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New Rover to Explore Past and Future Concerns on Mars

This artist’s concept depicts the Mars 2020 SuperCam, a multi-faceted remote-sensing instrument that will employ a laser and remote optical measurements to assess the mineralogy, chemistry, and composition of rocks on Mars.

Image Credit: NASA

In 2021, NASA intends to land a rover on Mars that will help scientists look for signs of Martian life in the past while advancing plans to send humans to the red planet in the future.

“The reason we’re going to go to Mars is we believe, within our solar system, it’s probably the most habitable place—or was the most habitable place,” said Caltech Mars 2020 project scientist Kenneth Farley during a Facebook Live event hosted by the agency.

To find out whether life ever evolved on Mars, NASA is sending the Mars 2020 rover to the red planet. The new rover design incorporates heritage hardware from the existing Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover while adding more advanced technology to accomplish the goals of the new mission.

“We’re going to use a version of the Curiosity rover; that’s […] the platform that we are going to start with,” said Farley. “Now, the reason we’re going to start with Curiosity is that it is a very, very capable feat of engineering. It’s really a remarkable tool. This allows us to focus our resources—our time, our money, and our engineering talent—developing the capabilities that are necessary for our mission.”

Mars 2020 will feature seven science instruments designed to enable researchers to conduct geological surveys that support the search for signs of life. In addition to a high-resolution stereo zoom camera, the rover will include a laser to study rocks in the near distance and a robotic arm to examine rocks up close.

“The laser is mounted up on the [rover’s] mast, and it fires high-energy laser light at the rock and actually causes that rock to vaporize. And when that vapor cools down, it emits light that comes back to the rover that tells us what minerals are present and what elements are present,” said Farley. This will provide a deeper understanding of the geologic environment around the rover.

Using the robotic arm, the rover will investigate small pieces of rock, roughly the size of a postage stamp, in great detail. A microscopic imager will determine the fabric and structure of the rock, said Farley, “and we’ll also have the ability to map the elemental composition in that postage stamp and identify minerals that are present. And one of the most exciting new features on the rover is that we will also be able to identify and map the distribution of any organic molecules that might be present. This is important because organic molecules are produced by, among other things, life. So this is one way that we can identify signs of ancient life on Mars.”

Mars 2020 will utilize ground-penetrating radar to examine the structure and layers of rocks beneath the rover, and will employ a suite of instruments to measure weather-related phenomena, including temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed, and dust in the atmosphere.

In addition to peering into the Martian past for evidence of microbial life, Mars 2020 is looking toward the future in hopes of facilitating human missions to the red planet.

“The last instrument that we have is entirely different. Its purpose is to further NASA’s journey to Mars by actually testing a technology that would be of great value for future human exploration,” said Farley. “[W]e’re going to fly a device whose purpose is to demonstrate the conversation of atmospheric carbon dioxide to oxygen. This is an example of in-situ resource allocation. Of course, oxygen would be of great value to future human explorers, both to breathe and also for their rocket to bring them back to Earth. If they don’t have to bring all of that oxygen with them, it makes the mission much simpler to do.”

The rover will also collect and store rock and soil samples, with an eye toward returning them one day to Earth. “The objective of the Mars 2020 mission is to prepare a very compelling set of scientific samples and leave them on the surface of Mars for a possible future mission to go and get them,” said Farley. The team plans to prepare about 35 samples of core taken from Martian rock.

Mars 2020 is expected to launch in the summer of 2020 and reach Mars in February 2021. Before then, many decisions must be made. Two critical challenges are to identify the ideal landing site and design a plan for entry, descent, and landing (EDL) that will place the rover precisely where it needs to be.

For the mission to achieve its science goals, the ideal landing site should contain rocks and cliffs that are more than three and a half billion years old, dating from the time when Mars was much warmer and wetter than it is now. Based on findings from previous missions, scientists have narrowed the number of potential landing sites to eight, which fall into two general categories.

“The first half of the sites are associated with surface water. There are things like rivers and lakes and deltas recorded in the rocks. The other half of the sites are associated with high-temperature water circulating through rocks. Now the reason we have been focusing on those two kinds of environments is because on Earth those are areas where microbial life thrives, and we’re hoping that the same would have happened on early Mars,” said Farley.

Although the science community is looking for a relatively rocky landing site, that sort of terrain will complicate the landing process for the rover. The mission plans to use Curiosity’s “Seven Minutes of Terror” EDL blueprint as a starting point for Mars 2020’s approach to touching down on the red planet. “So, from the outside, things look pretty much the same [as with Curiosity]. But under the hood, we’ve made a number of improvements that will help us get to the types of sites that Ken was talking about,” said Allen Chen, Mars EDL lead at JPL.

One improvement is a range trigger: a mechanism that will enable the rover to deploy its parachute when needed to best reach the landing site. “[W]e’re giving it the smarts to choose to deploy that parachute based on where it is, so that if it’s coming up a little bit short on the parachute deploy target, it can wait a little bit longer to deploy that parachute. Or if it thinks it’s going long, it can deploy the chute a little earlier than it normally would have,” said Chen. “So that helps us land in much tighter spots that we couldn’t have considered before with Curiosity. And also lets us land closer to the types of things that the scientists want to go see after we land on the ground.”

A second improvement in the EDL system is terrain-relative navigation (TRN). TRN will enable the rover to take photographs during descent and then compare those images with an onboard map in order to land on the best site available. “Once Mars 2020 knows where it is by using those pictures, it can then avoid hazardous terrain that’s nearby,” said Chen.

In addition to advances in its science instruments, EDL system, and other technology, the rover is designed to maximize autonomy to make up for the lag in signals between Mars and Earth. “One of the things that is very challenging for us on this mission is to work efficiently on Mars,” said Farley. “So we’re investing a lot of time and effort to allow the rover to use its computer and its autonomous systems to navigate and to do science. This will be an important step forward in remote exploration,” said Farley.

Mars 2020, which is managed by JPL, recently passed a major development milestone: Key Decision Point C (KDP-C). The mission is part of the Science Mission Directorate’s Mars Exploration Program, which includes five currently active spacecraft at the red planet, including two rovers and three NASA orbiters.

Watch a video about the science goals of the Mars 2020 mission.

Look back at NASA’s 50 years of Mars exploration in this video.

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