The Next Mars Rover Will Sport Some Serious Hardware

The Mars 2020 rover. (Credit: NASA) NASA must be big fans of Douglas Quaid in Total Recall. “Get your ass to Mars,” he says, and NASA listened, sending 24 probes, landers and rovers over the past five decades. It’s just too tempting a target: The closest, easiest planetary neighbor for us to explore, which may or may not prove habitable, also tells scientists more about the solar system’s history. We’re steadily learning more and more about the next Mars rover, currently known as “Mars 2020.” It’s due to launch in the summer of 2020, will arrive on the Red Planet about 7 months later, and is scheduled to spend about 2 years (1 Mars year) studying the world and its potential for habitability, including searching for past microbial life itself. NASA hasn’t decided on a landing site yet, but they did release this week a bit more on the tools ...