Jorge Coghlan, head at the CODE Astronomical Observatory in the province of Santa Fe, deemed a "historic landmark" the arrival to Mars of NASA's Mars 2020 spacecraft, carrying the Perseverance rover vehicle and the Ingenuity Mars helicopter.
He also voiced his opinion that manned missions to Mars will start launching by the 2030s.
As he explained, the Perseverance "has landed in the Jezero crater, which is believed to have been a very important water basin on Mars... over the first billion years" the planet had "a very dense atmosphere, much denser than the present one, meaning there was water on the surface".
The astronomer also explained that this is the first time in history "that a robot will bring samples from Mars...so far, we only got samples from the Moon and samples of meteorites".
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