NASA's Mars 2020 rover set to hunt Martian fossils, scout for manned missions

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NASA's Mars 2020 rover set to hunt Martian fossils, scout for manned missions

By Rollo Ross

 

FILE PHOTO: Engineers and technicians install the remote sensing mast to the Mars 2020 rover in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, U.S., June 5, 2019. Photo taken June 5, 2019. NASA-JPL-Caltech/Handout via REUTERS

 

PASADENA, Calif. (Reuters) - A NASA robotic rover is nearing completion ahead of a journey next year to search for evidence of past life on Mars and lay the groundwork for the space agency's mission to send humans into deep space.

 

The U.S. space agency on Friday showed off its Mars 2020 rover, whose official name will be chosen early next year.

NASA will in February ship the rover to Florida's Kennedy Space Center where its three sections will be fully assembled.

A July launch will send the rover to a dry lake bed on Mars that is bigger than the island of Manhattan. 

 

The four-wheeled, car-sized rover will scour the base of Mars' Jezero Crater, an 820-foot-deep (250-meter-deep) crater thought to have been a lake the size of Lake Tahoe, once the craft lands in February 2021. The crater is believed to have an abundance of pristine sediments some 3.5 billion years old that scientists hope will hold fossils of Martian life. 

 

"The trick, though, is that we're looking for trace levels of chemicals from billions of years ago on Mars," Mars 2020 deputy project manager Matt Wallace told Reuters. The rover will collect up to 30 soil samples to be picked up and returned to Earth by a future spacecraft planned by NASA. 

 

"Once we have a sufficient set, we'll put them down on the ground, and another mission, which we hope to launch in 2026, will come, land on the surface, collect those samples and put them into a rocket, basically," Wallace said.

Humans have never before returned sediment samples from Mars.

 

The findings of the Mars 2020 research will be crucial to future human missions to the red planet, including the ability to make oxygen on the surface of Mars, Wallace said. The Mars 2020 Rover is carrying equipment that can turn carbon dioxide, which is pervasive on Mars, into oxygen for breathing and as a propellant.

 

LESSONS FROM CURIOSITY

 

If successful, Mars 2020 will mark NASA's fifth Martian rover to carry out a soft landing, having learned crucial lessons from the most recent Curiosity rover that landed on the planet's surface in 2012 and continues to traverse a Martian plain southeast of the Jezero Crater.

 

The Soviet Union is the only other country to successfully land a rover on Mars. China and Japan have attempted unsuccessfully to send orbiters around Mars, while India and Europe's space agency have successfully lofted an orbiter to the planet.

 

(Writing by Joey Roulette; editing by Bill Tarrant and Cynthia Osterman)

 

-- © Copyright Reuters 2019-12-28

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[Samui Bodoh]

I am always interested in space exploration, even if this article seems to be a 'Hey! We are still here!' piece rather than a detailed announcement of import and consequence.

 

That said, there is one part that intrigues me...

 

"...The findings of the Mars 2020 research will be crucial to future human missions to the red planet, including the ability to make oxygen on the surface of Mars, Wallace said. The Mars 2020 Rover is carrying equipment that can turn carbon dioxide, which is pervasive on Mars, into oxygen for breathing and as a propellant..."

 

I am pleased to read that NASA is seriously thinking about sending people there, to the extent of shipping, in advance, key cargo that would be required for any lengthy stay. And, it bears a reminder that at the moment and for the foreseeable future, any trip there by a human would be one way. If there are means to turn carbon dioxide to oxygen, then one of several keys initial hurdles for long-term visits and/or permanent settlements will be reached.

 

A question to my fellow "Space Junkies" (if you are reading this, then there is a high probability that you are a "Space Junkie")...

 

If you were selected for a one-way mission to Mars where the basics required for life (food, water, power) are already on-site, would you go?

 

My initial thoughts would be "Yes!". Human kind, should it wish to survive, will need to one day reach for the stars, and the people who lead that initial step will be lionized; perhaps one day people would live in Samui Bodoh city, Bodohnia province on the continent of Samuitious 

 

Seriously, would you go on a one-way trip? And be the first to really see a new planet?

 

Something to ponder over this New Year break...