NASA launches second Mars probe
Announced on its official website on December 4, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said it will launch its second Mars probe in 2020.
The structure and equipment of this second space rover are similar to the first Curiosity probe. However, this vehicle only costs 1.5 billion USD - helping NASA save about 1 billion USD compared to the cost of operating Curiosity (2.5 billion USD).
A photo taken by Curiosity of the surface of Mars. (Source: Reuters)
A day earlier, at the American Geophysical Union Conference in San Francisco, American scientists said that from the first analysis results that the Curiosity rover performed on Mars and transmitted back to Earth, they discovered water and a chemical compound but did not find carbon compounds while this is an essential element for the formation of life at the lowest level - bacteria.
Thus, up to now, the Curiosity probe has not found any solid evidence of signs of life on Mars.
NASA said the goal of the second probe would be to discover and select land for study, and search for other signs of life.
Currently, the Curiosity rover is considered the most modern and largest space probe ever, with a total weight of about 900kg, five times that of the "twin" rovers Spirit and Opportunity - the rovers that have been operating in the Martian atmosphere since 2004 but lost communication signals with Earth in 2010./.
According to (Vietnam+) - VT
