A new rover will land on Mars in 2020 to continue the hunt for ancient Martian life.
NASA's new rover will explore the red planet with tools designed to search for signs of past alien life forms in rocks, the BBC reported.
The rover will not have the technology to look for existing microbes on the planet's surface.
"That's a darn hard measurement to make and a darn hard measurement to convince the skeptical science community, because scientists are naturally skeptical," Jack Mustard, team chair and professor of geological sciences at Brown University, said.
"The science definition team wrestled with this question, but the feeling was, on the basis of the evidence we have today, the most logical steps forward were to look for the ancient forms of life that would be preserved within the rock record" he said.
For budget reasons, the rover will be almost identical to the current Curiosity exploration device and will employ the same entry, descent and landing (EDL) system.
The system uses a "sky crane" to place the rover in the exact desired location. The new mission will look at locations believed to have once held water.
This rover will bag up rock and soil samples to be brought back to Earth on a later mission. NASA has not fully planned out how they will retrieve the findings.
"I wouldn't rule out that human explorers will go and retrieve the cache," Nasa's science director John Grunsfeld said.
"That's the eventual goal - to put astrobiologists and planetary scientists on the surface of Mars. Of course, they would bring back many more samples as well. But that's all forward work," he said.
The rover could also be used to test the radiation risk for humans (which Curiosity has already started) in hopes of getting astronauts on Mars by 2030.
NASA will also launch a satellite called "Maven" to test Mars' atmosphere later this year.
