ISLAMABAD-Following touchdown, MOXIE will brew up oxygen while geologists comb for sediments to sample. Recently, NASA’s newest Mars rover, Perseverance, is scheduled to touch down on the surface of the red planet following a nail-biting entry and descent sequence vividly known as the “seven minutes of terror.” If all goes according to plan, the car-sized explorer will blast safely down into Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide impact basin that once may have hosted a river delta flooded with water, and possibly life. Over the next year and a half of its primary mission, Perseverance will explore the crater and collect rock samples that will one day be returned to Earth, where scientists hope to study them for evidence of ancient microbial life. As the rover traverses the empty lake bed, it will determine which sediments to sample, with the help of MIT’s Tanja Bosak, professor of geobiology, and Benjamin Weiss, professor of planetary sciences. Bosak and Weiss are members of the mission’s return sample science team and will be using the rover’s images to direct the vehicle toward interesting sediments to collect.
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