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NASA's 2020 Mars Rover Mission Goals

The rover NASA will send to Mars in 2020 should look for signs of past life, collect samples for possible future return to Earth, and demonstrate technology for future human exploration. The Mars 2020 Science Definition Team, which NASA appointed in January to outline scientific objectives for the mission, is composed of 19 scientists and engineers from universities and research organizations. They proposed a mission concept that could accomplish several high-priority planetary science goals and be a major step in meeting President Obama's challenge to send humans to Mars in the 2030s. "The Mars 2020 mission will provide a unique capability to address the major questions of habitability and life in the solar system," said Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division. "This mission represents a major step towards creating high-value sampling and interrogation methods, as part of a broader strategy for sample returns by planetary missions."

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 (Music) It's a whole planet out there with a complicated history. It's that history is a story that's stored in the rocks and our job is to figure out that story and what that story of that planet tells us about this planet that we live on. The recommendations of the Science Definition Team to NASA are to fly a rover with similar capability to the Curiosity rover that' s still on Mars that would land in the same way and have about the same size. And we are recommending that they equip that rover with instrumentation that allows it to explore the surface of Mars at one site, which will have relevance or importance to understanding past habitability, did it have the conditions necessary to sustain life, and to look for signatures or rocks that may hold signatures of biological significance. So where Curiosity takes rocks and grinds them up into powder and looks at their bulk constituents.

    00:01:06 What this mission would need to do is be able to look at a microscopic level and examine the rocks for these very tiny and detailed messages that they would be sending us about the past life that could've lived there. The sorts of evidence we're looking for, sorts of the signatures of past life that we would be looking for would be signatures of microbial life. So not realistically looking for dinosaur bones and that kind of thing. If life ever existed on Mars, we expect it to have been microbial microorganisms. This that I'm holding up here is a classic biosignature from the Earth. It's a fossil. We're not actually expecting to see a fossil of shells or other components, but what we want to be able to see with this instrumentation, are the fine scale layering that one might see in a rock, in which we can see dark and light tone layers and those dark and light tone layers are telling a story.

    00:02:03 We wanted to do something that would make technical progress and that thing was going and coring rock samples, putting them into a little container, a cache, and storing them for bringing back later. Because no matter how well instrumented a rover is we can't look with the kind of detailed understanding that we would have in laboratories back here on Earth. We can do so much more in a laboratory on the Earth with equipment that exists now and who knows what's getting invented in the decades ahead that can still analyze those rocks. The human flight component would like to see an experiment where resources on the surface of Mars, from the rocks or the atmosphere could be used to generate fuel or other parts that would enable future exploration in cutting the ties, so to speak, to Earth.

    00:02:55 So you wouldn't necessary have to bring everything with you. You could actually manufacture it on the planet. And that's a really exciting additional component that we've been exploring and analyzing in this work.