After six long years of service, NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars may finally be ready to take the long sleep. Sad as that is, NASA isn't likely to leave the Red Planet untapped for data.
That's why it's already figuring out where it's going to send the next rover in 2020.
Images courtesy: NASA
This week, hundreds of scientists, astronomers, and Mars enthusiasts have gathered in California for a NASA conference. There, the space agency will debate the best landing point on the planet for the rover, in order to "set the stage" for the next ten years of exploration on the red planet.
The new rover will seriously have its work cut out for it. Not only will the wheeled explorer have to look for signs of life on Mars, but it NASA believes it could also be the first step towards bringing soil and rock samples from the planet back to Earth. That makes choosing the drop point all the more important.
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This three-day conference is actually the fourth of its kind, since having started back in 2014. It will also be the last. For one thing, the spot obviously can't be the same as where Curiosity landed. Mars is huge after all and the rovers don't move very fast, even without stopping to analyse samples. But there are other things to consider too.
Where Curiosity had an internal lab to test samples, the 2020 rover will instead have a sample collection system. It will collect soil and rock samples, seal them up in test tubes and scatter them across Mars for later NASA missions to pick up and send back to Earth.
Topographical map of the landing sites
In 2014, there were 30 potential landing spots in the running. After imaging them from space, those were narrowed down to eight, and then the current top four - Columbia Hills, Jezero Crater and Northeast Syrtis, and "Midway" (which sits between Jezero Crater and Northeast Syrtis. The first two of those spots have some of the oldest rocks on Mars, while the third is where they believe a body of water used to exist.
Wherever the 2020 rover does go however, it might still be a long wait before we see the results. NASA officials say it might take three or four missions after the 2020 rover's launch before we're able to get the samples it's collected back to Earth.
NASA will launch the finalised landing site by the end of the year. The mission is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in July 2020 and the rover will touch down on Mars by February 2021.