NASA says ready to build Mars 2020 rover

The Mars 2020 rover has gone through "an extensive review process" and passed "a major development milestone," NASA said in a statement.

If everything goes smoothly, the six-wheeled robot will be launched in summer of 2020, arrive on the Red Planet in February 2021, and then begin to investigate a region where the ancient environment may have been favorable for microbial life, it said.

Throughout its investigation, the rover will collect samples of soil and rock, and cache them on the surface for potential return to Earth by a future mission.

"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," said Geoffrey Yoder, acting associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

"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."

To reduce risk and provide cost savings, the 2020 rover will look much like its six-wheeled, one-ton predecessor, Curiosity, but with an array of new science instruments and enhancements to explore Mars as never before, NASA said.

For example, the rover will conduct the first investigation into the usability and availability of Martian resources, including oxygen, in preparation for human missions.

Mars 2020 will carry an entirely new subsystem to collect and prepare Martian rocks and soil samples that includes a coring drill on its arm and a rack of sample tubes.

About 30 of these sample tubes will be deposited at select locations for return on a potential future sample-retrieval mission.

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