“We first landed on Jezero Crater on Jan. 23rd,” said Heather Bottom, systems engineer for the Mars 2020 mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory describing NASA’s test simulation of the 27,000 actions and calculations the 2020 rover will perform in seven minutes in the early afternoon of Feb. 18, 2021 as it speeds through the hazardous transition from the edge of space to Jezero Crater. “And the rover successfully landed again on Mars two days later.” (more…)
Humanity may not have to wait much longer to get our first evidence of E.T., NASA chief Jim Bridenstine said recently at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory headquarters. Bridenstine isn’t the only NASA leader to express optimism about the alien-life hunt. In 2015, Ellen Stofan, NASA’s chief scientist from 2013 to 2016, who predicted that NASA would find “proof of alien life in 20 years.”
“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.
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