Ken Farley in his laboratory inspecting vacuum lines used to extract and purify noble gases for measurement of rock ages.
In August 2015, more than 150 scientists interested in the exploration of Mars attended a conference at a hotel in Arcadia, California, to evaluate 21 potential landing sites for NASA's next Mars rover, a mission called Mars 2020. The design of that mission will be based on that of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), including the sky-crane landing system that helped put the rover, Curiosity, safely on martian soil. Over the course of three days, the scientists heard presentations about the proposed sites and voted on the scientific merit of the locations. In the end, they arrived at a prioritized list of sites that offer the best opportunity for the mission to meet its objectives-including the search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet and collecting and storing (or "caching") scientifically interesting samples for possible return to Earth. We recently spoke with Ken Farley, the mission's project scientist and the W.M. Keck Foundation Professor of Geochemistry at Caltech, to talk about the workshop and how the Mars 2020 landing site selection process is shaping up. Can you tell us a little bit about how these workshops help the project select a landing site? We are using the same basic site selection process that has been used for previous Mars rovers. It involves heavy engagement from the scientific community because there are individual experts on specific sites who are not necessarily on the mission's science team.
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