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Benjamin P. Weiss
Robert R. Shrock Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
I am a Co-Investigator for Returned Sample Science on the Mars 2020 rover mission. The goal of the mission to select and cache rock samples for eventual return Earth. During our exploration of an ancient lakebed in Jezero crater., we have identified minerals formed by liquid water, indicating it was likely a habitable environment (e.g., Farley et al. 2022, Scheller et al. 2022, Wiens, et al. 2022, Bell et al. 2022, Simon et al.. 2023). We have acquired nearly two dozen absolutely oriented samples of Martian bedrock (Weiss et al., 2024). Future laboratory studies of these samples will search for potential signatures of past Martian life, characterize past aqueous processes and paleoclimate and to establish whether there were habitable environments, and study the thermal and aqueous evolution of the Martian interior to understand the history of igneous differentiation and tectonics (Mittelholz et al. 2018, Beaty et al. 2019).