between these two planets, regardless of life.”

While noisy and chaotic, Perseverance’s landing last Thursday — NASA shared video online — “worked out almost perfectly,” he said.

“People have put a lot of their life into this for the last decade and a lot of things had to go right for that landing to succeed …,” Francis said. “(At) each critical juncture, you could see people getting more hopeful.”

Now that Perseverance has landed, Francis’s work begins.

As science engineering liaison, he helps co-ordinate discussions of what the science team wants to do.

“They might be what observations to make, which experiments to run, where to drive the rover to make our next studies,” he said.

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The rover is “greatly improved” from its predecessor, Curiosity.

“It looks a lot like Curiosity rover, but it is not,” Francis said. “We have greatly improved capabilities and our autonomous driving system is much improved. We’ll be able to drive farther and faster.”

Francis also be part of operating its artificial intelligence system.

“I’m am going to have a role in deploying that software and making sure it gives us good science data,” he said.

Francis also runs a “supercam,” or laser geochemical spectrometer, he said.

Their work is being done on “Mars time,” where a day last 24 hours and 38 minutes and scientists will give up regular sleep cycles to use every second.

“The rover works best during the day on Mars, so we can spend less energy on heating because the sun is up and we can easily take pictures,” he said.

Rock and other samples collected by the rover will be retrieved, he said, likely in two missions in the early 2030s: one to land, pick up samples and lift them into orbit; another to carry them from Mars to Earth.

In earlier interviews, Francis said Sudbury and Science North helped shape his interest in science and space.

Francis told Tilbury District High School students in southern Ontario a few years ago about an encounter that changed his life.

“Probably the first time that happened to me was when I was … [in] first grade,” Francis said. “I grew up in Sudbury and there was a place there called Science North, a public science centre. And they had Bob Thirsk – a Canadian astronaut … and he came by with an American astronaut who had already flown. And they gave this presentation about ‘look, this is what it’s like to operate a space shuttle.’”

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“I still have the little poster he signed,” Francis added.

Thirsk would later become the first Canadian to fly at length in the International Space Station, in 2009.

Earlier this year, he told Quirks & Quarks, a science show on CBC Radio, that living in Sudbury in some ways helped prepare him for this Mars mission.

“You’re from Sudbury, which is a big mining town,” Quirks & Quarks asked. “And after building a career in robotics and space science, you’ve been led back to rocks. They’re just rocks on another world.”

“That’s right,” Francis replied. “And honestly, during my PhD studies in how to teach computers to look at rocks, I spent some time up in Sudbury looking at those. The mines in Sudbury are the results of an ancient impact crater that’s not quite as old as Jezero, but the impact geology is a very good analogue for the types of large scale impact sites we find in craters on Mars.

“So going home to Sudbury was actually a very useful thing for getting prepared for these kinds of studies on Mars.

HRivers@postmedia.com

Twitter: @SudburyStar