The solar-powered version of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover that the agency plans to send to the Red Planet in 2020 could wind up finding and storing samples for eventual return to Earth, a panel of agency “Mars czars” said this week.
Speaking at the Humans to Mars Summit in Washington, D.C., three current or former heads of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program said the science-definition team now deciding what instrumentation will ride on the 2020 rover has sample-caching as a top priority, in keeping with the priority set in the current decadal survey of planetary scientists.
“I think we will see, after the science definition team comes back from their consideration on the 2020 mission, an absolutely fabulous array of measurements that need to be made on samples, decision processes on whether we keep those or not, how we keep those,” said James Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA headquarters and acting director of the Mars program.
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