Life on Mars Ca(ClO) in the Phoenix soil has not interacted with liquid water of any form, perhaps for as long as 600 Myr. If it had, the highly soluble Ca(ClO) in contact with liquid water would have formed only CaSO. This suggests a severely arid environment, with minimal or no liquid water interaction. The Mars Science Laboratory mission is a NASA project that launched on November 26, 2011, the "Curiosity" rover, a nuclear-powered robotic vehicle, bearing instruments designed to assess past and present habitability conditions on Mars. The "Curiosity" rover landed on Mars on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater, near Aeolis Mons
Mars sample-return mission basis for a Mars sample-return mission. In September 2012, NASA announced its intention to further study several strategies of bringing a sample of Mars to Earth – including a multiple launch scenario, a single-launch scenario and a multiple-rover scenario – for a mission beginning as early as 2018. Dozens of samples would be collected and cached by the Mars 2020 rover, and would be left on the surface of Mars for possible later retrieval. A "fetch rover" would retrieve the sample caches and deliver them to a Mars ascent vehicle (MAV). In July 2018 NASA contracted Airbus to produce a