NASA HQ have announced that the mission lifetime of MSL has been extended indefinitely, beyond the current one martian year (2 terrestrial years). That’s good news for the sceince team, though not unexpected bearing in mind how well Curiosity is operating. As the plutonium power source has a half life of tens of years, hopefully we will be making discoveries for years to come.
There is also a plan for a new Curiosity class rover for 2020 which could explore one of the other landing sites in the MSL short list including the Eberswalde delta or Marwth Vallis . We don’t know what instruments Curiosity’s sibling will have yet but there has long been an aspiration for sample return from Mars. A first step in that multi mission process would be to cache samples for subsequent return, so that technology would interest many scientists.
The Insight static lander of 2016 will produce a seismic profile of the martian crust and mantle and the ExoMars rover due for landing in 2018 will be a European led rover designed specifically to test for signs of past or present life. Mission planning for that will be informed by the results from Curiosity. The MAVEN orbiter for 2013 will determine the rates of atmospheric loss from Mars and the ExoMars Orbiter of 2016 will provide stereo, colour coverage of Mars.
Some of the technology and instruments for these missions will come from the UK. For instance CCD detectors on CHEMIN and CHEMCAM are made by E2V, a UK company and the seismometer on Insight will have a UK lead. The University of Leicester has a major role in a Raman spectrometer for ExoMars and leads other possible instrumemts for landers including X-ray diffraction and the Life Marker Chip.
We are in a golden era of martian exploration.
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