NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Building on the success of Curiosity's Red Planet landing, NASA announced plans for a robust multi-year Mars program, including a new robotic science rover set to launch in 2020. The plan to design and build a new Mars robotic science rover brings a total of seven NASA missions operating or being planned to study and explore our Earth-like neighbor.

The 2020 mission will constitute another step toward being responsive to high-priority science goals and the president's challenge of sending humans to Mars orbit in the 2030s. The future rover development and design will be based on the Mars Science Laboratory architecture that successfully carried the Curiosity rover to the Martian surface this summer. This next rover mission ensures America remains the world leader in the exploration of the Red Planet, while taking another significant step toward sending humans there in the 2030s.
 

TRT: 1:09
Supers:
                NASA
                John Grunsfeld, Associate Administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate
                HQ Contact – Dwayne C. Brown, 202-358-1726
                For more information: www.nasa.gov/mars

John Grunsfeld, NASA Associate Administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate

TRT: 0:19-“And so I am very, very proud to announce today that we are going to build a science rover for 2020 launch to Mars.  It is going to be based on the MSL chassis, it’s really building on the tremendous success of the engineering for Curiosity.”

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John Grunsfeld, NASA Associate Administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate

TRT: 0:32“While 2020 may seem a long way off, it really is not Curiosity was about a decade in the works.  Now fortunately, and this is the reason why we can do this within the President’s fiscal 13 subnet, is one, it moves it out to 2020 so that the phasing is more favorable of the dollars that we have available, and also we have a tremendous of systems engineering and even spare parts left from the MSL chassis and those really are the enabling things that allow us to do this.”

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