St. Louis Astronomical Society Meeting - The Perseverance Rover Mission and the Search for Early Life on Mars
Raymond Arvidson is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and a Fellow of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University. In addition to teaching and research focused on surface processes of planetary bodies, he has been a team member of NASA spacecraft orbiter, lander, and rover missions to Mars and Venus. He has published his research efforts in over 250 scientific papers. Dr. Arvidson is also the Director of the NASA Planetary Data System Geosciences Node. This facility archives and makes available images and data of solid surfaces gathered by all NASA missions to the global community of researchers and to the general public.
Mars is a very cold and dry world today, but it was much different in its distant past. NASA’s latest robotic surface explorer, the Perseverance Rover, is scheduled to land on Mars on February 18. The NASA Exploration Program focuses on characterizing the early warm, wet conditions on Mars, and searching for evidence for early life. This includes the Perseverance Rover Mission, designed to collect rock cores from an ancient river delta deposited in a lake that once filled Jezero Crater. Cores would be returned to Earth by a subsequent mission, allowing records of ancient life to be explored in great detail in various laboratory settings.
The St. Louis Astronomical Society is an organization for individuals interested in astronomy and telescopes. The public is invited to attend its meetings, telescope observing sessions, and special events. For more information about Astronomical Society events, please visit www.slasonline.org or call 314-962-9231. The event, cosponsored by NASA's Missouri Space Grant Consortium, is open to the public free of charge.
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