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NASA's Headed Back to Mars, and It Plans to Collect Souvenirs

NASA's released its plan for a 2020 Mars rover that will be like Curiosity on steroids.
An artist's concept of the 2020 Mars rover. via NASA/JPL

In 2020, NASA is going to send another rover to the red planet, and, surprise surprise, it’s going to look for signs of past life. But there’s more to this mission than adding more data to the burning question of whether we ever had galactic neighbors. This mission is going to collect and store samples for a possible sample return mission, a huge feat on its own, while also demonstrating some technologies that will help astronauts explore the planet some day.

The 2020 rover will reuse the basic architecture of the Curiosity rover. NASA frequently reuses proven technologies to keep mission costs down, and this will be no exception. But this rover will have a different task. While Curiosity was designed to determine whether or not Mars ever in its history had the right chemistry to support life, this rover will look for traces of ancient life.

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The plan is for the rover to visually, mineralogically, and chemically analyze the Martian environment down to the microscopic level in search of biosignatures, or forms in rocks that could only have been formed biologically. This will require a specialized suite of instruments. The agency is slated to begin soliciting proposals from outside contractors for science instruments later this year.

Looking for evidence of past life is the natural next step in light of everything we’ve learned about Mars in the last decades. In the last year, Curiosity has found conclusive evidence that the past Martian environment could have supported microbial life. In the nearly decade prior, the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity, along with the orbiters circling the planet, found ample evidence that ancient Mars was a wet one. Taken together, this is highly suggestive that some primitive life might have existed on Mars. So now we have to find it.

Of course, studying Mars remotely via a rover isn’t the easiest way to explore the planet. Our dexterity and fast brains outstrip a rover’s equivalent faculties, and the light-time delay between the two planets makes real-time commands impossible. But that’s not the only challenge with robotic exploration. NASA can’t work on a rover’s instrument suite right down to the day before launch. The instruments have to be ready months or years in advance; designs are typically frozen years before a mission leaves Earth. That means the instruments are effectively frozen in time. Technological advances on Earth are no help to a rover on Mars.

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One of Curiosity's more recent self-portraits. via

That’s where the sample return comes in handy. Getting samples back to Earth where they can be studied with the latest instruments, and studied again as better instruments are developed, would make the search for biosignatures that much easier. With this in mind, the 2020 rover will collect and store up to 31 samples of rock cores and samples that a later mission could pick up and return to Earth. And there’s no rush. The 2020 rover could hold on to the sample for a decade if need be, or forever if it determines with its own onboard instruments that the samples aren’t worth returning to Earth.

With this latest mission in the pipeline, it looks like NASA is still working towards President Obama’s goal of a manned mission to Mars in the 2030s. But these things are always changing.

Midway through 2011, the National Research Council’s Committee on Planetary Science, in cooperation with NASA, outlined a series of planetary goals for the decade 2012 to 2023. The so-called decadal survey planned new missions to Mars every 26 months (specifically during each favorable launch opportunity) culminating in 2018 with a Curiosity-type mission that would be the first step in a sample return mission.

This plan was scrapped in early 2012 when NASA’s 2013 budget was released. It didn’t have any room for planetary exploration. Manned spaceflight still gets the bulk of NASA’s budget. But then Curiosity landed by Sky Crane last August and everyone fell in love with a Mars roving robot. Suddenly, Mars regained centre stage and money for planetary exploration was redirected towards our neighbor. The abandoned decadal survey plan was resurrected.

This latest mission fits right in with the new old plan. Of course, there’s no saying what will happen when a new administration moves into the White House in 2016. Hopefully this mission will be far enough along that it wouldn’t be cost effective to cancel it and we’ll still get our Curiosity 2.0. Or maybe things will change and we’ll decide to go somewhere else in a year’s time. I’m still voting for Europa.