In what may be NASA's biggest mission of the decade, the agency's next rover will head to Mars in 2020 to collect samples that may one day travel back to Earth.
After five months of research and more than 6,000 emails among a team of 19 scientists, NASA released a 154-page report Wednesday outlining its plans for the 2020 rover. The robot will search for signs of past life on Mars and obtain material that will be used in planning future human exploration missions.
"[NASA] should only be seeking to answer the biggest questions, and the biggest question of humankind is 'are we alone?'" said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, director of the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, in a press conference.
For the most part, NASA will work off the framework of Curiosity, a highly successful rover that determined Mars was once suitable for life. Like Curiosity, the 2020 rover will be about the size of a car — 10 feet long (not including the arm), 9 feet wide and 7 feet tall.
Unlike Curiosity rover, however, the 2020 rover will be able to identify a rock's mineralogy and chemistry on a finer scale using high-resolution imaging instruments. Instead of planning shot-in-the-dark drills on rocks that may seem interesting on the surface, scientists will be able to determine the best rocks for experimentation based on their chemical makeup.
"The context is everything. Making sure you have the right sample is everything," said John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science.
The 2020 rover will extract samples from the rocks' cores, transfer them into sealed sample tubes and store them in a cache that NASA will retrieve at a later date. That storage unit will have room for 31 samples. (See image below.)
At this stage, the agency's most important objective is constructing a system that can obtain the best sample without contamination.
"Putting the samples into a returnable cache is a small step forward, but it doesn't address the sample return," Grunsfeld said.
The team doesn't yet know how they will transport the samples back to Earth, which would open doors for more in-depth experiments. The most obvious mode of transport is via humans. While NASA has studied manned trips to Mars for years, the agency doesn't have an official roadmap for that type of mission. That said, don't count out human retrieval.
"I wouldn't rule out that human explorers will go and retrieve the cache 20 years from now," said Grunsfeld, a former astronaut. "I would like to see it be some kind of race because I would like to see scientists on Mars."
Planning for NASA's 2020 Mars rover envisions a basic structure that capitalizes on re-using the design and engineering work done for the NASA rover Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, but with new science instruments selected through competition for accomplishing different science objectives with the 2020 mission.
Images courtesy of NASA
Images courtesy of NASA
