Humans won’t be on it, but now we know where NASA's next mission to search for signs of life on Mars will land.
After searching and debating the possibilities for five years, NASA chose the ancient Jezero Crater lakebed as the landing site for its upcoming Mars 2020 robot rover mission, the agency announced Monday.
"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," NASA’s Thomas Zurbuchen said in a statement.
Though bone-dry now, the crater once contained a lake and a river delta.
Jezero Crater presents several promising targets of at least five different kinds of rock that all have a decent chance of preserving signs of past life, NASA said.
The rover will not only seek signs of ancient life – it will collect rock and soil samples and store them on the planet's surface. And for the first time, future round-trip missions would then retrieve those samples and bring them back to Earth, so this landing site sets the stage for the next decade of Mars exploration.
While all aspects of these sorts of missions are challenging, "nothing has been more difficult in robotic planetary exploration than landing on Mars,” Zurbuchen said. Thus, planning ahead for a specific site will give engineers and scientists plenty of time to study the landing area.
The mission is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in July 2020 and arrive on the Martian surface in February 2021, NASA said.
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