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Mars landing comes down to final 6 minutes of 6-month trip

24 November, 2018, 01:14 | Author: Bridget Leonard
  • NASA officially announces landing site of Mars 2020 rover, and it’s incredibly interesting

In a new blog post, NASA reveals that it has chosen a site known as the Jezero Crater to be the landing area for Mars 2020.

Once settled, the solar-powered craft will spend one Martian year - two Earth years - plumbing the depths of the planet's interior for clues to how Mars took form and, by extension, how the Earth and other rocky planets came into being.

But Jezero came out a victor as it offers promising sampling targets of at least five kinds of rock, including clays and carbonates that have high potential to preserve signatures of past life, as revealed by NASA in a press statement.

There are a number of factors that NASA had to consider while choosing a landing site.

As it once hosted an ancient lake-delta system, NASA hopes Jezero also contains a variety of minerals, which would hugely help discover more about the red planet.


The US space agency's mission to place a next-generation rover on the Martian surface is scheduled to launch in July 2020. Utilizing information from NASA's armada of Mars orbiters, they will outline landscape in more noteworthy detail and distinguish districts of intrigue - places with the most fascinating geographical highlights, for instance - where Mars 2020 could gather the best science tests. But landing safely isn't a slam dunk: Scientists want to make sure the rover doesn't land in a boulder field, a sand trap or on the edge of a cliff.

Named WALL-E and EVE after the main characters in the 2008 animated movie, the twin CubeSats will pass within a few thousand miles (kilometres) of Mars as the lander attempts its dicey touchdown. "But what was once out of reach is now conceivable, thanks to the 2020 engineering team and advances in Mars entry, descent and landing technologies", he said.

Overcoming 485 million km, InSight will land in the volcanic area of the world, the Elysium highlands, which is located near the equator of Mars.

InSight stands to "revolutionise the way we think about the inside of the planet", said Nasa's science mission chief, Thomas Zurbuchen.

This mission will study the internal structure, the tectonic and seismic activity on Mars. It is a revised version of the rover Curiosity, which arrived on the Red Planet in 2012. China is planning to get in on the action with its first-ever Mars mission, also due for launch during 2020's favorable launch opportunity.

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