Tag Archives: Oxia Planum

Europe to Mars — and back!

Europe has been in orbit around Mars for more than 15 years and is almost a year away from launching its first rover mission, but ambitions are already running high to go one step further: returning a sample from the … Continue reading

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ExoMars rover PanCam filter set

This may look like a collection of colourful contact lenses and in some respects there are some similarities: these are the filters through which the ExoMars rover – Rosalind Franklin – will view Mars in visible and near infrared wavelengths. … Continue reading

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Hunting for biosignatures in volcanic rocks

[Editor’s note: From a paper by Magnus Ivarsson, Therese Sallstedt, and Diana-Thean Carlsson recently published in Frontiers in Earth Science.] Morphological Biosignatures in Volcanic Rocks – Applications for Life Detection on Mars The exploration of Mars is largely based on comparisons with … Continue reading

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ExoMars: Mars calling

An exciting new competition is giving citizens of planet Earth the opportunity to get their voices to Mars in the next phase of the ExoMars programme. The ExoMars rover and platform will launch to the Red Planet in 2020. The … Continue reading

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Defining the goals for collecting Mars samples

Returning samples from the surface of Mars has been a high-priority goal of the international Mars exploration community for many years. Although randomly collected samples would be potentially interesting, they would not be sufficient to answer the big questions that … Continue reading

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Seeing Mars with 2020 vision: Jezero Crater and Oxia Planum

Both NASA and ESA hope their next Mars rovers will find evidence that life once thrived on Mars, but they have different strategies to reach this goal. Their landing site choices reflect this difference. Engineers are assembling two ambitious rover … Continue reading

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ExoMars rover named for Rosalind Franklin

The ExoMars rover that will search for the building blocks of life on the Red Planet has a name: Rosalind Franklin. The prominent scientist behind the discovery of the structure of DNA will have her symbolic footprint on Mars in … Continue reading

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ExoMars: Oxia Planum landing site favored

[Ed. note: See also here.] The ExoMars Landing Site Selection Working Group has recommended Oxia Planum as the landing site for the ESA-Roscosmos rover and surface science platform that will launch to the Red Planet in 2020. The proposal will be … Continue reading

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HiRISE: An ExoMars landing site

HiRISE plays an important role in finding suitable landing sites for future rover missions. Scientists have narrowed down the candidate landing sites for the upcoming European ExoMars rover mission to two regions: the plains of Oxia and Mawrth Vallis. Images … Continue reading

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ExoMars 2020: To Oxia Planum… or Mawrth Vallis

Two ancient sites on Mars that hosted an abundance of water in the planet’s early history have been recommended as the final candidates for the landing site of the 2020 ExoMars rover and surface science platform: Oxia Planum and Mawrth … Continue reading

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