A scientific panel today gave NASA a blueprint for the kind of rover that it should send to Mars in 2020. If NASA were to follow the panel's recommendations, the 2020 rover would look a lot like Curiosity, which is now surveying the planet. But it would have a host of new capabilities to enable a detailed investigation of the martian surface. And it would aim to create a cache of martian soil samples that could be brought back to Earth in the future.
Images taken by Curiosity, which landed on the martian surface in August last year, has confirmed that water once flowed on Mars. This November, NASA will launch a spacecraft that will orbit Mars and study its upper atmosphere. But, as John Grunsfeld, the chief of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, noted in a telecom with reporters this afternoon, "the action really is still on the surface of Mars. We really need to go back to the surface and go to the next stage in answering whether there was ever any life on Mars."
To read more, click here.