Mars rocks: Edmonton geologist to drive Mars corsair in collection of rock, dirt samples

Chris Herd has landed an out-of-this universe opportunity.

Herd, an Edmonton geologist, will confirm that Martian meteorites are collected on NASA’s 2020 speed to a Red Planet. 

The mission, rising this summer and nearing on Mars successive February, will be a initial try to collect Martian stone and dirt samples. 

The corsair will collect core samples of a many earnest rocks and soils it encounters and cache them until a apart idea retrieves them and brings them to Earth many years from now. 

Taking partial in a idea is a childhood dream fulfilled, Herd said. 

“It’s super exciting. It’s amazing,” Herd pronounced in an talk with CBC News. “There is something about Mars that unequivocally sparked my imagination. 

“I consider we was 13 when we motionless we wanted to be there when a rocks came behind from Mars, and this is a initial genuine step that NASA and other space agencies have taken to indeed take samples back.” 

The systematic watchful game 

Herd, a highbrow in a Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and curator of a University of Alberta Meteorite Collection, has a twin purpose in a mission.

He was comparison as one of 10 designated experts on a plan and one of dual returned-sample scientists. 

In these positions, Herd will confirm that outcroppings of stone are many expected to yield pivotal information about Mars’s geological history. 

“The corsair is versed with all these instruments to tell us what a rocks are done of, though it has a additional ability to core that representation out, sign it in a tube and leave for contingent lapse to Earth.” 

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The corsair has a life camber of one Mars year, about 687 Earth days.

A successive mission, still in a formulation stages, would eventually collect a samples.

“It’s too costly to do it all during once,” Herd said. 

“It would need another corsair to come and collect a samples, put them in a rocket, blast them off a aspect of Mars where it would event with an orbiter around Mars that would afterwards come behind to Earth.” 

‘Water was there and, potentially, life’

The corsair will be scouring a Jezero Crater, an ancient lake bed, for signs of past microbial life.

“The stream and lake expected existed three-and-a-half or four billion years ago and a sediments have been recorded ever since,” Herd said. 

The samples collected could not usually yield a glance into a past though residence elemental questions about a intensity for destiny tellurian life on Mars, Herd said.

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“Where we are going is where a movement is,” he said. “Water was there and, potentially, life and that’s eventually a idea of this mission, to hunt for signs of life.”

As for Herd, he hopes he won’t be late by a time a rocks done it to Earth.

“My purpose is for during slightest a successive 3 years,” he said. “The samples would come behind someday in 2031 or expected a small later.  

“It’s a outrageous undertaking.”

Article source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/mars-rover-mission-rocks-alberta-research-1.5471354?cmp=rss