NASA Mars Rover 2020: Next Mars Rover to Seek Signs of Life

A sketch of the design for NASA's 2020 Mars rover. 

Planning for NASA's 2020 Mars rover envisions a basic structure that capitalises on re-using the design and engineering work done for the NASA rover Curiosity.

NASA rover Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012, but with MSL, the new science instruments selected through competition for accomplishing different science objectives with the 2020 mission.

CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's next Mars rover should hunt for signs of past Red Planet life and collect samples for eventual return to Earth, a team of mission planners has determined.

The new Mars rover — slated to launch in 2020 — should explore a site that once was habitable, make its own observations and snag material for scientists here on Earth to study in unprecedented detail at some point in the future, according to a new report compiled by the mission's "science definition team" (SDT).

"The SDT-preferred mission concept employs new in situ scientific instrumentation in order to seek signs of past life (had it been there), select and store a compelling suite of samples in a returnable cache and demonstrate technology for future robotic and human exploration of Mars," states the report, which was released to the public today (July 9).

The 2020 Mars rover will be based heavily on NASA's Curiosity rover, which touched down last August on a mission to determine if Mars could ever have supported microbial life.

For example, the new robot will use a similar chassis and "sky crane" landing system, NASA officials have said. But the 2020 rover will take the science to a whole new level.

"The 2020 rover as proposed by the Science Definition Team would carry a different and more advanced set of science instruments than Curiosity carries, its drill would extract cores rather than blended powder from rocks and it would collect and package samples for possible future return to Earth," NASA officials wrote today in an FAQ about the SDT's report.

Just what those instruments will be is unclear at the moment; they will be selected through a competitive process but the science gear will search for visual, mineralogical and chemical signs of past life if the SDT recommendations are adopted.

"The capability for examining the mineralogic composition of samples at microscopic scale would be unprecedented for a mission to Mars," NASA officials wrote in the FAQ.

"The search for potential signs of past life could use assessments of textures, shapes, mineralogy, organic-matter content, and possibly elemental chemistry at the scale of individual grains within a sample."

The rover would also gather and store samples for potential return to Earth by a future mission (the timing and details of which are yet to be determined).

Sample-return is viewed by most scientists as the best way to look for signs of Red Planet life.

The new rover's landing site has not been selected yet, officials said, and its power source similarly has not been confirmed.

The Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, took this self portrait, which shows its Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) at center

Curiosity is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), which converts the heat generated by radioactive decay into electricity.

The 2020 rover may follow suit, but it's also possible that it could run on solar power, like NASA's smaller Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which landed on Mars in 2004.

"No final decision on a power source for the 2020 rover would be made until the mission completes a review through the National Environmental Policy Act process, which considers the environmental impacts of launching and conducting the mission," NASA officials wrote in the FAQ.

Curiosity's mission cost a total of $2.5 billion. The 2020 rover is expected to be significantly cheaper, with a total price tag estimated at around $1.5 billion.

Early Signs of Life on MARS: Watery McLaughlin crater

"The McLaughlin crater is an ideal place for scientists to examine the structure of Mars's soil," Russian scientist Evgeny Chernyakov says.

Scientists believe that a large crater, which has been discovered on Mars, might have been a lake several billion years ago.

A space vehicle, which NASA sent to explore Mars, has discovered layers of clay and carbonate minerals in the walls of this crater.

These substances may form in the ground only after the contact with water.

This crater, which has received the name of McLaughlin, is one of Mars's largest craters. It is 92 kms wide and 2 kms deep.

The space vehicle discovered no traces of washouts on the crater's walls, which means that, most likely, no water has ever come into the crater from outside.

If the crater really was once full of water, this water has most likely penetrated from underground.

Mars is smaller than the Earth, and the gravity power on Mars is three times weaker than on the Earth.

Thus, scientists suppose that if underground waters have once existed on Mars, the soil layers that contained water were thicker and more clay-like than they were on the Earth.

These conditions are ideal for bacteria to appear, scientists say. It is not ruled out that there is still water under the crater's bottom and that bacteria still live there.

"The McLaughlin crater is an ideal place for scientists to examine the structure of Mars's soil," Russian scientist Evgeny Chernyakov says.

"The fact that there exists such a deep natural hollow on Mars allows scientists to examine Mars's soil without drilling artificial holes," Mr. Chernyakov says.

"This makes delivering the relevant equipment to Mars (which would have been very difficult and costly) unnecessary.

Now, all that we need is to send a small device to Mars, which would "look" into this crater and take photographs or samples of the soil.

From the ribs of the crater, we can rather easily take samples of the ground that would otherwise have been very hard to extract."

Scottish Scientists step towards bringing life to inorganic matter

All life on Earth is carbon-based, which has led to the widespread assumption that any other life that may exist in the universe would also be carbon-based.

Excluding the possibility of elements other than carbon forming the basis of life is often referred to as carbon chauvinism.

Researchers at the University of Glasgow are looking to overcome this bias and provide new insights into evolution by attempting to create “life” from carbon-free, inorganic chemicals.

They’ve now taken the first tentative steps towards this goal with the creation of inorganic-chemical-cells, or iCHELLS.

Prof Cronin says the current theory of evolution is really a special theory of evolution because it only applies only to organic biology. He says that if he and his team are successful in creating life from inorganic matter, it could lead to a general theory of evolution.

"The grand aim is to construct complex chemical cells with life-like properties that could help us understand how life emerged and also to use this approach to define a new technology based upon evolution in the material world - a kind of inorganic living technology," said Prof Cronin.

"If successful this would give us some incredible insights into evolution and show that it's not just a biological process.

It would also mean that we would have proven that non carbon-based life could exist and totally redefine our ideas of design."



Prof Cronin gave a talk at TED Global earlier this year in Edinburgh where he said that if his team is successful in creating life while taking carbon out of the equation, it might reveal what other elements might be capable of producing life elsewhere in the universe and provide NASA with a better idea of what to look for in the search for extraterrestrial life.

The University of Glasgow team's paper "Modular Redox-Active Inorganic Chemical Cells: iCHELLs' is published in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

Ooops! Mars Robots may have destroyed vital evidence of life

Mars landers and Rovers have been destroying signs of life, instead of identifying chemicals that could point to life. NASA's robot explorers may have been toasting them by mistake.

In 1976, many people's hopes of finding life on Mars collapsed when the twin Viking landers failed to detect even minute quantities of organic compounds - the complex, carbon-containing molecules that are central to life as we know it. "It contributed, in my opinion, to the fact that there were no additional [US lander] missions to Mars for 20 years," says Jeff Moore of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

The result also created a puzzle. Even if Mars has never had life, comets and asteroids that have struck the planet should have scattered at least some organic molecules - though not produced by life - over its surface.

Some have suggested that organics were cleansed from the surface by naturally occurring, highly reactive chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide. Then last year, NASA's Phoenix lander, which also failed to detect organics on Mars, stumbled on something in the Martian soil that may have, in effect, been hiding the organics: a class of chemicals called perchlorates.

At low temperatures, perchlorates are relatively harmless. But when heated to hundreds of degrees Celsius they release a lot of oxygen, which tends to cause any nearby combustible material to burn. For that very reason, perchlorates are used in rocket propulsion.