After three intense days of work in the town of Monrovia, California, the points on the map of Mars have already been chosen where the next NASA mission could land (or rather, ‘amartize’), the first that it plans to bring from returned Martian rock samples to Earth . The vote has been carried out on eight ‘nominees’ and the final destination of the rover – exploration robot – will be decided a year or two before the launch , scheduled in July 2020.
The preferred area for scientists, according to their votes, is the Jezero crater, where a lake almost as large as the island of Ibiza stretched and where remnants of microbial activity could be detected. Because that is the priority objective of the Mars 2020 mission: to know if the neighboring planet harbored any kind of life . Hence, the factor most taken into account when casting ‘targets’ was that the water had run across its surface ; then the possibilities of finding organic compounds, molecular biomarkers or even microfossils of organisms multiply.
The second and third locations selected at the Monrovia meeting were the northeast Syrtis Major Plateau , with a past of volcanic activity and hot springs, and the Columbia Mountains . This last location, already visited by the Spirit rover between 2004 and 2010, is the one that raises the most doubts in the astronomical community. According to critics, the latest exploration failed to elucidate whether its silica rocks , similar to those found in hydrothermal deposits on Earth, were somehow connected to the emergence of life .
Apart from the biological question, other factors have been weighed in the selection of the three Martian landscapes, such as the ease of moving from one place to another (the Mars 2020 mission rover is expected to collect twenty rock fragments in two years) , access to natural resources and risks for future human explorers.
Bottom photo: Jezero crater
