Science & Space/
NASA Serves Up Plans for 2020 Mars Rover Mission
By Damon Poeter
August 1, 2014 05:40pm EST
The instruments designed for NASA's next Mars rover mission include sophisticated tools for detecting signs of life.
NASA this week announced the final list of scientific instruments for the space agency's next Mars rover mission in 2020, including the most sophisticated tools for detecting signs of ancient Martian life in the space agency's arsenal.
The next Mars rover will "carry seven carefully selected instruments to conduct unprecedented science and exploration technology investigations on the Red Planet," NASA said in a statement.
Those instruments, to which NASA is devoting $130 million, were chosen from 58 proposals made by scientists and engineers all around the world, double the average number of proposals made in past instrument competitions, the space agency said.
"Today we take another important step on our journey to Mars," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. "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."
Curiosity, NASA's most recent Mars rover mission, landed on the planet nearly two years ago and recently completed its first full Martian year (687 Earth days) on the surface. The unnamed rover being designed for the 2020 mission will be based on Curiosity, but NASA promised that the next-generation mobile lab would "carry more sophisticated, upgraded hardware and new instruments to conduct geological assessments of the rover's landing site, determine the potential habitability of the environment, and directly search for signs of ancient Martian life."
NASA's unmanned Mars rover missions have been some of the most successful endeavors by the space agency in recent years. The Opportunity rover, which arrived on Mars in January 2004, recently set the record for distance traveled by a vehicle off-Earth when it passed the 40-kilometer mark last weekend.
But the search for extraterrestrial life, a big part of the space agency's series of Mars expeditions, has thus far not turned up any conclusive proof that organisms of any type once lived on the planet.
The 2020 rover mission aims to find that evidence, if it exists. Several instruments selected for the future Mars rover are able to detect organic compounds, including the Supercam proposed by French and American scientists, which is "able to detect the presence of organic compounds in rocks and regolith from a distance," NASA said.
Another instrument selected to help in the hunt for evidence that life existed on Mars is the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) spectrometer. This instrument, set to become the first ultraviolet (UV) Raman spectrometer sent to Mars, can "provide fine-scale imaging and uses a UV laser to determine fine-scale mineralogy and detect organic compounds," NASA said.
The other instruments selected for the mission are an advanced camera system called Mastcam-Z; an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer with a high-resolution imager called PIXL; a collection of sensors called MEDA for measuring temperature, wind speed, humidity, and more on Mars; a ground-penetrating radar system called RIMFAX; and MOXIE, or the the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment, which will attempt to convert Martian atmospheric carbon dioxide into oxygen in an early-stage terraforming experiment.
"The Mars 2020 rover, with these new advanced scientific instruments, including those from our international partners, holds the promise to unlock more mysteries of Mars' past as revealed in the geological record," said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "This mission will further our search for life in the universe and also offer opportunities to advance new capabilities in exploration technology."
NASA's emphasis on doing more than just noodling around the Martian surface with the 2020 mission can be seen as a part of the space agency's stated goal of sending humans to Mars despite growing criticism of that objective. The MOXIE experiment in particular has the very practical purpose of developing technology that could one day be used in a human habitat on the planet.
"The 2020 rover will help answer questions about the Martian environment that astronauts will face and test technologies they need before landing on, exploring and returning from the Red Planet," said William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
"Mars has resources needed to help sustain life, which can reduce the amount of supplies that human missions will need to carry. Better understanding the Martian dust and weather will be valuable data for planning human Mars missions. Testing ways to extract these resources and understand the environment will help make the pioneering of Mars feasible."
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which managed the launch, spaceflight, and landing of Curiosity and also oversees the rover's current mission, will be in charge of operations for the Mars 2020 rover mission.
The 2020 mission will be part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, which has already landed the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers on the planet as well as placed the Odyssey probe and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft in orbit around Mars. Another orbiter, MAVEN, left Earth last November and is en route to the planet. NASA's next lander mission ahead of the 2020 expedition, InSight, is scheduled to depart for Mars in 2016 on a mission that involves drilling up to 16 feet below the surface of the planet to investigate thermal characteristics.
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Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals.
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