NASA finalizes next Mars rover, inching closer to 2020 launch

By Dyllan Furness Published April 2, 2021

Almost four years after NASA’s Curiosity rover landed on Mars, the space agency has decided to move forward with the final design and construction of its next rover to explore the Red Planet. For now dubbed simply the Mars 2020 rover, the machine will help NASA scientists investigate Martian surface rocks for signs of prior life, collect samples, and store them for recovery by missions in the future.

“The Mars 2020 rover is the first step in a potential multi-mission campaign to return carefully selected and sealed samples of Martian rocks and soil to Earth,” Geoffrey Yoder, acting associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a NASA press release. “This mission marks a significant milestone in NASA’s Journey to Mars — to determine whether life has ever existed on Mars, and to advance our goal of sending humans to the Red Planet.”

Recommended Videos

The Mars 2020 rover will follow the design of Curiosity, but it will be packed with updated instruments and backed by a team of scientists who’ve been around a Martian dune or two. The new rover will be equipped with a coring drill to collect specimens and sample tubes for storage. Some 30 samples tubes will be left around the Red Planet for future collection. On Earth, the samples may be analyzed for signs of life and to detect potential health hazards for future manned missions to Mars.

NASA is also trying to bring the Mars mission closer to those on Earth by equipping the rover with a microphone and range of cameras to record the images and sounds of its entry.

“Nobody has ever seen what a parachute looks like as it is opening in the Martian atmosphere,” JPL’s David Gruel, assistant flight system manager for the Mars 2020 mission, said in the press release. “So this will provide valuable engineering information.”

“This will be a great opportunity for the public to hear the sounds of Mars for the first time, and it could also provide useful engineering information,” added Mars 2020 deputy project manager Matt Wallace of JPL.

With this plan to progress, the Mars 2020 mission passes it’s third milestone into Phase C of development, which includes design and fabrication. With Phase C and Phase D (system assembly) complete, the mission will be on track to launch in the summer of 2020.

Former Contributor

Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…

Topics

Emerging Tech

Checking body medication levels may now be as easy as sucking on a peach-flavoured lollipop

Forget the clinic swab; this lollipop wants a lick

Lollylab

Checking your body’s medication levels is usually no one’s idea of fun. Now researchers are trying to change that with Lollylab, a candy-coated, lollipop-like device that can collect saliva and measure levels of acetaminophen in under two minutes.

The prototype created by researchers whose work was published in ACS Sensors transforms a familiar object into a miniature testing device. In a pilot study, six adults ingested the peach-flavored Lollylab before and one hour after a standard 650-milligram dose of acetaminophen. The device repeatedly detected the pain reliever in their saliva, and participants reported it was more comfortable and easier to use than traditional saliva swabs.

Phones

A US state just approved an AI doctor. For now, it’ll only prescribe acne cures.

Aside from acne, Nolla's AI can also handle redness, fine lines and wrinkles, hyperpigmentation and dark spots, and under-eye bags.

Nolla Derm AI doctor app.

The first AI doctor is here. Despite all the skepticism and risks associated with AI models going haywire, the state of Utah just approved Nolla Health, a company that is providing an AI healthcare expert capable of writing prescriptions without any human in the chain. For now, it will only write acne prescriptions for Utah residents over 18 years of age, willing to pay a token monthly subscription fee that's lighter than your Spotify bill.

The big push here is that the Nolla Derm app will reduce the costs of medical consultation, save users the hassle of clinic visits, and take out the problem of waitlisting from the entire healthcare equation. “Unlike telehealth platforms that use AI only to collect information before handing patients off to clinicians, Nolla's AI system is designed to independently issue initial prescriptions within tightly defined, physician-approved treatment protocols,” writes the company.

Emerging Tech

AI’s massive appetite could make cheap smartphones much harder to find

The smartphone aisle is getting pricier, and AI may be partly to blame.

Electronics, Mobile Phone, Phone

Buying a genuinely cheap smartphone could soon become a lot harder, and the reason has little to do with what’s happening inside the smartphone industry itself. The enormous amount of hardware being poured into AI data centers is pressuring global memory supplies. That has helped drive up the cost of making phones, and manufacturers appear increasingly reluctant to absorb those extra costs at the cheapest end of the market.

According to Counterpoint Research, prices of existing smartphones have increased by around 15% globally this year, while newly launched devices are roughly 25% more expensive than comparable models from last year. The impact hasn't been equal everywhere, either. Smartphone prices have climbed 21% in India and 19% across Asia-Pacific, compared with just 5% in the US.