Mars 2020 Mission Overview
[Narrator] NASA's next Mars
rover is in development ━
and has an ambitious mission.
Decades of Mars research
from previous spacecraft
have shown the planet not only
had water in the ancient past,
but had environments that
could have supported life.
[Thomas Zurbuchen] Mars is
our neighboring planet
and in many ways the
most similar to us ━
and certainly in its history.
And the question whether
ancient life was there
is still the question that
keeps us up at night.
[Ken Farley] Mars 2020
has two new objectives:
to specifically seek
the signs of life,
and then sample materials
and prepare a cache
that could be returned to
Earth by a future mission.
[Thomas Zurbuchen] Mars
2020 is really the essential
first part of a sample
return mission.
So it actually looks at the
environment of these samples
and then collects them
and stores them.
Afterwards we will of course go
and bring these samples back.
So Mars 2020 is the first half
of a return trip.
[Farley] The Mars 2020 mission,
to the maximum extent possible,
follows the Mars Science
Laboratory (Curiosity) Mission.
We're gonna use a very
similar rocket;
a very similar cruise stage;
a very similar Entry,
Descent and Landing;
and the rover━when you step
back━will look almost identical.
[Erisa K Hines Stilley] Not only
were a lot of designs already
developed for the most part, but
we're also using a lot of spare
hardware that we had from MSL
(or “Curiosity”) for Mars 2020.
If you know where to look on
Lab, you can walk around and see
a lot of the EDL hardware and
the cruise stage hardware
that's already been built.
[Farley] And this is really
important for understanding
why this mission makes sense.
We have to do relatively little
in the way of new development.
This saves money; it saves risk;
it saves time ━
it's the right way to pursue
this kind of mission.
[Narrator] Mars 2020 also
features new technologies 
for Entry, Descent and Landing━-
allowing it to target a
smaller landing zone,
and even divert from
known risks in the area.
[Hines Stilley] It means that we
can both go to places that are
maybe more interesting
to the scientists
because we're able to handle
places with more hazards,
as well as land closer to the
things they're interested in
off the bat ━ so we get to
the science they care about,
and more quickly.
[Farley] The three key sites
that we are considering
right now share one thing
in common: they are all
environments that
might have been habitable
in the very distant past.
One of them is the
floor of an ancient lake;
another is a hot spring;
and the third one is a site
where hot water interacted
with rocks in the
shallow subsurface.
We have instruments on board
which are expressly designed
to seek evidence of ancient life
━ what we call “biosignatures” 
━ and we have the capability
to prepare samples,
drill them out of a rock,
seal them in a tube,
so that a future mission could
go and bring them up ━
we call that “caching.”
[Zurbuchen) So it is a first
of a new type of mission,
which is to bring samples back
to the best labs we have,
which are here on Earth.
Mars 2020 is a pivotal mission
in our search for life
that could finally answer
the age-old question:
“Are we alone?”
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
California Institute
of Technology
