Rover Will Collect Mars Samples to Send to Earth

In an article in Discovery News, staff writer Irene Klotz discussed NASA's new plans to recover samples of Mars pebbles and soil to send back to Earth. New science chief Alan Stern is now preparing for a sample return mission in 2020. Scientists believe this will be the best way to prove whether life ever developed on the Red Planet.

"You look around and can't help but think that life here is unique and special. If you find life elsewhere, that tells you that conditions that existed here...existed somewhere else and that biologically, we're not unique. Philosophically, that has a lot of implications,"

said co-chairman of the Mars Science Laboratory committee, John Grant. The Mars Science Laboratory mission is scheduled to launch in 2009 and it is NASA's best attempt to establish whether Mars is a potential habitat. The committee narrowed the list to 6 of candidate landing sites for MSL. The committee will continue to observe images sent from orbiters that are currently circling Mars. Scientists decided not to return to Opportunity's landing site in the equatorial region of Mars which shows evidence of a shallow salty sea. Instead, the consensus was to explore a region that has clays, which are believed to have been formed by water interacting with rocks. Some of the potential landing sites show fan-shaped structures believed to be prints of standing water. Other areas actually show clay deposits on the surface. Most of the sites will require MSL to drive for several weeks and maybe months from where it lands to reach the most scientifically interesting features. But with the rover designed to operate for a full Martian year (687 Earth days), scientists believe the driving time is worth it. Within the next year, scientists will need to narrow the landing site options to either the four more northern locations (Nili Fossae Trough, Marwth Vallis, and Runcorn and Jezero craters) or the two southern ones (Holden and Terby craters). Wherever scientists decide to travel, bits of materials will be picked up and deposited into a wire mesh basket that is the size of a hockey puck.