8/14/2023 0 Comments Octavia e butler landing site“Space exploration and colonisation are among the few things left over from the last century that can help us more than they hurt us,” Butler’s heroine Lauren Olamina writes in Parable of the Sower. The latter was set in the 2020s, where climate change and inequality have turned America into a place of chaos its 1998 sequel, Parable of the Talents, sees a violent, far-right president ascend, promising to “make America great again”. For example, when the Curiosity team named one of its sites "Yellowknife Bay" after a location in Canada, individual rocks and targets within that area were named after features in Canada's Yellowknife Bay.Butler, the first African American woman to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and the first sci-fi writer honoured with a MacArthur “genius” grant, is the author of novels including Kindred Bloodchild, as well as the remarkably prescient 1993 dystopia Parable of the Sower. As a nod to the diversity of its international science partners, the team used names from parks in countries that have contributed to the mission.Īs the rover explores Jezero Crater, any time the team sees an interesting feature, they will name it for a corresponding location here on Earth. These quadrangles were named for various national parks and preserves on Earth. Before Perseverance launched, the team mapped the entire landing site in Jezero Crater, dividing it into squares about 0.75 miles (1.2 kilometers) on each side. Throughout the mission, the science team will use a naming system similar to the one used to name the locations that the Curiosity rover has explored on Mars. The first African American woman to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and the first science fiction writer to be honored with a MacArthur Fellowship, her writing inspired many in the planetary science community and beyond. Butler grew up in Pasadena, California near the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Butler Landing," after the groundbreaking science fiction author. The team informally named the rover's touchdown site "Octavia E. As Perseverance explores the Martian surface, the science team will assign unofficial names to especially interesting regions and features. Naming things is a great way to remember them. It is also a great location for the rover to collect a variety of samples of Martian rock and soil. Accessing the ancient rock at Jezero should help answer some of these questions, and tell us more about the formation of rocky planets. There are many ideas about what early Mars was like, and how it came to be what it is today. This makes Jezero Crater a great place to fulfill the Mars 2020 mission's science goal of studying a potentially habitable environment that may still preserve signs of past life.Īt Jezero Crater, Perseverance should be able to access rocks that are as old as 3.6 billion years. On Earth, scientists have found such clays in the Mississippi river delta, where microbial life has been found embedded in the rock itself. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's CRISM instrument has revealed that the crater contains clays, which only form in the presence of water. Jezero Crater is thus likely to have been habitable in the distant past. Landing Site Jezero Crater, Mars 2020's Landing Site Scientists will study how the region formed and evolved, seek signs of past life, and collect samples of Mars rock and soil that might preserve these signs. If so, signs of their remains might be found in lakebed or shoreline sediments. Conceivably, microbial life could have lived in Jezero during one or more of these wet times. Scientists see evidence that water carried clay minerals from the surrounding area into the crater lake. More than 3.5 billion years ago, river channels spilled over the crater wall and created a lake. Jezero Crater tells a story of the on-again, off-again nature of the wet past of Mars. After the exhaustive five-year study of potential sites, each with its own unique characteristics and appeal, Jezero rose to the top. The process of landing site selection involved a combination of mission team members and scientists from around the world, who carefully examined more than 60 candidate locations on the Red Planet. Scientists believe the area was once flooded with water and was home to an ancient river delta. NASA chose Jezero Crater as the landing site for the Perseverance rover. Full image and caption | View Rover Interactive Map Landing Site Jezero Crater as Seen by ESA's Mars Express Orbiter: This image shows the remains of an ancient delta in Mars' Jezero Crater, which NASA's Perseverance Mars rover will explore for signs of fossilized microbial life.
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