NASA’s next Mars rover to prep for sample returns, human exploration

Set to launch in 2020, it will look for past life and collect souvenirs.

Scott K. Johnson – Jul 11, 2013 12:30 pm | 50

NASA affirmed its addiction to Big Red this week, announcing plans for the next Mars rover, which is scheduled to launch in 2020. The mission plan is conservative in a way, mainly hitting items on the Martian to-do list that had previously been neglected due to funding issues. If you were amazed by the novelty of Curiosity, prepare to be amazed by the exact same thing again. Rather than reinvent the rover, NASA will save money and reduce the risk of the unknown by building a modified Curiosity-class vessel.

The mission will have three main goals. First, the rover will be specifically outfitted to look for signs of past life in the rocks of Mars—a job at the limits of Curiosity’s abilities. Unlike Curiosity, it will also be collecting rock samples that will hopefully be brought back to Earth by later parcel delivery missions. Finally, it will be doing a little scouting on the side to start paving the way for a future human expedition.

To look for evidence that life once existed on Mars, the rover will use instruments similar in nature to the ones Curiosity is carrying around, but with some key differences. It will need to be able to inspect the structure and chemistry of rocks on a smaller scale as it will be looking for fossils or trace chemical signatures associated with microbial-type life. There will also be slightly more capable instruments for organic chemistry that will refrain from crushing samples for analysis (since NASA is aiming to bring some of those babies home).

The new rover will have to do the same kind of work Curiosity is doing in order to identify rocks with the best prospects of yielding evidence of past life. Its controllers will be looking for rocks that were deposited in the presence of water, where chemistry could have provided the energy for life and where some organic matter could be preserved. Ensuring that all of these are options will undoubtedly create a healthy discussion about where on Mars to drop the rover for its mission.

The sample collection system will load thirty or so small cores of rock into a container that would protect and preserve them. The plan is for that container to be dropped off somewhere for a to-be-designed, two-stage retrieval mission. The first piece would land on the surface, grab the container, and launch it into Martian orbit. The second component would snatch it from orbit and fly it back to Earth. The details haven’t been worked out yet, but NASA will have to know enough about that system to send a container that will be compatible with it.

If this all sounds familiar, it could be because it’s essentially the same mission that was scrapped in 2011 due to budget limitations.

A new component to this mission, however, is gathering information relevant to future human exploration of the Red Planet, currently targeted for the 2030s. The rover should gather lots of environmental data, including continuous weather conditions and measurements of potentially harmful cosmic rays, as well as characterize the risks posed by Mars’ ubiquitous dust. It will also test technology to use CO₂ from the Martian atmosphere to generate oxygen. If oxygen could be produced there for life support systems and rocket fuel, the astronaut-bearing spacecraft could cut a lot of weight, which is always at an absolute premium.

The mission also figures to include a significant upgrade to the ridiculously awesome SkyCrane landing system. NASA will want a much tighter “landing ellipse”—the margin of error around the targeted landing location—which they hope to achieve by improving the SkyCrane system’s ability to recognize surface terrain. It would then be able to make adjustments on the way down to ensure it sets down in just the right spot.

Of course, 2020 is a way off yet, and we’ll have to wait and see what makes the cut and which instruments are chosen to fulfill the mission’s goals. But budgets willing, NASA will introduce a new member of the Mars family.