Mission to the Red Planet from NASA in Alabama - AL.com

It's the first step in an ambitious project to bring the first Martian rock samples back to Earth to be analyzed for evidence of ancient life.

Right now, NASA’s Perseverance rover is flying through space toward a February landing on Mars, and no one is watching closer than Dr.

For the first time, a rover will try to send samples from the planet back to Earth.

“This particular place on Mars was something I had spotted in very low-resolution data in 2003, 2004,” Fassett said last week.

“In that data, it was really clear that there were these valleys in this crater.” What Fassett saw in images from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which is still orbiting Mars, were signs of sedimentary deposits on one side of the crater and “an outlet” on the other side.

“To have an outlet form, you have to fill the whole (crater) up and have it overflow,” Fassett said.

This map shows regions in and around Jezero Crater on Mars, the landing site of NASA's Perseverance rover.

Jezero held a lake and river delta billions of years ago; scientists want to capture samples of rock in these regions that may contain evidence of ancient microscopic life, which will be returned to Earth by a future mission for extensive study.

Carbonates were found in a rock sample from a Martian meteorite that hit Earth, Fassett said, “and that was one of the things that set off the Mars program re-invigoration in the 1980s, because people were arguing it was biology.”.

Scientists don’t think that now, he said, and Fassett believes finding evidence of life on Mars next year is “unlikely.” The rover is “very capable,” he said, “but we have a hard time on Earth identifying the signatures of life in 3 ½ million-year-old rocks.

That’s why NASA is looking at the big step of “bringing samples back” to Earth.

The plan is that if Perseverance finds “interesting samples,” they will be gathered and stored in the rover until a Mars Ascent Vehicle arrives later in the 2020′s.

his illustration shows a concept of how the NASA Mars Ascent Vehicle, carrying tubes containing rock and soil samples, could be launched from the surface of Mars in one step of the Mars sample return mission.