The Mars Sample Return mission is a space exploration campaign, the result of a collaboration between NASA and ESA, with the goal of collecting rock and regolith samples from the surface of Mars and bringing them to our planet (inside the Sample Receiving Facility, a facility dedicated to Martian samples that should be based at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston) to find information on the possibility that there is or has been life on the red planet. The Measurement Definition Team (MDT) is the international group that has been working since last September to define this receiving facility. Among them is a single Italian: Marco Ferrari, from Rome, 45, a research geologist at the Institute of Space Astrophysics and Planetology of Inaf in Rome, who explains to Inaf magazine, "It was gratifying to know that I was selected within an international group of 40 scientists of the highest level." "There will be a competition in the near future that will determine which research groups in the world will receive the samples collected on Mars," he continues, "but only after they have received preliminary characterization in the Sampling Receiving Facility. "What we scientists within the Measurement Definition Team are doing is precisely envisioning from scratch the perfect laboratory to house the Martian samples. The NASA Perseverance rover that landed on Mars in February 2021 explains that it "has already collected 23 samples out of a planned total of 30 that will arrive on Earth, for about half a kilogram of Martian material," but "to receive the samples on Earth, we have to wait until 2033, hoping there are no hiccups in the intermediate stages. "A lander will be sent to land near-or inside-the Jezero crater with a small rocket, onto which the samples collected by Perseverance will be loaded. There will probably also be two helicopters similar to Ingenuity, which has proven to work excellently, to assist in the recovery of the samples. After that, another spacecraft, orbiting Mars, will retrieve the capsule with all the samples and send it back to Earth on a return trip, which will take a few months". He concludes, "As a scientist hoping for the discovery of the century, if not the millennium, I would obviously like to have something inside that would testify that there is or has been the presence of some form of life on Mars”.
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