by We now have a better picture of where the European Space Agency is Rosalind Franklin’s ExoMars Rover he will be driving when he lands Mars from its life-seeking mission, thanks to a brand new geological map of its landing zone.
“This map is exciting because it is a guide that shows us where to find the answers,” said Peter Fawdon of the UK’s Open University in press release. “It serves as a visual hypothesis of what we currently know about the various rocks in the landing site. The instruments on Rosalind Franklin will allow us to test our knowledge on the spot when the time comes.”
First a partnership with Russia, which was providing a landing platform for the rover, the mission it was delayed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The new launch date is scheduled for no earlier than October 2028 as scientists revamp the mission and design and build a new landing platform, with the intention of reaching Mars by 2030.
Related: ExoMars: European astrobiology missions to Mars
The chance of finding microbes living on Mars today is slim given the cold, dry and irradiated conditions on the red planet, but the prevailing hypothesis is that Mars was hot and wet and that life could have existed. more than 3.5 billion years ago. We see evidence for this in remains of it river channelsfloodplains and coasts, in the mineralogy of these regions, and in the presence of organic molecules.
If life existed long ago, its biosignatures may still be locked in Martian rocks just waiting to be discovered by the rover Rosalind Franklin.
The rover’s mission will involve driving many kilometers across Oxia Planum, which is a vast plain rich in clay-bearing minerals long ago laid down by liquid water. The rover will regularly drill 2 meters (6.5 feet) into these clay sediments and obtain samples for analysis by a suite of ‘Pasteur’ instruments on board the rover.
Clays are considered an excellent material for preserving biological signals, and among the tools the rover will use to study these samples is its Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer (MOMA), which will test the sampled material to try to identify organic, carbon-based molecules. such as amino acids, lipids and even RNA and DNA (or their Martian analogues) that only life could have left behind. So why the rover has been named after Rosalind Franklinthe British chemist who played a crucial role in understanding the structure of DNA.
However, when the rover’s wheels touch Martian dirt, the scientists retreat World You need to know where to drive Rosalind Franklin to get the best chance of achieving her goals.
So the new map will help scientists plan the rover’s journey, identifying 15 specific types of geological units in the Oxia Planum region, including boulder fields, transverse aeolian ridges (TARs) believed to be wind-made, widely spaced fractures, craters and their associated material such as ejecta, honeycomb material made of polygonal and rectilinear troughs, overlying dark material, and various bedrock types and layers sediment dating back nearly 4 billion years. .
It is not yet clear how all these features were formed; Polygonal forms are often associated with subsurface ice or permafrost typically found at higher latitudes, for example, but the subsurface ice of Oxia Planum, which is at a low latitude of 18 degrees north of the Martian equator, has been often linked. not yet discovered (although ice has been found elsewhere near the equator of Mars).
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These different types of geology, and the periods they come from (the Noachian era from 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago, the Hesperian from 3.7 to 3 billion years ago, and the Amazonian from 3 billion years ago to the nowadays). -coded on the map. It has a scale of 1:25000, which means that each centimeter (0.4 inch) on the map represents 250 meters (820 feet) on Mars. The rover would only be a few millimeters off the map with an average daily drive of 25-50 meters (82-164 feet).
The genesis of the map was actually a COVID lockdown project, with 80 trained volunteers characterizing 134 isolated locations each one square kilometer in area based on data from Europe’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter and NASA. Mars Exploration Orbit.
The rover’s lead scientists then combined all the information from the volunteers to build the final version of the map, which was published in Map Magazine.
