Perseverance Mars Rover captured this object with Mastcam-Z on April 5, 2021

On April 5, 2021 NASA’s Perseverance Rover sent series of images of Mars’s Helipad location captured by Mastcam-Z. Mars’s soil samples are very interesting to be analyzed by scientists on Earth. Mars Sample Return—MSR in NASA’s inevitable initialism—will mark the first time that humans make a round trip to Mars, and it will be the first physical, tangible, two-way cause-and-effect connection between Earth and another planet. For the first time in recorded history, we’ll be able to physically touch and interact with a pristine piece of another planet. Mars is 1,000 times drier than even the driest parts of the Atacama, which makes it less likely that microbial life as we know it exists on the planet’s surface, even with some access to water. However, even in the driest areas of Chile’s desert, remnants of past microbial life from wetter times in the Atacama’s history were clearly present and well preserved over thousands of years. This means that because scientists know that Mars was a wetter, more vibrant planet in its past, traces of that ancient life might still be intact.

Credit: nasa.gov, NASA/JPL-Caltech, NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Source for NASA’s Perseverance Mars mission: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/

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Видео Perseverance Mars Rover captured this object with Mastcam-Z on April 5, 2021 канала iGadgetPro