Mars 2020: Bringing rock samples from The Red Planet back to Earth
NASA's Mars 2020 mission intends to send a rover to The Red Planet that would help us understand more about Mars as a potential habitat for life - past or present - with one of the most interesting ideas planned being collecting rock samples and bringing them back to Earth for analysis.
What are the goals of the mission?
NASA has been actively exploring the surface of Mars for some time now and one of the biggest questions that are still open is the possibility of past or present life there. We've already discovered that Mars was once a much more active place which might have created conditions that could have supported life. And keeping in mind that we know there are still places with liquid water there, we cannot rule out the possibility of life still existing on The Red Planet today.
That's why NASA have set out to search for signs of past of present life and the Mars 2020 mission is part of that program.
What will the mission do exactly?
In order to support the goals above, the Mars 2020 rover is going to try a few fascinating things.
It's going to search biosignatures. Those are a variety of special compounds or structures that could only be the result of life. There is a chance that if there was once life on the planet, signs of that have been preserved in Mars' sedimentary rock and the rover will try to find them.
Collect and prepare core rock samples so they can be sent back to Earth at a later stage. The biggest challenge of finding the signs of life on a foreign planet is the fact that the rovers only have limited equipment available. If we manage to take samples of interest and send them back to Earth, we can use all the equipment and professionals here to uncover much more about them than a rover could hope to there. On top of this, while the mission is in progress and the samples are in transit, we can continue developing new methods and ideas about how to test them. The only disappointment here is that the Mars 2020 mission is only going to collect the sample and leave them waiting on the surface of the planet and retrieving them back to our home world supposedly be part of a later mission. This means that we are going to wait quite some time before we can get our hands on some nice Mars rock samples.
Additionally, the rover is going to take all kinds of readings about wind, temperature and is going to use its state of the art dual imaging stereoscopic cameras to help us continue learning more about the environment on Mars.
Last, but not least, the rover is going to perform a practical science experiment and will try to produce oxygen from the Martian atmosphere by breaking down the CO2 that it contains. This will help pave the way for potential human exploration of the planet and will test out one of the most important life support technologies required for that.
How cool will the rover be?
Very. Unsurprisingly, it's going to be the best Mars rover to date, drawing heavily from the experience and knowledge gained from the Spirit and Curiosity missions and improving on the technology enabling the new rover to do even more. It's going to have more processing power, improved wheels, more memory, better communication technology and lots and lots of science equipment.
You can read and see a lot more on the project's official website including information about the ongoing landing site selection.
All images courtesy of NASA and their public domain image policy.
There is life out there somewhere.
Quite possibly. The question is where...
While you can still edit this, Dave, you might want to change several "sings" to "signs..." ;)
😄😇😄
Thanks a lot for noticing! I had gotten it wrong on two of the three instances of using it, pretty embarrassing stuff :P
Not embarrassing at all, or shouldn't be!
We get so used to "on the fly" spellchecking that at times we don't notice that we've transposed letters!
This is also a clear case in point for my (oft repeated) pleas for perpetual editability of Steemit articles... ;)
I used to make a living teaching English, so this means it's supposed to be kind of embarrassing :P But I've never been great at spelling and I've had students call me out on spelling mistakes. And yes, the ubiquity of spellcheck exacerbates the problem for many, certainly does for me.
I don't see huge reason why editability should be limited. I also don't see why only votes within the first week should count. It kind of discourages evergreen content which is the bread and butter of other blogging platforms as it leads to a lot of search traffic. But here search traffic is pretty much worthless, especially to the author. C'est la vie. :)
I find myself far more concerned by the editing problem than the voting situation. The latter makes sense to me (limited reward pool vs. ultimately near-infinite article store). I know there is still great value in the touted "archival nature" of blockchain storage, as well as value to me because new readers can better evaluate me immediately by reviewing my library...
I would welcome better search facilities! :D
What I meant is that keeping and upkeeping your library of posts is basically something that you do 100% (or 99%) altruistically because after the 7 days have passed, you have zero incentive to try and promote it and bring people to it. I guess they don't allow editing later because they want to preserve the post in the form it was when it got rewarded, as a clear record of what earned the reward or something.
When talking about search, I don't mean the search option that is here on steemit.com or other interfaces you might be looking at the blockchain from. I mean search engines like Google and Bing who are responsible for a great deal of the visitors going to the popular websites on the internet. But for the steemit blockchain and its authors, those visitors bring very little value as they affect your posts performance only if the visitor decides to register because of your post and than goes back an follows you upvotes your content. That's a bit of a long shot and I think that is disincentivizing content creators here from caring about search engine optimization and in turn makes the site less visible to the general public. I think Steem would benefit greatly from an affiliate program that would give you a commission for bringing in new people and this will make a lot more people work on bringing all types of traffic and making the platform more popular.
It must be "or something," because this is not so. The blockchain maintains a very clear record of the state of the post all through the voting period.
Regarding searching, there are at least one or two folk on Steemit writing about how to do Search Engine Optimization on your own articles. I agree that Steemit itself could definitely improve that situation.
I literally laughed out loud when I read that :P You are absolutely right about the blockchain record, then I don't even have a hypothesis other than "something" indeed :D
I've seen SEO post and people putting effort into it, but the platform on the whole doesn't incentivize that in any way. There are also people printing out fliers and holding events to bring more people to the platform but the platform itself doesn't incentivize that either. They are just doing it because they believe it is good and of value to people and the value they get out of it, I believe, is relatively small and I think the platform itself should increase it. The only thing they are getting out of it now are the votes on the posts they make about their efforts and a possible follower here and there from the people that they have managed to bring in.