Mars

Mars2020 And Mars Sample Return

By Keith Cowing
astro-ph.EP
December 17, 2020
Filed under
Mars2020 And Mars Sample Return

Mars Sample Return consists of three separate missions, the first of which is the Mars2020 rover which will land at Jezero crater on February 18, 2021. We describe here our remote sensing study of a particular unit that outcrops in Jezero crater that is likely to be part of the return sample suite.

We report on our efforts to characterize the olivine unit using data from the CRISM instrument, including the grain size and Fe/Mg (Fo) number of the olivine. We also discuss the astrobiological significance of the unit by analogy with the stromatolite-bearing early Archean Warrawoona group in Western Australia. We also discuss the current state of the MSR architecture.

Adrian J. Brown

Comments: 6 pages, 1 figure
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2012.08946 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2012.08946v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Adrian Brown
[v1] Tue, 15 Dec 2020 16:16:13 UTC (1,101 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.08946
Astrobiology,

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, Na’Vi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him) 🖖🏻