NASA’s fifth expedition to Mars with a roving lander is scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet later this week, with scientists hoping to glean information about its history and whether it holds any clues about Earth’s future.
“We know that Mars had a bad past,” Thomas Zurbuchen the associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, told USA Today. “We used our Spirit and Opportunity rovers (2003) to follow the water in search of answers as to why this once ocean world is now dry and desolate. Following those missions came our Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012 and is still operating.”