NASA says its next Mars rover, with a 2020 rendezvous date with the Red Planet, will explore its surroundings for ways to sustain life -- human life, in the form of future manned missions to follow.
It will follow in the footsteps, or at least the tire tracks, of three previous rovers -- Opportunity, Spirit and Curiosity -- which have looked for evidence of past life and its present ability to support life.
"The 2020 rover will help answer questions about the Martian environment that astronauts will face and test technologies they need before landing on, exploring and returning from the Red Planet," says NASA's William Gerstenmaier, one of the scientists working on proposed future human missions.
To that end, one of the premiere experiments the new rover will carry out will be converting carbon dioxide present in Mars' atmosphere into oxygen suitable "for human consumption," the space agency said.
Oxygen produced on the Martian surface could also be a source for fuel to refill a mission spacecraft's tanks for the return trip to Earth, it said.
The carbon dioxide experiment has been dubbed MOXIE, for Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment. The ISRU stands for in site resource utilization.
The 2020 rover will be an almost identical twin to the Curiosity rover currently exploring Mars -- NASA already has the twin on hand and waiting -- which will help save money in an atmosphere of tightened space budgets.
However, the Curiosity "clone" will be armed with a number of upgraded instruments and capabilities.
It will "carry seven carefully selected instruments to conduct unprecedented science and exploration technology investigations on the Red Planet," NASA said in a statement.
The instruments, the bill for which will come in at around $130 million, where selected from almost 60 proposals submitted by scientists and engineers from all parts of the globe, the agency said.
They include better cameras, soil analyzers and even ground penetrating radar to scan the interior of the Red Planet down to depths of a third of a mile.
Along with the cameras will be spectrometers that can analyze chemical components in rock and soil to gauge their ability to support farming efforts by future astronauts, NASA said.
"An ability to live off the Martian land would transform future exploration of the planet," it said in a statement.
Although the next rover will aim for a 2020 landing on Mars, it's not yet known exactly when a human astronaut might put the first footprint on the Red Planet.
