IT Home reported on March 29 that the European Space Agency's Rosalind Franklin Mars rover is about to carry out a mission to find life on Mars, and recently, scientists released a new geological map of its landing area, which will provide important guidance for the rover to choose a path after landing.
Peter Fawdon of the Open University of the United Kingdom told a press conference: "This geological map is like our treasure hunt guide, it tells us where to look for answers. Based on what we know so far, this map visualizes the distribution of different rocks in the landing zone. When the rover arrives on Mars, it will use the instruments it carries to validate what we know. ”
The mission was originally planned to be carried out in cooperation with Russia, with the Russian side providing the landing platform. However, due to changes in the situation in Ukraine in 2022, cooperation was forced to be suspended. With the launch postponed to October 2028, scientists are replanning the mission and building a new landing platform to reach Mars in 2030.
Due to the current environment on Mars that is cold, dry, and full of radiation, the chances of microbial survival are slim. But the prevailing view is that Mars was warm and humid about 3.5 billion years ago and may have the conditions to support life. This is evidenced by river beds, floodplains and coastal remains, as well as by the mineral composition and the presence of organic molecules in these areas.
If life ever existed on Mars, their biofeatures may have been preserved in Martian rocks, waiting to be discovered by the Rosalind Franklin rover. The rover will cross the vast plain "Oxia Planum", which is rich in clay minerals. These clay minerals were deposited in ancient times and were formed from liquid water. The rover will routinely drill these clay layers to obtain samples to a depth of 2 meters, which will be analysed by the on-board "Pasteur" instrument suite.
Clay is considered great for preserving biological features. The rover will use a variety of tools to study these samples, one of which is the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer (MOMA). The instrument will test samples for organic carbon-based molecules, such as amino acids, lipids, and even RNA and DNA (or their Martian analogues) that may be present, in the hope of identifying substances that only living organisms can leave behind. This is also the reason why this rover is named after the British chemist Rosalind Franklin, who made a key contribution to our understanding of DNA structure.
In order for the Rosalind Franklin rover to achieve its goals to the fullest, scientists need to plan its path on Earth. This new geological map will play an important role. The geological map depicts 15 specific geological units in the Oxia Planum area, including megalithic fields, transverse aeolian sand dunes (TARs), wide-spaced fractures, impact craters and their ejecta, honeycomb material made up of polygonal and rectangular trenches, cover, different types of bedrock, and layers of sediment dating back nearly 4 billion years. These geological units were formed about 4 billion years ago in the Noahic (4.1-3.7 billion years ago), Hesbury (3.7-3 billion years ago), and Amazonian (3 billion years ago to the present) period, and are distinguished by different colors on geological maps.
According to IT House, the map has a scale of 1:25000, which means that every centimeter on the map represents 250 meters on Mars. The rover travels an average of 25-50 meters per day, which corresponds to a distance of only a few millimeters on the map.
The geological map was born out of 80 trained volunteers who characterized 134 1-square-kilometer areas on the Martian surface based on data from the European ExoMars Gas Trace Detection Orbiter and NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The rover's chief scientists then combined the information provided by the volunteers to create the geological map, which was published in the Journal of Maps.