NASA Chooses Ancient Lake Crater For Mars 2020 Rover Mission To Search For Life

Jezero Crater, a depression in Mars' surface that once held a river-fed lake with a delta where water exited has been chosen as the landing site for a planned Mars 2020 rover to collect samples for evidence that primitive microbial life once existed on the Red Planet, NASA said in a press release on Monday.

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 19th November, 2018) Jezero Crater, a depression in Mars' surface that once held a river-fed lake with a delta where water exited has been chosen as the landing site for a planned Mars 2020 rover to collect samples for evidence that primitive microbial life once existed on the Red Planet, NASA said in a press release on Monday.

"The rover mission is scheduled to launch in July 2020 as NASA's next step in exploration of the Red Planet," the release said. "It will not only seek signs of ancient habitable conditions - and past microbial life - but the rover also will collect rock and soil samples and store them in a cache on the planet's surface.

Associate NASA Science Mission Directorate Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen told reporters in a press briefing that a mission to retrieve the cashed rock and soil samples would probably launch in the late 2020s.

"Add a couple years or whatever it takes at the back end of that [mission] will be the return so it would most likely be ... in the early [20]30s when the samples would come back to Earth," Zurbuchen said.

NASA explained that Jezero Crater is a giant meteor impact basin just north of the Martian equator.

Mission scientists say they believe the 28-mile-wide crater, once home to an ancient river delta, could have collected and preserved ancient organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life from the water and sediments that flowed into the crater billions of years ago.