[ad_1]
Where to land on Mars? NASA has made its decision for its next mission, which will land in 2021.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
NASA is ready to announce which of the four finalists has been chosen as the landing site for its March 2020 rover, which is scheduled to land on the Red Planet in 2021, and we will all know more on Monday, November 19th. ).
The agency will announce its choice at a press conference call Monday at 12pm. EST (17:00 GMT). Audio and visual recordings of the announcement will be available here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV, or directly on the agency's website.
The announcement follows a workshop held in October, in which hundreds of scientists listened to presentations on the benefits and concerns of each of the candidate sites. At the end of this meeting, participants voted according to their preference and the overall results of this vote were sent to a recommendation that NASA should consider in its final decision-making process.
This is a heavy decision because the March 2020 rover has a host of intriguing scientific goals to tackle. The mission is designed to look for evidence of a possible ancient life on Mars and to collect and store samples that a future NASA mission could one day report to Earth's laboratories.
The four landing sites currently under study for the NASA 2020 Rover.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
The four candidate sites are named Columbia Hills, Jezero Crater, Northeast Syrtis and Midway. (The last of them, a late competitor in battle, lies between the crater of Jezero and the north-east of Syrtis and has given rise to the hope of scientists that they might be able to integrate the two destinations into one mission.)
Each site has been carefully evaluated for security risks – it is notoriously difficult to land on Mars and there is no point in risking an expensive spacecraft by choosing a touchdown point that adds additional danger – and taking into account the geological interest of nearby rocks.
But which site will win? Log on Monday to find out!
Email Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her. @meghanbartels. follow us @Spacedotcom and Facebook. Original article on Space.com.
[ad_2]
Source link
