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JIM BELL Planetary Scientist :
It's a whole planet out there with a complicated story that's stored in the rocks and our job
is to figure out that story and what that story of that planet tells us about the planet
that we live on.
JACK MUSTARD Science Definition Team Chair
The recommendations of the Science Definition Team to NASA are to fly a rover of similar
capability to the Curiosity rover that' s still on Mars that would land in the same
way and have the same size.
And we are recommending that they equip that rover with instrumentation that allows it
to explore the surface of Mars at one site which will have relevant importance to understanding
past habitability did it have conditions necessary to sustain life and to look for signatures
or rocks that may hold signatures of biological significance.
LINDY ELKINS-TANTON Planetary Scientist
So where Curiosity, which was a phenomenal mission where it takes rocks and grinds them
up into powder and looks at their bulk constituents— What this mission would need to do is be able
to look at a microscopic level and detailed messages that they would be sending us about
the past life that could've lived there.
ABIGAIL ALLWOOD Astrobiologist
The sorts of evidence we're looking for the signatures of past life, would be signatures
of microbial life. Not realistically looking for dinosaur bones and that kind of thing.
If life ever existed on Mars, we expect it to have been microbial microorganisms.
JACK MUSTARD Science Definition Team Chair
This that I'm holding up here is a classic biosignature from the Earth. It's a fossil.
We're not actually expecting to see a fossil of shells or other components, but what we
want to be able to see with this instrumentation, are the fine scale layering that one might
see in a rock, in which we can see dark and light tone layers and those dark and light
tone layers are telling a story.
JIM BELL Planetary Scientist
We wanted to do something that would make technical progress and that thing was going
and coring rock samples, putting them into a little container, a cache, and storing them
for bringing back later.
LINDY ELKINS-TANTON Planetary Scientist
Because no matter how well instrumented a rover is we can't look with the kind of detailed
understanding that we would have in laboratories back here on Earth.
JIM BELL Planetary Scientist
We can do so much more in laboratories on Earth with equipment that exists now and who
knows what's getting invented decades ahead that can still analyze those rocks.
JACK MUSTARD Science Definition Team Chair
The human flight component would like to see an experiment where resources on the surface
of Mars, from the rocks or the atmosphere could be used to generate fuel or other parts
that would enable future exploration in cutting the ties so to speak to Earth. So you wouldn't
necessary have to bring everything with you. You could actually manufacture it on the planet.
And that's a really exciting additional component that we've been exploring and analyzing in
this work.