NASA's Mars 2020 rover set to hunt Martian fossils, scout for manned missions

A NASA robotic rover is nearing completion ahead of a journey next year to searc...

FILE PHOTO: Fans and deltas formed by water and sediment are seen in the Jezero Crater on Mars, identified as a potential landing site for the Mars 2020 Rover, in this false color image taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, published May 15, 2019 and obtained November 15, 2019. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via REUTERS

The U.S. space agency on Friday showed off its Mars 2020 rover, whose official name will be chosen early next year. NASA will in February ship the rover to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center where its three sections will be fully assembled. A July launch will send the rover to a dry lake bed on Mars that is bigger than the island of Manhattan.

“The trick, though, is that we’re looking for trace levels of chemicals from billions of years ago on Mars,” Mars 2020 deputy project manager Matt Wallace told Reuters. The rover will collect up to 30 soil samples to be picked up and returned to Earth by a future spacecraft planned by NASA.

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