"That's going to be terrible during operations because there's none of that reading people you have when you're face to face." "I've been asked a lot about how the team feels and I don't actually know because we are so separated," Dr Allwood says. With COVID-19 rampant in the US, most members of the Mars 2020 team, including Dr Allwood, will be watching the landing from home.
Most Mars missions have failed," Dr Flannery says. ( Supplied: NASA/JPL-Caltech)Īlthough NASA has landed successfully in the past, this is the most dangerous landing site yet attempted. Perseverance is scheduled to land about 7:55am AEDT on Friday. "I was interested in looking for life beyond Earth and a lot of the things I worked on focused on Mars, because the best chance in my lifetime to apply my background to that question," he says. Working with Dr Allwood in the US for the first year of the project was David Flannery, then a post-doctoral student from the Queensland University of Technology.ĭr Flannery had also studied ancient rocks in the Pilbara, as well as South Africa. With $US 1.3 billion in funding, work began to develop a full-scale version of the PIXL prototype. In 2014, at the age of 41, Dr Allwood became one of seven principal investigators chosen for the Mars2020 mission. " they thought I was too young and there was no way that I could be the principal investigator of any such thing." "If it had been the European collaboration mission, which was going to launch in 2018, there was no way known PIXL would have been ready," she says. NASA decided to run a new mission with a new spacecraft built from leftover parts originally designed for the Curiosity rover.ĭr Allwood believes the twist of fate worked in her favour. It could have been all over, but six months' later Curiosity landed with spectacular success and the tables turned. The Pilbara Craton, more than 1,250 km north of Perth in Western Australia, is one of a few places on Earth where it is still possible to find parts of the crust the same age as the rocks on Mars. The quest to find out whether life ever existed on another planet will not be easy, and the proof needed will be high.īut Dr Allwood has already faced these challenges in her career: it is from her work in the ancient rocks of the Pilbara that the idea for PIXL was born. This little box about the size of a large lunchbox is designed to take close-up images and scan a postage-stamp sized area with x-rays, looking for chemical signatures of microbial life in 3-billion-year-old rocks. Perched on the arm of the robotic rover is a key tool called PIXL (short for Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry). In the most complex mission NASA has sent to the Red Planet, Perseverance is specifically tasked with answering the question of whether life ever existed on a planet other than Earth. NASA's newest rover will attempt a daring landing on Mars about 7:55am (AEDT) on Friday morning.
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