<< Back to Blog
Tracing traces of life
MARS 2020 Mission - An online conference by Richard Léveillé
On July 30, 2020, the most sophisticated rover ever designed by NASA, Perseverance, launched for the Red Planet to analyze its surface at its arrival on February 18, 2021.
Perseverance rover collecting samples on Mars. Artist's Concept, NASA.
What are the objectives and particularities of this ambitious space mission? Will it allow us to determine whether favorables conditions to life have ever existed on Mars? Will we discover traces of past microbial life? What else could we learn about the subsoil and climate of the Red Planet? And what about the crazy plan to bring rock samples from Mars back to Earth? Let's embark on the story of a great scientific adventure that has only just begun.
Richard Léveillé is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at McGill University and Professor of Geology at John Abbott College. He is a member of the Mars 2020 Mission and more precisely of the Franco-American team of the SuperCam instrument. Since 2012, he is also part of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission that sent the robot Curiosity to the Red Planet.
Thursday, November 19, 2020, 6 p.m.
ONLINE - FREE
Available again here: Cœur des sciences Youtube channel