WASHINGTON (Reuters) – NASA is considering a plan to deal with the limited budgets set by Washington, extending a mission to bring back samples from Mars, a researcher said Wednesday.
” It makes the program more affordable, “he told reporters in a conference call Steve Squyres, an astronomer at Cornell University, who heads the Mars Exploration Rover mission.
” It reduces the cost per year to do that, “he said.
The U.S. space agency has for 6,000 million dollars in the last federal budget, but President Barack Obama has said it is time abandon the costly program “Constellation” to carry astronauts to the moon and instead focus on Mars.
Squyres, speaking at a conference in Texas on the search for extraterrestrial life, said the new approach does not affect the work with which his team is exploring Mars using robots.
“We all want to see humans on Mars, taking samples,” he said, but added that the “details” are not important.
FOSSILS IN PLASTER
Some other scientists at the meeting in Texas said they had better evidence that this mission could find evidence of life on Mars, if ever there was one.
For example, the vast field of gypsum that cover much of the planet”s surface could contain evidence, said Bill Schopf of the University of California in Los Angeles.
Schopf and his colleagues said they found the remains of plankton, diatoms and cyanobacteria in gypsum deposits originated when the Mediterranean dried up six million years ago.
No one ever thought that the fossils could survive in plaster, Schopf said the information. However, if dragged on Earth for millions of years, could have remained in large areas of plaster that extend into what looks like a dry sea on Mars.
“Now we know this is a good place to look for evidence of fossilized life on Mars, “said Schopf.
” If we can find organic matter, then we have real reason to believe that life once existed there there, “he said.
shares a similar view Mary Voytek, a scientist for astrobiology at NASA.
” These investigations are actually settings search strategy for life in our solar system, “he said.
Also, on Wednesday, two teams of U.S. researchers reported seeing clear evidence of water on an asteroid.
teams led by Andrew Rivkin, University of Maryla Johns Hopkins, and Humberto Campins, University of Central Florida, found spectral evidence of what could be a thin layer of icead2in 24 Themis, one of the largest objects in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
(Published in Spanish by Ricardo Figueroa)
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