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This Hard-to-Understand Region of Mars Is on the List of Potential Rover Landing Sites

A quick, fugitive look at the image we have here might not leave you with much. It’s a portion of Mars like many others, as seen through the lens of the HiRISE orbital camera. A region that looks to the untrained eye like all others we’ve seen until now, but one that to experts reveals a potential landing site for future robotic exploration missions.
Potential rover landing site on Mars 6 photos
Photo: https://uahirise.org/hipod/ESP_072554_2000
Nili Fossae region of MarsNili Fossae region of MarsNili Fossae region of MarsNili Fossae region of MarsNili Fossae region of Mars
This area is called Nili Fossae, comprises a series of concentric grabens (depressed blocks of the planet’s crust) and is located in the Syrtis Major quadrangle. Even as seen from space, the place reveals a wealth of landscape features, but also a diversity of minerals that make it particularly attractive to scientists.

Along with seven other places on the Red Planet, Nili Fossae was on the short list of landing sites for the Perseverance rover. The most successful Martian machine to date however ended up in the Jezero Crater, where it wrote history on more than one occasion.

When choosing a landing site, people take into account a variety of factors, including if the location would serve the rover’s scientific purpose, and how the geography will help it in its quest. For Perseverance, after narrowing the list down to three spots, an MIT-developed software was brought in to help with the selection process.

At the time of writing, no other mission to Mars is being planned, aside from the Sample Return mission, given how the full extent of NASA’s might is focused on the Artemis program that should take humans to the Moon once more.

When releasing this image earlier this year (the pic was snapped in January), NASA did hint though, another robotic mission might be planned, and Nili Fossae continues to be a place of interest given the said rich landscape and abundance of minerals.
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Editor's note: Gallery shows Nili Fossae region of Mars.

About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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