Russia and China signed a memorandum of understanding  to set up an international lunar research station, Russia’s Roscosmos space agency said. Moscow and Beijing will draw up a roadmap to establish the station and cooperate closely on planning, designing and implementing the project as well as presenting it to the world space community, it said. “An international lunar science station is a complex of experimental and research facilities created on the surface and/or in orbit of the moon, designed to conduct multidisciplinary and multipurpose research work,” it said. Russia and China will promote international cooperation on the project and offer equal access to any nation that wants to take part, the agency said in a statement on its website.

The memorandum was signed by Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin and Zhang Kejian, head of the China National Space Administration, during a meeting by video conference, it said.

Mars on Earth: Turkish lake may hold clues to ancient life on planet

As NASA’s rover Perseverance explores the surface of Mars, scientists hunting for signs of ancient life on the distant planet are using data gathered on a mission much closer to home at a lake in southwest Turkey.

NASA says the minerals and rock deposits at Salda are the nearest match on earth to those around the Jezero Crater where the spacecraft landed and which is believed to have once been flooded with water.

Information gathered from Lake Salda may help the scientists as they search for fossilised traces of microbial life preserved in sediment thought to have been deposited around the delta and the long-vanished lake it once fed.

“Salda … will serve as a powerful analogue in which we can learn and interrogate,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, told Reuters. A team of American and Turkish planetary scientists carried out research in 2019 on the shorelines of the lake, known as Turkey’s Maldives because of its azure water and white shores. Scientists believe that the sediments around the lake eroded from large mounds that are formed with the help of microbes and are known as microbialites.

The team behind the Perseverance rover, the most advanced astrobiology lab ever flown to another world, wants to find out whether there are microbialites in Jezero Crater.