Post by Life on Mar 13, 2021 20:30:48 GMT 5
About 3.9 billion years ago, a wayward rock slammed into Mars, punching a 45-kilometre-wide hole into its surface. On 18 February, NASA plans to land its latest rover inside that pit, named Jezero Crater.
The goal is to explore an area of Mars that was once much warmer and wetter, and perhaps even liveable. Scattered throughout the crater are geological formations hinting at its watery past, including the remains of a lake and a river delta. Studying the make-up of these rocks — in a region where no spacecraft has gone before — will give NASA its best chance yet at answering the age-old question of whether life ever existed on Mars.
“Jezero is very special,” says Briony Horgan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and a member of the mission’s science team.
NASA’s six-wheeled rover, named Perseverance, will explore Jezero as a robotic geologist — examining outcrops and then scooping dirt and rock into a carousel of tubes stored in its belly. If all goes well, by the end of its first Mars year on the surface — a little under two Earth years — the rover will have travelled more than 15 kilometres. And it will have collected a precious set of samples that it will drop onto the Martian ground, where future spacecraft might one day retrieve them — the first attempt to bring Mars rocks back to Earth.
Destination: Jezero
Two other missions reached Mars this month. The United Arab Emirates’ Hope spacecraft started orbiting the planet on 9 February, followed a day later by China’s Tianwen-1 mission — a first for both nations. But Perseverance aims to become the first rover to land since 2012, when NASA’s Curiosity spacecraft arrived in Gale Crater, a dry lake bed about 3,700 kilometres from Jezero. (Tianwen-1 is slated to send a rover to touch down as early as May, and Hope will continue orbiting.) Only eight spacecraft have successfully operated on the red planet’s surface (see ‘Touch Down’).
Full read with high quality images in the following LINK: www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-021-00321-7/index.html
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The goal is to explore an area of Mars that was once much warmer and wetter, and perhaps even liveable. Scattered throughout the crater are geological formations hinting at its watery past, including the remains of a lake and a river delta. Studying the make-up of these rocks — in a region where no spacecraft has gone before — will give NASA its best chance yet at answering the age-old question of whether life ever existed on Mars.
“Jezero is very special,” says Briony Horgan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and a member of the mission’s science team.
NASA’s six-wheeled rover, named Perseverance, will explore Jezero as a robotic geologist — examining outcrops and then scooping dirt and rock into a carousel of tubes stored in its belly. If all goes well, by the end of its first Mars year on the surface — a little under two Earth years — the rover will have travelled more than 15 kilometres. And it will have collected a precious set of samples that it will drop onto the Martian ground, where future spacecraft might one day retrieve them — the first attempt to bring Mars rocks back to Earth.
Destination: Jezero
Two other missions reached Mars this month. The United Arab Emirates’ Hope spacecraft started orbiting the planet on 9 February, followed a day later by China’s Tianwen-1 mission — a first for both nations. But Perseverance aims to become the first rover to land since 2012, when NASA’s Curiosity spacecraft arrived in Gale Crater, a dry lake bed about 3,700 kilometres from Jezero. (Tianwen-1 is slated to send a rover to touch down as early as May, and Hope will continue orbiting.) Only eight spacecraft have successfully operated on the red planet’s surface (see ‘Touch Down’).
Full read with high quality images in the following LINK: www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-021-00321-7/index.html
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