Are we alone? Mars rover will seek clues

LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE, Calif. – Like any tourist, NASA’s next Mars rover will want to bring home a few souvenirs.

But instead of piling them into a suitcase, the rover is going to have to drop its precious cargo onto the surface of the Red Planet and await another spacecraft to fetch them.

Work is almost complete on the rover at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles well ahead of a launch window that starts July 17 in Florida.

With previous rovers having shown Mars had the building blocks of life, the goal of the next mission is to establish whether life has existed.

“This is the one we have been working toward,” said Matt Wallace deputy project manager of Mars 2020. “Now we are really asking the question, ‘Can we find any sign of life?’ ”

The trip will take about seven months. If all goes according to plan, the rover will come to life next February in an ancient river delta in a lake that filled the Jezero Crater. Its mission is expected to last two years.

The lakebed is considered ripe for exploration because life is supported by water. Just finding evidence of a singlecell organism would be a breakthrough.

The six-wheeled rover, yet to be given a formal name, looks similar to the last one, dubbed Curiosity. JPL engineers compare it to a Mini Cooper.

Where the vehicle at the heart of the $2.5 billion exploration will really stand apart, however, is in its ability to analyze and process samples, then drop them into tubes for pickup by another Mars mission expected to launch in 2026. Samples will be carried inside the rover until they are deposited in individual tubes or in a bunch on Mars’ surface.

Then, the future mission would robotically accomplish what it took humans to do on the moon 50 years ago by bringing back samples of soil and rocks for detailed study by scientists on Earth.