admin LOS ANGELES – NASA scientists said on Friday unveiling The Mars 2020 rover, which will set off for the red planet next year, will search for traces of ancient life and also pave the way for human missions.
The rover is scheduled to leave Earth from Florida’s Cape Canaveral in July and has been constructed near Los Angeles in a sterile room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena where in the previous week, its driving equipment was given its first successful test.
Seven months later from july it will become the fifth U.S. rover to land on Mars.
Matt Wallace, deputy mission leader said, “It’s designed to seek the signs of life, so we’re carrying a number of different instruments that will help us understand the geological and chemical context on the surface of Mars.”
The devices on board the rover includes 23 cameras, two “ears” that will allow it to listen to Martian winds, and lasers used for chemical analysis, and the rover, approximately the size of a car, allowing it to traverse rocky terrain equipped with six wheels like its predecessor Curiosity.
Speed is not a priority for the vehicle, which only has to cover around 200 meters per Martian day — approximately the same as a day on Earth.
Mars 2020 has articulated arms and a drill, fueled by a miniature nuclear reactor, to crack open rock samples in locations that scientists identify as potentially suitable for life.
“What we’re looking for is ancient microbial life — we’re talking about billions of years ago on Mars, when the planet was much more Earth-like,” said Wallace.
Back then, the red planet had warm surface water, a thicker atmosphere and a magnetic field around it, “and so it was much more conducive to the types of simple single-cell life that evolved here on Earth at that time.”
Once collected, the samples will be sealed in tubes by the rover. The tubes will be left on the surface until a future mission can transport them back to Earth.
To maximize its chance of unearthing traces of ancient life, Mars 2020 will land in a former delta called Jezero.
The site, selected after years of scientific debate, is a crater that was once a 500-meter-deep lake. It was formerly connected to a network of rivers that flowed from 3.9 billion to 3.5 billion years ago. The crater measures just under 50 km (30 miles) across, and experts hope it may have preserved ancient organic molecules.
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