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 US space agency on Friday showed off its Mars 2020 rover, whose official name is to be chosen early next year.
NASA would in February ship the rover to Florida’s John F. Kennedy Space Center, where its three sections are to be fully assembled. A July launch would send the rover to a dry lake bed on Mars that is bigger than the island of Manhattan.
Photo: AFP
The six-wheeled, car-sized rover is to scour the base of Mars’ Jezero Crater, a 250m-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 about 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,” deputy project manager Matt Wallace told reporters.
The rover is to 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 rover’s research would be crucial to future human missions to the red planet, including the ability to make oxygen on the surface of Mars, Wallace said.
The rover is to carry equipment that can turn carbon dioxide, which is pervasive on Mars, into oxygen for breathing and as a propellant.
If successful, Mars 2020 would mark NASA’s fifth Martian rover to carry out a soft landing, having learned crucial lessons from the most recent rover, Curiosity, that landed on the planet’s surface in 2012 and continues to traverse a Martian plain southeast of the Jezero Crater.
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