Nasa to send new rover to Mars in 2020

Jesus, I'm all for sending out as many missions as Congress will pay for, but another Mars rover? Can't they throw a little bit of money towards sending a melt-bot to Europa or Enceladus, or a boat-bot to Titan already? It'll be 2015 before we even know what Ceres really looks like.<p>Mars is certainly critically important, but the solar system is a massive place, and with such limited budgets why wouldn't you spend at least a chunk of your resources on explorations that have the potential of finding life in our solar system? We've known about these options for decades, and yet each mission gets scrapped at the last minute. I don't get NASA's priorities sometimes.<p>Also, in that time frame Elon Musk, China, and even NASA have bounced around various plans for getting humans to Mars. I'm usually an advocate for robotic exploration, but for the deep digging you will probably have to do to find something interesting, it may be better to have boots on the ground (for example exploring for microbial life or fossils below the surface.) It really seems like we're at the beginning of a Mars space race anyway, and this rover will inevitably be cancelled 5-10 years from now in order to focus on beating the Chinese there.

This is good. They'll be able to ask the Chinese to walk over and repair it if it breaks.

It is naive to ask why another? I was under the impression that Curiosity was supposed to be like <i>the</i> rover to end all Martian rovers. What else do they need? It seems like there must be <i>something</i> else to do aside from.... rove. Maybe not manned exploration, but something to push things further towards that?<p>Or are they still stuck on "We must make a final, irrefutable conclusion on whether life has or has not existed on Mars prior to introducing organisms to the planet"? Am I the only one who thinks that the search is kind of, well, silly at this point? How much of the surface have they covered with rovers? I'd imagine it would take much longer, and a much more exhaustive search to come to any sort of definitive conclusion.

Well it looks like I'm going to be dead by the time they send something interesting there.<p>Back in the days of Apollo, they risked a hell of a lot in the name of exploration. It'd be nice to see the same spirit applied to Mars.

Doesn't Elon Musk want to have people walking around on Mars by 2020?

I think this kinds of headlines would really anger me if I were 85.

This is great news, but I hope Elon Musk's human crew will be watching the landing <i>from</i> Mars.

Why does it take so long? I mean 8 years to send a V2? what's stopping them rolling it out in 1 year?<p>I don't understand the reason for such an extended timescale.

I can't but think this is bad PR for NASA (in an unintended consequence kind of way).<p>"How cool is it that we've got an awesome rover on Mars! ...oh they're sending a new generation one there in 18 years time? Bah... now I have to wait for the good stuff to happen. Curiosity is already last generation gear."

I'd like to see it have an instrument to "culture" soil samples with various temperature, and moisture settings.<p>It would also try increasing atmospheric pressure, and sunlight to possibly speed up any biological reactions.

Anyone think it will be possible to crowd-fund a private rover by then?

By 2020 I'd kind of hope we're sending mostly-autonomous humanoid robots. Wouldn't that really inspire people's imagination? And they could start building the infrastructure for a colony.