Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Mars Landing! And a Speculative Question: What Spot Would You Pick on Earth?

 

Courtesy of NASA

The landing is almost here (or by the time you read this, it's happened already, for better or worse)! I hope, hope, hope that all goes well. Mars is a tough target, and I've seen to many failures and disasters. But...if they are able to stick the landing, we'll have an incredible adventure ahead of us, exploring the Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient sea and river delta complex. It's thought to be one of the most likely places to find evidence of any life that might have evolved on Mars.

Jezero Crater delta complex, landing site of the Perseverance Mission

Lots of good resources and landing schedules can be found here: Landing Toolkit: Perseverance Rover - NASA Mars. I've checked out things ahead of the landing, as you can see below, and the rock samples look intriguing.

(You can do your own pic with the mission toolkit)

I'm curious. The Mars landing site was carefully chosen as to glean the most information possible in a small area. If you had a single chance to land a rover on Earth for an only exploration, what place on Earth would you pick for the landing? And why? Answer in comments!


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Burgess shale

Anonymous said...

Any municipal landfill.
Bound to be lots of archeologically significant items to explore :-)

DSchwartz78 said...

Ok as a geographer, yes people often think I do what you do, I would be interested in places where things were different fairly recently, had evidence of that well preserved, and showed how the transition to the current situation affected the region.

With that in mind I would pick the region of Death Valley or the Altiplano where we have the remnents of old large lakes, water carved features, and fossil pollen. Plus much else.