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July 10th, 2013 
Peter Nolan
“To combine this suite of instruments would be incredibly powerful,”
said Jack Mustard, SDT chair and professor of geological sciences at Brown
University.
The rover would collect about 31 samples that might one day be returned to
Earth, representing “a legacy for understanding the development of
habitability on the planet,” he told reporters.
The US space agency has not yet devised the technology to bring the cache back
to Earth without disturbing its contents, and no plans have been set for any
potential sample-return.
The next Nasa mission to Mars is a November launch of MAVEN, an orbiter that
will study how Mars interacted with the solar wind and lost its atmosphere.
The European Space Agency will follow in 2018 with its ExoMars rover.
John Grunsfeld, Nasa’s associate administrator for science, said the 2020 Mars
rover would get the US space agency to the next step in the “quest to
answer the grand questions,” before a planned human mission in the
2030s.
“Do we see any evidence of past life in those habitable environments?”
he said, alluding to the aims of the future missions.
Edited for Telegraph.co.uk by Barney
Henderson
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