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NASA Chooses the Landing Site For Its Mars 2020 Rover Mission (techcrunch.com)
Five years and sixty potential locations later, NASA has chosen the Jezero Crater as the landing site for its Mars 2020 rover mission. "Slated to launch in July the Mars 2020 rover mission will touch down at the Jezero Crater as NASA's exploration of the Red Planet enters its next phase," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The rover will be looking for signs of habitable conditions -- and past microbial life -- while also collecting rock and soil samples that will be stored in a cache on the Martian surface. "The landing site in Jezero Crater offers geologically rich terrain, with landforms reaching as far back as 3.6 billion years old, that could potentially answer important questions in planetary evolution and astrobiology," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, in a statement. "Getting samples from this unique area will revolutionize how we think about Mars and its ability to harbor life."
The crater is located on the western edge of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator, with some of the oldest and most scientifically interesting landscapes Mars has to offer, according to NASA scientists. Mission scientists believe the 28-mile-wide crater once held an ancient river delta, and could have collected and preserved organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life from the water and sediments that flowed into the crater. NASA thinks it can collect up to five different kinds of Martian rock, including clays and carbonates that may preserve indicators of past life. There's also the hope that minerals have been swept into the crater over the last billion years which Rover could also collect.
The crater is located on the western edge of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator, with some of the oldest and most scientifically interesting landscapes Mars has to offer, according to NASA scientists. Mission scientists believe the 28-mile-wide crater once held an ancient river delta, and could have collected and preserved organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life from the water and sediments that flowed into the crater. NASA thinks it can collect up to five different kinds of Martian rock, including clays and carbonates that may preserve indicators of past life. There's also the hope that minerals have been swept into the crater over the last billion years which Rover could also collect.
Will the rover arrive with a selfie stick?
Our first Martian colonists... :)
[($)]
fairly sure I could do this also
And don't hold your breath waiting for NASA to "return" to the Moon, either...
by the time humans ever get to set foot on mars, it will be already swamped by rover-robots.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Instead of spending 5 years trying to decide which of 60 locations to send a rover to, how about building 60 rovers and sending one to each site? Just getting cameras on the ground would help tremendously, as opposed to staring at vague pixels of satellite imagery, trying to decide if something is interesting like H2O, or an ordinary optical phenomenon. We really ought to be sending a dozen cheap rovers to Mars annually, the ongoing mission costs are minuscule. The amount of budget they (are mostly forced to) waste on rocketry annually would more than pay for it. Blue-sky rocket research, fine; paying $billions to develop a rocket that will be made obsolete by the competition by the time it flies, not so much.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Is this planned to be another large-scale rover like Curiosity?
they can make the rovers into their pet martian dogs, if they still work.
I understand you are not really interested in a discussion, but how much money do you think the average citizen would save if the NASA budget were cut? It represents somewhere around 0.5% of the total government budget. If they cut NASA and returned that portion of taxes to the public, it would hardly be noticeable.
Legacy launch costs were so high that Size, Weight and Power (SWaP) was everything. Putting cutting edge computing technology on a rover has never been a priority. These things are designed for reliability in harsh operating conditions and high radiation environments. Thus, to date rovers have been little more than marginally autonomous remote controlled science experiments.
The James Webb Space Telescope could have been made out of machined billets of stainless steel and use a concrete heat shield, launched on a Falcon Heavy, and been cheaper and faster than the current program - all due to legacy SWaP limitations. I'm not suggesting JWST is poorly designed. Congress and NASA have mangled the budget and timeline of JWST to the point that it's become an unmanageable nightmare.
Current planetary exploration missions like the Mars rovers have been designed around the SWaP available on the legacy launch platforms. It takes two Delta IV Heavy launches at $435 million each, or $870 million total, to put as much into orbit as a single $100 million Falcon heavy launch. BFR is just going to improve this calculation. Blue Origin will hopefully be successful in their reusable and low cost technology as well. A comparison of launch vehicles can be seen here.
What this means is that we should be able to litter the surface of Mars with more capable rovers in the not too distant future. More capability may come with shorter lifespans - or with service intervals. Why spend a fortune making something that will last a decade when a more capable system can be deployed and replaced for a fraction of the cost?
A human settlement on Mars will be able to make repairs and provide services and interact with rovers in ways that have never been possible, which will magnify the capabilities of both the rovers and the humans. Rovers send image and preliminary sensor data to the humans, who then request that the rovers return samples. The humans follow up with more detailed, harder to obtain samples, and perform analysis at more capable laboratories.
What people lose sight of is that rovers are highly specialized, and specialization is for insects.
Within one year on the surface of Mars the permanent presence of humans will yield orders of magnitude more scientific data than has been gathered in all the 42 years since the Viking program.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
Hawaii?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .