One more week ahead, one more contribution from someone that will be present at the 2nd MSL landing site workshop starting tomorrow and where, until next Wednesday, will be homing the ideas and projects that ultimately, in the future, will give origin to a decision about where will the Mars Science Laboratory playground be…

Our visit for today is Nicolas Mangold, CNRS researcher at Laboratoire IDES and Université Paris-Sud.

Mangold is proposing a location at a region that seems to enthusiasm scientists in a special way…Nili Fossae…

The researcher will be at the workshop making a presentation that will consist in a summary of the geologic context of this particular site and its scientific interest without leaving aside the technical characteristics for the landing site in this region, as roughness, slopes, to mention some examples.
The approach is made with carefulness, although confidence exists, Mangold made question to tell spacEurope that his goal is to show to the community what this proposal’s team has as best in what concerns the questions that are to be answered about Mars and not be waving a flag, telling everybody "we have the best site".
According to Mangold anyone should get its own opinion from the objective data in the presentation itself.

But Mangold will not be presenting just a single proposal…he is also also a co-proposer on other sites, not only in Nili Fossae, but also in Mawrth Valles Valles Marineris.
In terms of probabilities Mangold is well placed to have a moment of joy when final decisions are taken…

I asked him about what are the probabilities of seing one of his proposals approved, his answer revealed a cautious but at a same time confident attitude from the researcher, he thinks that one of the Nili Fossae sites present at the workshop will probably get into the top five but also tells us that he doesn’t know if it is going to be whether his personal proposal or another one focused on that region of the Red Planet.

I have presented the same question to Mangold that I did to previous guests, does he, has a scientist, give priority to one special vertice of the martian quest triangle, being these the study of the geological history of the red planet, the search for water signs and the habitability and possible existence of life in a remote past or even in our days?…

Mangold does not believe that the three may be separable, and the sites he is proposing or co-proposing are a good expression of his perspective on Mars study since all of them deal with the three referred aspects, and how? Almost in a dialectic manner…the researcher establishes the liaisons…by looking for clays we will have an important piece of past Mars history, if alteration mineral which require liquid water is to be found and studied and this mineral had the required characteristics that permitted it to possibly hide past life as it is the case on earth…if this happens, we were able to close, not the circle, but the triangle…



I always leave this question for the end…it may not be an easy, confortable one to answer but it has to be done in order to understand what is the opinion and the spirit that may be among the scientific community when the question is the fact of budget issues are affecting five of the eight MSL science instruments being some of them even removed…Mangold thinks that what is happening will certainly reduce the scientific return of the mission, the researcher states that the people envolved are not quiet, and are still battling to reduce these cuts at the minimum and the researcher makes a special reference to the ChemCam, revealing to spacEurope that all the Principal Investigators have requested the return of this specific instrument back on the MSL rover.

Let us wait and see what fruits will their efforts give.