Mars Rover Mission: The Potential Landing Site Selection For 2020

The Mars 2020 rover has to magnificently land. Its landing spot is studied and discussed by experts. This includes a selecting a landing site that will be talked on the Public Lecture at AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco, California this year.

Michael Meyer, astrobiologist and lead scientist of the MARS exploration Program at NASA explained that the search for the best landing site is an exciting science discussion about Mars-what we know, what we think we know and what we really don't know. He will be the first speaker on December 11, 2016, Sunday at AGU's Public Lecture. Meyer describes the event as the "existential moment" of landing a rover on Mars as noted by Earth & Space Science News.

The Mars 2020 mission aims to expand the understanding of the potential for past or present life beyond the planet earth. The Red Planet has been discovered to have expansive oceans and a thick sheath of atmospheric gasses.

The 2020 rover will examine the rocks and soil of the new landing site and will gain added insights into the planet's geological and astrobiological history. It will also gather set of soil and rock samples that could be picked up and returned to Earth by a future mission. The landing date for the new rover is scheduled in February 2021.

The land site of Mars rover will be decided and how it will land will be collaborated with the best engineers and scientists. They will use high-resolution images to gain from orbiters to recognize specific minerals in terrain and will patiently wade in a multitude of scenarios. Meyer added that an improved ability of Mars 2020 rover to precisely identify where it is above the Martian surface, which is called the "terrain relative navigation." This will extend the pool of potential landing sites, giving the team of engineers and scientists more spectacular places to compare and leading to the hard part, deciding on the one place on Mars to explore.

Meanwhile, there was a previous discussion about the landing site of the Mars rover 2020 mission last August 6, 2015. This is a joint project of Mars 2020 Project, Mars Exploration Program, Mars 2020 Project Science Group and Mars 2020 Landing Site Steering Committee as reported by Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The landing site workshop aimed to discuss the Mars 2020 landing site inputs from the science community. They also selected eight sites for further engineering and science evaluation. These sites selected include Holden, Eberswalde, Columbia Hills/Gusev, Jesero, Nili Fossae, NE Syrtis, Mawrth and SW Melas.