NASA Revealed Its 2020 Mars Rover That Will Help Accelerate Human Arrival On Mars

Its been a while since NASA has been working on the next Mars rover that is scheduled to blast off to the Red Planet in July 2020 to learn more about our solar neighbour and preparing for future missions involving humans, and now it has finally unveiled what it looks like.

NASA

The rover was manufactured in a sterile factory at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, near Los Angeles and has already completed a successful test run last week. The rover is scheduled to leave Earth in July next year from Florida¡¯s Cape Canaveral.

The rover is loaded with a plethora of equipment and sensors that will constantly provide data about the red planet. The rover has a total of 23 cameras, two microphones that allow capture of Martian winds. The rover also has lasers onboard -- not to fight with aliens it comes across but to be used for chemical analysis.

The rover is as big as a family car and has six wheels similar to its predecessor Curiosity that will help it to move along the tricky rocky terrain with ease.

Now in case you were wondering the rover to be fast like a sports car, you¡¯d be disappointed as the rover can do around 180 metres per Martian day or 24 hours and 37 minutes.

Powering the rover is a tiny nuclear reactor with two-metre-long articulated arms and a drill to break rocks and collect samples of life.

According to deputy mission leader Matt Wallace in a conversation with AFP, "What we're looking for is ancient microbial life - we're talking about billions of years ago on Mars when the planet was much more Earth-like.¡± He explained how Mars too had an atmosphere with warm surface water and even a magnetic force around it. ¡° And so it was much more conducive to the types of simple single-cell life that evolved here on Earth at that time," he further added.

NASA

After the rover collects the samples, they will be hermetically sealed in tubes. These tubes will then be discarded on the Martian surface for a future mission to collect them and get them to Earth.

According to Wallace, "We are hoping to move fairly quickly. We'd like to see the next mission launched in 2026, which will get to Mars and pick up the samples, put them into a rocket and propel that sample into orbit around Mars. The sample would then rendezvous with an orbiter and the orbiter would bring the sample back to the Earth. Samples should reach Earth in the course of a decade or so."