Mars Perseverance Rover will visit the red planet, looking for life

NASA is attempting its toughest Martian touchdown yet. Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover is heed Thursday for a compact 5-mile-by-4-mile (8-kilometer-by-6.4-kilometer) patch on edge of an ancient river delta on Mars. It's filled with cliffs, pits, sand dunes and fields of rocks, any of which could doom $3 billion mission.

expedition to red planet will search once submerged terrain for evidence of past life and rover will gar samples at this spot for return to Earth 10 years from w.

"We're really interested in specific things that geology can tell us, like habitability in past. Habitability is an environment in which life, as we understand it, could have existed. So, we're looking for se past environments that could have supported microbial life on Mars as recorded in rocks,' planetary scientist, Nina Lanza said Tuesday.

Lanza, Team Le for and Planetary Exploration at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Department of Energy Biomass scientists from Los Alamos, Idaho, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories held a discussion of ir contributions to Mars Perseverance mission with high school and college students.

"We're looking for bio signatures. This is signs of past microbial life actually being on Mars," she said.