The Mars 2020 rover, which sets off for the Red Planet next year, will not only search for traces of ancient life, but pave the way for future human missions, NASA scientists said on December 27 as they unveiled the vehicle.

The rover has been constructed in a large, sterile room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, near Los Angeles, where its driving equipment was given its first successful test last week.

It is scheduled to leave Earth in July 2020 from Florida’s Cape Canaveral, becoming the fifth US rover to land on Mars seven months later in February.

What are the features of the rover?

The car-sized rover will scour the base of Mars’ Jezero Crater, a 250-metre-deep crater thought to have been a lake the size of Lake Tahoe, once the craft lands in February 2021.

“It’s designed to seek signs of life, so we are carrying a number of different instruments that will help us understand the geological and chemical context on the surface of Mars,” said deputy mission leader Matt Wallace.

Among the devices on board the rover are 23 cameras, two “ears” that will allow it to listen to Martian winds and lasers used for chemical analysis.

The rover is equipped with six wheels like its predecessor Curiosity, allowing it to traverse rocky terrain.

Speed is not a priority for the vehicle, which only has to cover around 180 metres per Martian day - approximately the same as a day on Earth.

Fuelled by a miniature nuclear reactor, Mars 2020 has seven-foot-long articulated arms and a drill to crack open rock samples in locations scientists identify as potentially suitable for life.

What is the significance of Jezero Crater?

To maximise its chances of unearthing traces of ancient life, Mars 2020 will land in a long dried-up delta called Jezero. The site, selected after years of scientific debate, is a crater that was once a 480-metre-deep lake. It was formerly connected to a network of rivers that flowed some 3.5 to 3.9 billion years ago.

The crater is believed to have an abundance of pristine sediments some 3.5 billion years old that scientists hope will hold fossils of Martian life. “The trick, though, is that we are looking for trace levels of chemicals from billions of years ago on Mars,” said Wallace.

“What we are looking for is ancient microbial life - we are talking about billions of years ago on Mars, when the planet was much more Earth-like,” he said.

Back then, the Red Planet had warm surface water, a thicker atmosphere and a magnetic force around it, he explained.

How will the samples reach Earth?

The rover will collect up to 30 soil samples to be picked up and returned to Earth by a future spacecraft planned by NASA.

“Once we have a sufficient set, we will put them down on the ground, and another mission, which we hope to launch in 2026, will come, land on the surface, collect those samples and put them into a rocket, basically,” said Wallace.

Humans have never before returned sediment samples from Mars. The findings of the Mars 2020 research will be crucial to future human missions to the red planet, including the ability to make oxygen on the surface of Mars, said Wallace. The Mars 2020 rover is carrying equipment that can turn carbon dioxide, which is pervasive on Mars, into oxygen for breathing and as a propellant.

Mars missions of other countries

If successful, Mars 2020 will mark NASA’s fifth Martian rover to carry out a soft landing, having learned crucial lessons from the most recent Curiosity rover that landed on the planet’s surface in 2012 and continues to traverse a Martian plain southeast of the Jezero Crater.

The Soviet Union is the only other country to have successfully landed a rover on Mars. China and Japan have attempted unsuccessfully to send orbiters around Mars, while India and Europe’s space agency have successfully lofted an orbiter to the planet.

India’s Mangalyaan

Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), the maiden interplanetary mission of ISRO, launched on November 5, 2013, by PSLV-C25 got inserted into the Martian orbit on September 24, 2014, in its first attempt.

MOM is credited with many laurels such as cost-effectiveness, short period of realisation, economical mass-budget, miniaturisation of five heterogeneous science payloads, etc. The Mangalyaan mission, which was initially meant to last six months, has completed five years of orbiting Mars.

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