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The next NASA Mars rover, a twin probe to its current Curiosesity rover, will undertake the first part of a long-sought dream of planetary scientists: a sample-return mission from the Red Planet.
In December, a surprise announcement from NASA unveiled that it had selected a 2020 Mars mission that would reuse spare parts and plans from its highly successful Curiosesity rover. Little was said at the time about what exactly Curiosesity’s twin would be doing. The agency estimated that the rover would cost around $1.5 billion, far cheaper than Curiosesity’s total $2.5 billion price tag.
The event came as something of a shock to planetary scientists, some of whom lamented that the new rover could take money and resources away from other planetary exploration. But of all of NASA’s options, the Mars 2020 rover seems to make the most fiscal sense.
The most recent planetary science decadal, a wish list from the scientific community outlining which missions it would most like to see, gave high priority to a Mars sample-return mission. It also ranked a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa and a dedicated Uranus orbiter at the top of its priorities. The Mars 2020 rover’s budget wouldn’t quite cover the other missions, paying for about three-quarters of a Europa mission and about five-sixths of a Uranus flagship probe.
The new Mars rover would allow NASA to get good scientific output from investments it has already made.
“The existence of engineering expertise and spare parts from the Curiosesity rover creates a unique opportunity to fly a highly capably rover” at a reasonable price, wrote ecologist Van Kane from the University of Washington, who keeps a blog dedicated to future planetary science missions, in an e-mail to Wired. “NASA may be feeling some pressure to fly the rover as early as budgets allow (apparently 2020) so that the engineering teams can be kept intact and vendors will still be apply to supply key components.”
NASA’s decision to send another rover to Mars may have something to do with the incredible popularity and results coming out of Curiosesity. With less than a year under its belt, Curiosesity has shown that Mars had a dynamic and wet past that may have been capable of supporting life.
“We really needed to go back to the surface and do the next stage of answering questions about potential past life,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science, during a press conference on July 9 presenting a 150-page report outlining the new rover’s top scientific objectives.
Image: The sample caching chamber for the Mars 2020 mission. NASA/JPL-CaltechThese include specific searches for signs of past life on the Martian surface using new instruments and microscopes with much higher resolution than Curiosesity is carrying. It would also entail the acquisition and storage of at least 31 samples from various locationss that could later be returned to Earth and analyzed in detail, another capability that Curiosesity lacks. Such a mission has long been advocated by planetary scientists who study Mars because it could answer important questions that no robotic probe ever could, such as the age of different rock layers on the Martian surface.
Still, another Mars mission could come at the cost of exploring other parts of the solar system. The U.S. Congress is currently debating exactly how much money to give NASA over the coming year, with Republicans in the House looking to slash the budget while Democrats argue for funding increases. Both parties agree that the agency’s planetary science division funding should go up slightly, but the bulk of the cash would go to Mars. In addition to the 2020 Mars rover, NASA has two other missions scheduled to fly to Mars this decade: MAVEN, which will explore its atmosphere, and InSight, which will study the planet’s tectonics. Aside from LADEE, a lunar orbiter launching this year, and Osiris-Rex, an asteroid sample return mission planned for a 2016 launch, NASA doesn’t have any new robotic probes in the pipeline to explore the rest of the solar system.
Several observers on Twitter commented on NASA’s Mars-centric focus.
“Yes this is a large mission and it’s maybe the only large mission we do in this decade,” said physicist Jim Green, who leads NASA’s planetary science division. But, he added, NASA was committed to pursuing other small missions targeted at specific places in the solar system.
Given that Mars 2020 will cache samples, the mission seems to set NASA up for at least one more expensive mission to retrieve and deliver the samples to Earth. When asked if this would push back other planetary science missions elsewhere in the solar system, Grunsfeld said that the “only thing we’re committing to right now is sending this very capable scientific rover to Mars.”
“It’s likely we’ll pursue other planetary science objectives before we get to these samples,” he added, though if the samples turn out to be extremely interesting, the scientific community could want to bring them back faster.
It’s clear that NASA would like to send humans to Mars at some point in the future and both the Curiosesity rover and this new 2020 rover are taking data that would be useful to astronaut explorers. But a manned Mars mission would be an extremely expensive undertaking, requiring the development of lots of new technology and is unlikely to get funded by any government anytime soon.
