Unofficial: Cosmic

Approximately the size of a car, the Mars 2020 rover is equipped with six wheels like its predecessor Curiosity. NASA's Mars 2020 will land in a long dried-up delta called Jezero Highlights Mars 2020 has been constructed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory NASA has provided 23 cameras on the rover along with two "ears" Mars 2020 will remain active for at least one Martian year The Mars 2020 rover, which sets off for the Red Planet next year, will not only search for traces of ancient life, but pave the way for future human missions to Mars, NASA scientists said Friday as they unveiled the vehicle. The rover has been constructed in a large, sterile room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, near Los Angeles, where its driving equipment was given its first successful test last week. Shown to invited journalists on Friday, it is scheduled to leave Earth in July 2020 from Florida's Cape Canaveral, becoming the fifth US rover t...

The High Bay 1 clean room within the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at JPL is seen in this image taken on Nov. 12, 2019. The Mars 2020 rover is visible just above the center. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech Built-in 1961, the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is the cradle of robotic space exploration.   The first probes launched to the Moon, Mars, and Venus were assembled here. So were all of NASA's Mars rovers, Galileo and Cassini (the first orbiters to Jupiter and Saturn), and the twin Voyager spacecraft that are scouting the farthest reaches of the solar system. A new rover, Mars 2020, is going through final testing in this facility before being shipped in February to Cape Canaveral, Florida, where it will launch this summer. The Spacecraft Assembly Facility's construction marks when JPL transitioned from missiles to space exploration, according to JPL historian Erik Conway. "It's where a...