This illustration shows Jezero Crater — the landing site of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover — as it may have looked billions of years ago on Mars, when it was a lake. An inlet and outlet are also visible on either side of the lake.
A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).
Subsequent missions, currently under consideration by NASA in cooperation with the European Space Agency, would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.
Follow us on Google and Google News.
2 Comments
Interesting.
Curiosity.
Was wondering what algorithmms were used to create the image, and whether the same is the exact replica of the images that the eyes would perceive, if a a human was in a Space ship circulating the panet?
Can much more detailed images be created by taking the planet earth as the baseline and creating extremely accurate algorithms which can further improve the accuracy and detail of these images , so that what you see is what you encounter when we reach the planet?
Lake beds on earth as they exist currently and also as they probably existed on the planet in the past, should be the baseline for benchmarking and for predicting what we could expect to find on the surface of the Red planet —- and a great deal of analysis can be done on board of the next Roover, and the information sent back to the scientists in Houston rather than wait for the flight back.
A great deal of information and analysis can be completed long before the actual samples are brouught back to stations and off-planet bases set up in the space station and the moon or other heavenly bodies. Most of this can be done with the Existing “Eyes in the sky”.
Retthinking and reimagining the processes and technologies, is extremely criticalfor all of humanity.
Good to know we could ask a question about thories of space.Like our sun rah dying.the flares that are burning, Is rah getting smaller or bigger in size?