Outreach

Talking Space: The Search for Life on Mars

Talking Space: The Search for Life on Mars was a public talk by BQI Professor Martin Van Kranendonk at the Sydney Observatory in March 2017. The Observatory’s seminar room was packed to the hilt as Martin gave an overview of the Mars 2020 mission and described the three candidate sites where the rover might land to search for signs of ancient life on Mars.

At the end of 2018, Martin and some of his PhD students participated in NASA’s Mars 2020 Landing Site Workshop in Los Angeles, where the scientific community assessed the three shortlisted sites. Ultimately, a delta deposit within an ancient lakebed known as Jezero Crater was selected as the landing site for the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover.