Question: What tasks will your latest rover be carrying out on Mars?

Craig Leff answered on 29 Apr 2020:

Our overall goal is to look for signs of past or present life. To do that, we have several types of cameras that can look at things in various wavelengths, and can look at things far away and very close (like a magnifying glass). We want to map as much of the surface as possible. There is also a ground-penetrating radar — it works like the radar used to track airplanes, but it points into the ground and the echoes it sees aren’t from wings, but from rocks under the ground. This helps us build a picture of what’s underneath us. There is a drill to collect material from as far down as 2 meters, and those samples are dumped into the inside of the rover (called the bathtub, because that’s what it’s shaped like) — in the bathtub are several complicated biochemical instruments that can determine if there are chemical signatures of something living or having lived on or under the surface.