NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI)

Initial and ongoing activities focus on the selection of targets for orbital remote sensing and for in situ exploration by landed missions. Last year the focus group conducted several videoconferences to review options for landing sites for Astrobiology and prepared a white paper recommendation to assist the NASA Mars mission planning community in re-formulating a new Mars Program Architecture. These recommendations were presented to the Mars Architecture Team at JPL headed by Charles Elachi and disseminated in published form to a broad spectrum of the Mars planning community.
Recent planning for future activities proposes to broaden membership of the group to include scientists outside of the NAI and to return to our discussion of Mars landing sites for future missions. This will involve semi-monthly videocon-based reviews of high priority sites, followed by discussions focused on the scientific potential of each site and recommendations for implementation. Group discussions will aim to achieve a consensus regarding site prioritization and science implementation. To enhance site accessibility for any given mission, recommendations will be presented regularly to mission planners and engineers through existing Mars planning committees (e.g. MEPAG). Results of site reviews and discussions will be archived, along with supporting imaging and other data from Viking and MGS, on an NAI website that will be updated as new information is obtained. The NAI Mars Focus Group will be assisted in the web archiving effort by the Center for Mars Exploration (CMEX) based at NASA Ames.