30.01 Russian Scientists Propose Water Probe for NASA Mars Rover

MOSCOW, January 30 (RIA Novosti) – Russian scientists have proposed an instrument for an upcoming NASA Mars rover to search for underground water that could support life on the Red Planet, a lead scientist at the institute that submitted the project said Thursday.

“On the surface everything looks the same, just layers of dust and rock, but our instrument can see minerals of scientific interest underground,” Igor Mitrofanov told RIA Novosti.

The NORD instrument designed by Russia’s Space Research Institute was one of 58 proposals submitted to NASA earlier this month for inclusion on the agency’s upcoming Mars 2020 rover. NASA is due to announce the chosen experiments in March.

The Russian instrument would build on earlier water-scanning devices built by the institute for a series of NASA probes.

One of those devices, the High Energy Neutron Detector on the Mars Odyssey orbiter, helped detect huge quantities of frozen underground water on the Red Planet in 2002. A later NASA mission, the Phoenix lander, confirmed that finding.

Last year, a similar device aboard NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered that some regions of Martian soil contain as much water – six percent by weight – as soil in deserts on Earth where microbes are known to live.