The Mars 2020 Mission Explained

Hooray, we're finally going to Mars, and it's only a matter of time before we'll have a colony and then a civilization and before you know it, a bunch of badass Martian marines in Iron Man suits poised to defend their new world against everyone still living on the barely habitable planet Earth. Alas, though, Mars 2020 is still not a manned mission, in fact, a manned mission probably won't happen until at least the late 2030s, and from there it will be a long time before a few astronauts turns into Matt Damon turns into a colony turns into a civilization complete with badass Martin marines in Iron Man suits. Sorry.

We're taking baby steps, though, and we will be returning to the Red Planet this year with the still-unnamed Mars 2020 mission, which will look almost exactly like the last mission with a few notable exceptions. So don't expect to be wowed with memorable soundbites and the eventual conspiracy theories about how it all happened on a sound stage, but there will undoubtedly be some great moments and important discoveries. Here's what you can expect from Mars 2020.

If you've been getting most of your information about space from the Star Wars franchise, you may not be super well-versed in exactly what's been happening on the Martian front over the past few decades. We really started to take the Mars thing seriously in 2003 with the launch of the two rovers Spirit and Opportunity, but those missions weren't our first trips to Mars. 

According to NASA, our relationship with Mars goes all the way back to 1965 when Mariner 4 shot the first photos of another planet from outer space. Since then, missions to Mars have been plenty — we even landed a spacecraft on the surface as early as 1975. But the Mars missions really came into their own in 2004 with Spirit and Opportunity. Those rovers were different because they were designed for the uneven and rugged Martian terrain, so they were a lot more mobile than previous rovers like the 1997 Mars Pathfinder, and they were packed with sensitive and sophisticated equipment dedicated to answering one important question: Was there ever life on the Red Planet?

Spirit and Opportunity were designed to last 90 Martin days in the harsh other-worldly environment, and they both exceeded expectations. Spirit lasted for 2,200 Martin days and Opportunity was still sending data back to Earth 14 years after it landed. Did they find signs of life? Sort of. Opportunity found hematite and spirit found carbon — both substances that are associated with a wet environment.

Curiosity is still functioning and still providing scientists with data, so why mess with a good thing? Well, Mars is a big planet so why limit yourself to exploring only one small part of it? According to NASA, Mars 2020 is similar to Curiosity, but it has a few advantages over its predecessor. 

First, it's slightly longer and significantly heavier than Curiosity. It gathers samples a little differently, too. Curiosity pulverizes rock; Mars 2020 will collect intact core samples. Which would be cool if it could then, you know, send those core samples back to Earth via Martian UPS or something, but obviously it can't. Unlike most other government agencies, though, NASA at least has mastered patience. Those core samples will be placed in a cache where they can hopefully be retrieved by future missions (though probably not until 2026 or 2027) for eventual return to Earth, thus saving those future missions from having to also take core samples. 

Curiosity has mostly been looking for signs of a once-habitable environment — Mars 2020 will go one step beyond that and look for signs of life itself. 2020 will be searching for the biosignatures of microbial organisms. Scientists don't expect to find anything still living — Mars is pretty inhospitable today — but they hope to be able to show that things once lived there. Meanwhile, Curiosity promises not to feel at all overshadowed by its bigger, more important sibling.

Black and white television hasn't been a thing in the US since the 1960s, so it's kind of baffling that NASA, in its infinite wisdom, chose to equip Curiosity with 13 black and white cameras and only four that are capable of capturing images in color. According to NASA's engineering camera team lead Justin Maki, most of Curiosity's cameras are black and white "because that's all the rover really needs in order to detect rocks and other obstacles." Lame. To be fair, though, a lot of what we've seen from Curiosity was shot by those few color cameras, which are in charge of capturing all of the sciency images. 

Mars 2020 will once again one-up its predecessor by featuring not 17 but 23 cameras, most of which are color. One of the cameras — called "Mastcam-Z," will be able to zoom and shoot panoramas. It will also be able to shoot high-definition video, which should give us a good long look at absolutely nothing, since the Red Planet is completely devoid of life and nothing ever happens there. That's not the only upgrade, though. 2020 will also have "ears," so it will be able to record the Martian wind and the sound of its own, lonely wheels crunching over the rocky, desolate surface of the planet. Cool.

And in what will surely be the final blow to Curiosity's now fragile ego, Mars 2020 will also be smarter than Curiosity. Ouch. 

According to NASA, a Mars rover has to wait for commands from its human overlords — err, NASA — before it can do anything or go anywhere. That means that the rover is essentially crippled until it gets its set of commands for the day, which can take up to seven hours for the rover team to put together. Curiosity is almost entirely dependent on the commands it receives from Earth, but Mars 2020 will have a much higher degree of autonomy. It will also be able to calculate its path five times faster than its predecessor, which means it's basically smarter. The ability to self-drive means it will take less time — about five hours — for the team to put together the rover's set of daily instructions, which ultimately means that 2020 will provide Earth with more data over its lifetime. Sorry, Curiosity.

In The Martian, Matt Damon gets his butt kicked by a massive dust storm. That wasn't something someone just made up for the movie, either. Well, it sort of wasn't made up for the movie. Mars does have dust storms but according to Science Alert, they aren't massive, at least not compared to some of the hurricanes we have here on Earth. They can cause damage, though, as the hapless Opportunity rover learned when it was taken down by one. So before we can put people on Mars, we need to know what the actual deal is with Martian weather.  

According to CNN, 2020 will carry a suite of sensors called the "Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer," or MEDA, which will study the dust and radiation on the surface of Mars, and learn more about how those things might change with the seasons. Because even though seasons on Mars are basically just "really cold" and "unbearably cold" and "kill me please," Mars does have seasons. MEDA will help scientists understand how temperature, wind, and pressure affect the surface of the planet, which will give them a better idea about how humans and their stuff might do if subjected to those conditions for long periods of time.

It's all well and good to land on Mars, but most astronauts probably want to go home again after the mission is over. Unfortunately, it will take between 33 and 50 tons of fuel to lift off from the Martian surface, which is a lot of weight to have to carry across the solar system. 

Because it's really expensive and impractical to pack all that stuff with you on a 180 million mile journey, Mars 2020 will prove an important concept and hopefully eliminate the need to bring a bazillion tons of rocket fuel all the way from Earth on every single mission to Mars. According to NASA, the oxygen-generating MOXIE experiment that 2020 will have on board will do more than just figure out how to give astronauts air to breathe while they're on the surface of the Red Planet. If MOXIE can make liquid oxygen from the Martin atmosphere, then larger versions of the technology could provide around three quarters of the propellant astronauts will need for the entire mission. That's a critical piece in figuring out how to make a manned mission feasible.