Daring Mars mission to send rocks back to Earth in hunt for past life
by Robin McKie from Science | The Guardian on (#4VK91)
Europe poised to join US in complex plan to find evidence of fossil microbes on red planet
Engineers plan to collect rocks on Mars and bring samples to Earth, in one of the most complex robot space projects envisaged. The scheme, being developed by Nasa and the European Space Agency (Esa), will involve robot rovers finding rocks that might contain evidence of past life.
The samples would be blasted into space, intercepted by an unmanned spacecraft, and dropped by parachute in the Utah desert, with the 500g of Martian soil and rock shared with researchers round the world.
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