Mars 2020 sky crane landing system under construction at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (Image: Dan Coatta/JPL)

Future Mars explorers can breathe easy. The next NASA rover to land on the red planet will bring equipment that can take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and break it apart to make pure oxygen.

“When we have humans exploring Mars, they can make great use of the oxygen,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, in a press conference today. “We all love that stuff.”

The oxygen experiment is one of seven instruments that will fly on the Mars 2020 rover, NASA announced today. The rover will be a near clone of the Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in August 2012. It will use the same chassis and the same “sky crane” landing system, as well as some of the older rover’s spare parts.


Curiosity has spent the past two years hunting for signs that Mars was once hospitable to life, and found evidence of running water and the chemicals necessary to create a comfy habitat.

Like being there

Last July, NASA directed the Mars 2020 rover team to take that work a step further and look for the microbes that may have actually lived there. Teams of scientists from around the world submitted a total of 58 proposals to compete for a slice of the $130 million instrument budget.

In addition to the oxygen experiment, which could one day be useful for producing rocket fuel as well as breathable air, the rover will carry a weather station that will measure temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity, and characterize dust – data that will help prepare future human missions.

It will also take two spectrometers at the end of an arm that can determine the composition of the Martian soil, and a ground-penetrating radar that can examine the subsurface of the terrain the rover drives on.

The two instruments on the rover’s head will be souped-up versions of what Curiosity carries: a laser that can vaporise rocks and scan them for their compositions, and a panoramic, zoomable camera – the first camera with zoom that has ever flown to Mars – that will take short movies as the rover drives.

“This is going to get so much closer to the experience of having a human with two eyeballs on Mars,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

“The selection of instruments was to maximize the science capability of the rover itself,” said Meyer. “No measurement is done by only one instrument. They overlap and complement each other.”

Sample snatch

When it launches in 2020, the rover will take fewer instruments than Curiosity, which has 10, and the equipment will weigh 35 kilograms less. That frees up room for one of the new rover’s most important jobs: gathering samples to be returned to Earth at a later date.

The plan is light on details on how exactly the samples will get back to Earth, and it will require at least one separate mission. But using a smart rover to collect and store them means that a future retrieval mission can be simple, like a fancy arcade crane.

“I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that future astronauts will pick up the sample and bring it to Earth,” Grunsfeld said.