MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — West Virginia University geology professor Dr. Kathy Benison has been selected as one of 10 scientists to participate in the Mars 2020 expedition.
Benison, who will serve as a member of the Return Sample Selection Participating Scientist team, will join nine others who will survey and select the areas where samples will be taken by a rover.
“Environments that maybe had water, like lake deposits are good candidates for places that might have had water and hosted life,” Benison said. “We’re looking for things that might have indicated there were biosignatures.”
A biosignature is any element, isotope or phenomenon that provides scientific evidence of past or present life.
Benison said an important part of the Mars 2020 mission is the rover that will actually do the work.
“A drill on this rover that can take cores,” Benison said,” But, the cores are going to be pretty small, about the size of a piece of chalk. The reason they’re going to be so small is because, to bring them back to earth is part of the engineering problem.”
Benison said part of the mission is to determine if human life can be sustained on Mars which has a high concentration CO2.
“There’s an instrument called Moxy,” Benison said,” The Mars atmosphere is mostly CO2 and this Moxy instrument is going to take CO2 and make oxygen out of it.
Benison will travel to Cape Canaveral, Florida for the Mars 2020 launch in July of 2020. The rover will land in March of 2021 and that’s when the work begins.
Benison will be splitting her time between her WVU office and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Benison’s travel and work on the project is supported by a five-year, $289,773 award from NASA.