NASA finalizes next Mars rover, inching closer to 2020 launch

The wheels, which are tougher than those on Curiosity after it faced issues traversing sharp rocks, are capable of digging little trenches on the Martian surface.

NASA’s Curiosity rover is rolling around Mars, and has provided researchers with all kinds of data on the Red Planet, not to mention the cache of photos.

The modern Martian surface is cold, dry and radiation-blasted, but this wasn’t always the case. And other spacecraft have turned up additional evidence that the ancient Red Planet was a relatively warm and wet world. With the 2020 rover, the aim would be to look signs of past life forms that could have been supported by Mars.

The rover’s main job will be to “seek the signs of life” and try to answer the question of whether or not we’re alone, Kenneth Farley, a project scientist on the Mars 2020 team, said.

The probe will collect samples that will be sent to earth so they can be properly studied in well-equipped labs. If successful, it will significantly simplify a human mission to Mars because it will greatly decrease the amount of oxygen astronauts would have to carry with them, said Farley.

The rover will, for the first time, investigate how useable and available resources, such as oxygen, are on Mars.

Yoder added that the mission is a significant milestone in the USA space agency’s journey to the Red Planet in a bid to know if life has ever existed there.

“The Mars 2020 rover is the first step in a potential multi-mission campaign to return carefully selected and sealed samples of Martian rocks and soil to Earth”, said Geoffrey Yoder, acting associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, in a statement.

The samples collected from the Mars rover mission will be analyzed by laboratories on Earth to decide the existence of past life on Mars. “But Mars 2020 is certainly not going to be flying a drone”. While that microphone won’t be the first to go to Mars it is meant to be the first to send back the planet’s atmospheric sounds.

Microphones from a 2008 mission are being included on the new craft. Finally, when the rover is preparing to land on the surface sometime in February 2021, an upgraded skycrane landing system will actually allow the lander to scan the surface for an ideal landing site and divert its course if necessary using a “range trigger”. Of late, the verified Facebook fan page of NASA has more than 16.4 million followers, while the NASA Curiosity page-also on Facebook-boasts about 1.2 million fans. NASA is aiming to launch within a 30-day window in July 2020.

The Mars 2020 mission has already passed an extensive review process and a major development milestone.

To reduce potential risk and also to reduce costs, the 2020 Mars rover mission will be a six-wheeled, one-tonne predecessor, Curiosity.

On the rover’s mast, two science instruments will provide high-resolution imaging and three types of spectroscopy for characterising rocks and soil from a distance, also helping to determine which rock targets to explore up close.