NASA’s Mars 2020 rover to explore ancient life
NASA’s Mars 2020 rover, its latest robotic mission to the Red Planet, will include technology to explore ancient life on Mars, according to the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The goal of the Mars 2020 rover is to look for signs of ancient life. It will be the first spacecraft to collect samples of the Martian surface, caching them in tubes that could be returned to Earth on a future mission, Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday.
The atmosphere on Mars is mostly carbon dioxide and extremely thin, about 100 times less dense than the Earth’s, with no breathable oxygen. There’s no water on the surface and the landscape is freezing, with no protection from the Sun’s radiation or from passing dust storms.
