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Curious about NASA’s next mission to the Red Planet – the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover? Here’s your chance to ask an expert!

Targeted for launch to the Red Planet in July 2020, our Mars 2020 Perseverance rover will search for signs of ancient life. Mission engineer Lauren DuCharme and astrobiologist Sarah Stewart Johnson will be taking your questions in an Answer Time session on Friday, July 17 from noon to 1pm ET here on our Tumblr! Make sure to ask your question now by visiting http://nasa.tumblr.com/ask

Lauren DuCharme is a systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, where she’s working on the launch and cruise of the Perseverance rover. Lauren got her start at JPL as an intern. Professor Sarah Stewart Johnson is an astrobiologist at Georgetown University in Washington. Her research focuses on detecting biosignatures, or traces of life, in planetary environments.

Fun Facts:

The name Perseverance was chosen from among the 28,000 essays submitted during the “Name the Rover” contest. Seventh-grader Alex Mather wrote in his winning essay, “We are a species of explorers, and we will meet many setbacks on the way to Mars. However, we can persevere. We, not as a nation but as humans, will not give up.”

Perseverance will land in Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer-wide) crater that scientists believe was once filled with water.

Perseverance carries instruments and technology that will pave the way for future human missions to the Moon and Mars. It is also carrying 23 cameras and two microphones to the Red Planet — the most ever flown in the history of deep-space exploration.

Perseverance is the first leg of a round trip to Mars. It will be the first rover to bring a sample caching system to Mars that will package promising samples for return to Earth by a future mission.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

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