The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to the day’s news headlines on the discoveries, people, and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
“Our measurements will help us turn back the clock and understand what produced a verdant Earth but a desolate Mars,” said Bruce Banerdt, who leads the Insight mission, prior to Monday’s landing at the Elysium Planitia, a flat, smooth plain devoid of rocks and hills, 373 miles north of the Curiosity rover.
“It’s like a ski jump,” said Ken Ramsley, a planetary science researcher at Brown University. “The boulders keep going but suddenly there’s no ground under them. They end up doing this suborbital flight over this zone.”
“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. “Getting samples from this unique area
“Nothing has been more difficult in robotic planetary exploration than landing on Mars.”
Jezero Crater, a potential landing site for NASA’s Mars 2020 rover mission to look for signs of past life, is one of 24 paleolakes that held vast amounts of water across the Red Planet featured in a new study by NASA scientists and University of Texas researchers. The mission is designed to search for evidence of possible ancient life on Mars and to gather and store geological samples that a future NASA mission could one day bring back to Earth laboratories.
“Oumuamua appeared to be a rocky object associated with the inner regions of a star system. Of course, it is the first interstellar object to be observed, so it might not be representative. ‘But if other interstellar objects look like this, there is something wrong with our models of planet formation”, observed University of Groningen astronomer Michael Mueller. (more…)