 Happy birthday Curiosity! Last week the Curiosity rover celebrated four years on the surface of Mars by singing happy birthday to itself. So when will curiosity get company on the surface of Mars? Well in 2020 NASA is planning to send another rover to Mars and program scientist Mitchell Schulte told me all about it. This is your space pod for August 10th 2016. My name is Mitch Schulte and I am a program scientist in the Mars exploration program which is part of the planetary science division at NASA headquarters in Washington DC. What kind of science objectives does Mars 2020 have? So we have four primary objectives for the mission. The first is to understand the geology and geological environment of the landing site. We'll be selecting a landing site through a process that involves the scientific community in terms of understanding the mission objectives and then hopefully getting everyone to sort of agree on the best place to send the rover to meet those objectives. So when we land the rover the first one of the things we'll be doing as an objective is to understand the geological environment of the landing site. Look at the history that is recorded in the rocks and try and understand the geologic history a little bit better of that environment. The second objective is to seek signs of past life. So we'll be looking for what we're calling potential biosignatures. So life at least on Earth leaves an imprint that it has been there in a variety of forms one of which is organic matter, one of which is an isotopic signal, things like that, particular concentrations of elements and rocks. If you see fossils obviously that's another good example of physical structure that you can see in the rocks. So we're going to be looking for those kinds of things on Mars as well to understand whether Mars was once inhabited by microorganisms primarily and so that's the second objective is to look for an astrobiological sense whether Mars was inhabited and look for the signs that life may have left behind. So primarily that will be through mineral signatures and organic compounds. The third objective is to collect samples and so we'll actually be drilling rocks and collecting core samples of those rocks. We're going to seal those tubes up that those rocks are collected in and leave them on the surface and we hope to be able to bring those samples back to Earth someday. And then finally the last objective is to help our colleagues in the human exploration and operations mission directorate who are interested in sending people to Mars and so we have a couple of instruments on the rover that are designed to assist them with gathering data related to how humans would be able to exist on Mars. So the first is a meteorological package which will be looking at temperature pressure, wind direction and velocity, relative humidity and looking at the dust that is collecting on the surface of the rover. And then finally we have an instrument called MOXIE which is actually a technology demonstration for what we call in situ resource utilization. So MOXIE will be extracting carbon dioxide out of Mars's atmosphere and processing that to create oxygen, molecular oxygen and this obviously is material that astronauts could use to breathe or it could be used as propellant fuel to get rockets back off of the surface. There place where Mars 2020 overlaps with Mars Science Lab or Curiosity rover is in terms of understanding the habitability of Mars. What Mars 2020 takes one step further is actually looking for signs of past life in the rocks in the rock record on the surface of Mars. So that's something we've actually not been able to do before with the instruments that we've had on any of our previous rovers. And the other addition that Mars 2020 brings is a much finer sense of scale. So any life that we think may have existed on Mars was probably microscopic. And as we know from looking here in Western Australia as an example, it's very hard to convince ourselves that what we're seeing in the rock record is actually evidence of life. And you have to really look at the scale at which microorganisms exist. And so we'll be able to do that for the very first time with the instruments on Mars 2020. Yeah, that is a big concern. And of course, not just the Mars 2020 rover, which will have some planetary protection requirements placed on it in terms of bringing those samples back because we'll be preparing the samples or collecting them in the first place. It will largely be up to the mission that retrieves those samples to do what is known as breaking the chain. So making sure that we establish that the samples that we bring back are as clean as possible and not hazardous. And so that will be largely up to the next mission, the one that brings them back. However, we are taking very seriously trying to keep down the amount of contamination because when we bring the samples back, we want to make sure that what we're seeing is not stuff we brought with us and then brought back. We want to make sure that what we're seeing is stuff that's native or indigenous to Mars. And so certainly we're very concerned about that and taking steps even right now to make sure that we can understand what the hazards are in bringing something back. In terms of getting the samples back, most of that collaboration will be with probably with other countries because it will be a very important set of samples that we'll be bringing back. And we want to make sure that not just the United States but the whole world community of scientists has an opportunity to study those samples. So it certainly would be helpful to us to have collaboration in that regard. We currently don't have any concrete plans to bring the samples back. And so this is actually just the first step in returning samples from Mars. NASA's INSIGHT mission has slipped it for another further two years. So what happens if Mars 2020 slips as well? It will be called Mars 2022. Either it'll be called Mars 2022 or we'll come up with another name for it. There are currently no plans to miss any launch dates. So we just will have to take that as it comes. And how are all the preparations going in terms of getting a launch provider and getting all that payload and instrumentation ready? Yeah, very well. We're expecting to have a launch vehicle named this month. We don't have it yet. We've put in the requests and that process is going through what it normally goes through. And we're expected to find out this month what our launch vehicle will be. The instruments are progressing. We're keeping very close tabs on that. They're going through each of their reviews and each of them so far has met their review criteria just fine. Obviously anytime you're developing new technology to send to another planet, there are bumps along the way and we're having those. But otherwise things are in pretty good shape. I believe there is some Australian influence going on with Mars 2020? Absolutely. There's a lot of influence from Australia. We have one of our PIs, Abby Allwood, who is Australian. She is the principal investigator of the instrument called Pixel, the planetary instrument for X-ray lithochemistry, which will be doing very fine scale chemical analysis of the rocks on surface of Mars. We're very happy that Abby is leading that charge, not only as an Australian but as a female. We think that's great. In addition, next week, I'm going up to the Pilbara to look at some really old rocks that are from around the same time that a lot of rocks on the surface of Mars got deposited. Looking at those ancient microfossils and the biosignatures in the rocks will really help me understand what it is we're going to be doing on this mission. Thank you so much. Mitch, on behalf of the citizens of tomorrow, we'd like to thank you for your time. Hopefully as we get closer to the launch date, we'd love to get you on and get chatting about the progressions of this mission. Sounds great. Thank you for your time. Fantastic. Thank you. Thanks for watching. What do you think about NASA's 2020 mission and what name would you give the rover? Let us know in the comments below or via our social media channels. 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