NASA has deployed a number of spacecraft to explore Mars and obtain information for a future visit to the Red Planet. As the date for such a mission approaches, NASA is sending another rover to Mars in 2020 that will explore direct signs of ancient Martian life.
On Thursday NASA announced the instruments that will be aboard the Mars 2020 rover after making selections out of the 58 proposals that were submitted from researchers and engineers across the world in January. The selected instruments will cost about $130 million for their development and they plan to conduct geological assessments of the landing site on Mars along with the potential habitability of the site. It will also search for ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.
"Today we take another important step on our journey to Mars," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, in this NASA news release. "While getting to and landing on Mars is hard, Curiosity was an iconic example of how our robotic scientific explorers are paving the way for humans to pioneer Mars and beyond. Mars exploration will be this generation's legacy, and the Mars 2020 rover will be another critical step on humans' journey to the Red Planet."
The selected proposals for the rover's instruments include: Mastcam-Z (will determine mineralogy of Mars); SuperCam (will detect the presence of organic compounds in rocks and regolith from a distance); Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (will determine the fine scale elemental composition of surface materials on Mars); Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (will administer fine-scale imaging and UV laser to go deeper into mineralogy and detect organic compounds); Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (will produce oxygen from Mars' carbon dioxide); Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (will provide measurements of temperature, wind speed and direction, relative humidity, and dust size and shape); and the Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Exploration (will provide centimeter-scale resolution of the geological structure of Mars' subsurface).
The 2020 rover is expected to gather pertinent information that will help NASA and other international scientists determine whether establishing a habitat on Mars is attainable in the near future and how they will need to adapt to establish such a habitat. By extracting resources from Mars, the scientists hope to produce oxygen for human respiration and even possibly do the same to establish an oxidizer for rocket fuel, which could provide answers in getting future Mars astronauts back to Earth (the technology to do so has not yet been invented).
You can read more about NASA's Mars exploration here.
