NASA's 2020 rover will land in an ancient, dried-up lakebed to hunt for past life on Mars

NASA's next car-sized rover will plummet through the thin Martian atmosphere and softly land on the floor of a dried-up lakebed, the space agency announced Monday.

When the robot arrives on Mars about 8 months after its launch in 2020, NASA will endeavor to land the six-wheeled rover in the Jezero Crater, a 30 mile-wide bowl about 1,640 feet deep. It's believed to have once held an 800-foot deep lake some 3.5 billion years ago. 

The space agency hopes to accomplish a number of things during the at least two-year mission. But the first science directive is to "determine whether life ever arose on Mars." Indeed, today Mars is extremely unlikely to harbor any life — on the surface, at least. It's a heavily irradiated, dry, frigid desert, with no liquid water.

"But it wasn't always that way," Ken Farley, the Mars 2020 project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a press call. 

Image: NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

NASA scientists suspect Mars was once a blue world, like Earth. And as bodies of water on Earth are teeming with life, NASA wants to scour the Jezero lakebed for signs that past microbial life could have survived there, or perhaps clear signs of long-dead life itself. 

"All things point to the idea that we should be looking to ancient Mars for a surface-habitable environment, said Farley. "Lakes on Earth are both habitable and inevitably inhabited."

The Jezero landing site also allows NASA scientists to rove over a dried-up river delta where water once flowed out of the lake. 

This environment likely held nutrient-rich clay minerals that could have been an ideal place for Martian microbes to flourish, as they do in moist clays on Earth. 

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The 2020 rover comes equipped with of slew of scientific instruments, making it a bonafide mobile laboratory. 

It carries a ground-penetrating radar, an experimental machine that produces oxygen from atmospheric carbon dioxide, and tools to store five tubes filled with Martian rocks and soil — to be carried back to Earth by another future mission one day.

“Getting samples from this lake-delta system will revolutionize how we think about Mars and its ability to harbor life,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said during the call. 

Image: nasa

One of the most significant tools for sleuthing out past evidence of Martian life — if not the most critical — is the SuperCam, a high-tech camera perched atop the 2020 rover. 

Once the rover lands, NASA scientists know there will be countless places of interest to visit, so the SuperCam will fire lasers to detect the make-up of rocks and chemicals from 25 feet away. Then, the rover will slowly rumble over to most promising places — places that could have once sustained hardy, microscopic life. 

Such ancient evidence will be difficult to find — should it exist at all. 

“It [Mars] may not yield its secrets easily,” Roger Wiens, a planetary scientist who heads the team that built the SuperCam, said this summer. 

While exploring the Martian surface with the new rover — should it successfully land — NASA also hopes to collect information that will support human visitation to Mars — a longer-term goal for the 2030s. 

While NASA wants to return astronauts to the moon in the coming decade, the next logical step is Mars.

"Mars is really the obvious place after the moon," said Zurbuchen.

And the 2020 rover is expected to pave the way there.

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