Friday, January 24, 2014

NASA Receives Mars 2020 Rover Instrument Proposals for Evaluation



Planning for NASA's 2020 Mars rover envisions a basic structure that capitalizes on the design and engineering work done for the NASA rover Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, but with new science instruments selected through competition for accomplishing different science objectives. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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January 21, 2014

NASA has received 58 proposals for science and exploration technology instruments to fly aboard the agency's next Mars rover in 2020, twice the usual number submitted for instrument competitions in the recent past, and an indicator of the extraordinary interest in exploration of the Red Planet.

The agency is beginning a thorough review to determine the best combination of science and exploration technology investigations for the mission and anticipates making final selections in the next five months.
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The Mars 2020 mission is designed to accomplish several high-priority planetary science goals and will be an important step toward meeting President Obama's challenge to send humans to Mars in the 2030s. The mission will conduct geological assessments of the rover's landing site, determine the habitability of the environment, search for signs of ancient Martian life, and assess natural resources and hazards for future human explorers.
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Before sending humans to Mars it would be advisable to make sure there isn't already some life form there that we humans might contaminate.
- LRK -

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The Mars 2020 rover mission is a Mars planetary rover mission concept under study by NASA with a possible launch in 2020. It is intended to investigate an astrobiologically relevant ancient environment on Mars, investigate its surface geological processes and history, including the assessment of its past habitability and potential for preservation of biosignatures within accessible geological materials.[1][2]
The Mars 2020 rover mission was announced by NASA on 4 December 2012 at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.[3] The rover's design will be derived from the Curiosity rover, and would carry a different scientific payload.[4] Proposals for rover instrumentation are being evaluated.[5]
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Very nice blog I ran across looking for hiding Martians, - LRK -
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More than any other world in the solar system, Mars has captured the imagination of the human race (except maybe for Pluto, but it’s not a planet, right?). Mars has dominated our imaginings of other worlds for more than a century, beginning with H.G. Wells’ masterpiece of invasion, The War of the Worlds.  Since The War of the Worlds was first written, many other tales of adventure, danger and horror have been penned or filmed concerning Mars — Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic Mars Trilogy, the classic 1964 film Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Elton John’s sonorous musings that Mars is no place to raise a family in “Rocketman,” and many many more.
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martian-chronicles


It may yet be true that Mars harbors no indigenous life, but we’ll never know until we ourselves go, and turn over every rock we can find. It will be the work of a lifetime, indeed of uncountable lifetimes if the exploration of the Earth is any kind of indicator.  In the end, there will be Martians, but as Carl Sagan so aptly noted (and Rock Hudson discovered at the end of The Martian Chronicles), the Martians will be us.
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Thanks for looking up with me. 
- LRK -
 
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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK -

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