NASA Mars rover to dig for signs of ancient life

craft aiming to land on Mars have skipped past planet, burned up on entry, smashed into surface, and me it down amid a fierce dust storm only to spit out a single fuzzy gray picture before dying. Almost 50 years after first casualty at Mars, NASA is attempting its hardest Martian touchdown yet.

rover named Perseverance 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. It's filled with cliffs, pits, sand dunes and fields of rocks, any of which could doom $3 billion mission.

once submerged terrain also could hold evidence of past life, all more reason to gar samples at this spot for return to Earth 10 years from w.

Where re was water, re may have been life. That’s why NASA wants Perseverance soping around Jezero Crater, once home to a lake fed by a river. It’s w bone dry, but 3.5 billion years ago, this Martian lake was as big and wet as Neva and California’s Lake Tahoe.

Perseverance will shoot lasers at rocks judged most likely to contain evidence of past microscopic life, analyzing emitted vapor, and drill into best candidates. A few dozen core samples - about a pound’s worth (one-half kilogram) of rock and dust - will be set aside in sealed titanium tubes for future pickup.

Scientists have wanted to get hold of Mars rocks ever since NASA’s Mariners provided first close pictures a half-century ago. NASA is teaming up with European ncy to do just that.

bold plan calls for a rover and return rocket to launch to Mars in 2026, to retrieve Perseverance’s stash of samples. NASA expects to bring back rocks as early as 2031, several years before first astronauts might arrive on scene.

rover’s super sterilized sample tubes are cleanest components ever sent into , according to NASA, to avoid any contaminating traces of Earth.

Im: AP