NASA’s Curiosity probe landed on the Mars in August and the US space agency says it plans to launch a robot based on the same technology in 2020.
NASA are planning to build the robot in the next eight years.
Central to Curiosity’s success was its ability to land in Mars’s giant equatorial bowl called Gale Crater.
John Grunsfeld, Nasa’s administrator for science said: “The new rover’s going to be based on the [Curiosity] chassis, and it’s really building on the tremendous success of the engineering of Curiosity,” he explained.
“While 2020 might seem a long way off, it’s really not. Curiosity was about a decade in the works.”
However NASA is facing tighter financial constraints, while the budget for Curiosity’s launch was in the region of $2.5bn, the budget for Nasa’s launch in 2020 will be $1.5bn (based on prices in 2015).
Image: Getty
