UT professor on NASA’s Mars mission team

NASA has enlisted a University of Tennessee professor to help prepare for the 2020 mission to Mars.

Earth and planetary sciences professor Jeffrey Moersh will be traveling the world’s most extreme climates like the Arctic and Chilean desert on a quest to learn more about Mars with a team of 20 other scientists.

His team’s purpose is to study places on Earth comparable to Mars to search for bio-signatures, or simply, the fingerprints of life. Their work will provide guiding principles to better understand where to search for life, what to search for, and how to recognize evidence of past or current life for the upcoming Mars mission.

"The goal is to develop a strategy the 2020 Mars rover can use to collect rock samples that are most likely to preserve evidence for Martian life, which can then be returned to Earth for detailed study by a follow-up mission," said Moersch in a press release, who has worked on six missions to Mars.