Mars Perseverance Rover will visit the red planet, looking for life

NASA is attempting its toughest Martian touchdown yet. The Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover is headed Thursday for a compact 5-mile-by-4-mile (8-kilometer-by-6.4-kilometer) patch on the edge of an ancient river delta on Mars. It's filled with cliffs, pits, sand dunes and fields of rocks, any of which could doom the $3 billion mission.

The expedition to the red planet will search the once submerged terrain for evidence of past life and the rover will gather samples at this spot for return to Earth 10 years from now.

"We're really interested in specific things that geology can tell us, like habitability in the past. Habitability is an environment in which life, as we understand it, could have existed. So, we're looking for these past environments that could have supported microbial life on Mars as recorded in the rocks,' planetary scientist, Nina Lanza said Tuesday.

Lanza, Team Lead for Space and Planetary Exploration at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Department of Energy Biomass scientists from Los Alamos, Idaho, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories held a discussion of their contributions to the Mars Perseverance space mission with high school and college students.

"We're looking for bio signatures. This is signs of past microbial life actually being on Mars," she said.