NASA's Next Nuclear-Powered Mars Rover: Building the Beast

This artist's concept shows the sky-crane maneuver during the descent of NASA's Curiosity rover to the Martian surface, which engineers dubbed "seven minutes of terror." The Mars 2020 mission will leverage the design of this landing system and other aspects of Curiosity's Mars Science Laboratory architecture.

MONROVIA, California — NASA's next nuclear-powered Mars rover, slated to launch in 2020, is slowly coming together. And while the Mars 2020 mission is largely based on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, which is now exploring the Red Planet, there are a variety of distinctions that set it apart. 

NASA's Mars 2020 rover mission is expected to explore a select site that's geologically diverse, is likely to have been habitable and to seek out signs of past life.

But the rover is also slated to collect and stash Mars samples in tubes and drop them off at a preselected depot point. Years later, according to NASA's plan, those Martian samples would be scooped up by a "ship and shoot" robotic mission to deliver the specimens back to Earth.