The European Space Agency (ESA) and Russia are cooperating on a joint mission to put another lander on Mars with the specific mission of finding life, either present or past, on the red planet. After researching four different candidate sites for landing the rover, scientists have announced the primary candidate for that landing: Oxia Planum.
An excellent and informative article on the Universe Today website gets into the details:
“Our preliminary analysis shows that Oxia Planum appears to satisfy the strict engineering constraints while also offering some very interesting opportunities to study, in situ, places where biosignatures might best be preserved,” said Jorge Vago, ESA’s project scientist.
The rover is currently scheduled to launch in 2018 and land on Mars in 2019, but the timetable is still under review, depending on any issues with construction of the rover. While the final landing site won’t be selected by both ESA and Roscosmos until six months before launch, this recommendation will weigh heavily in the decision.
Some of the priority requirements for the landing site is that is must show abundant morphological and mineralogical evidence for long-duration, or frequently reoccurring water activity, and that there should be numerous sedimentary rock outcrops.
From orbital study by previous missions, Oxia Planum is known to contain clays, and there appears to be remnants of a possible fan or delta, as seen in the image above from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This would be one of the potential science targets.
Although the landing site is not 100% set, it does appear to offer the types of opportunities that the ExoMars mission is targeting for study.
This image shows all four of the sites that are under consideration:
It will be exciting to see where the joint Euro-Russian team finally chooses to land the rover, and in the meantime, you can read additional details about this mission in the great article on the Universe Today website.
Source: UniverseToday.com – “Scientists Want ExoMars Rover to Land at Oxia Planum“
Featured Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.