NASA today announced its new Mars Rover will carry instruments and technologies that have the best chance of preserving evidence of past life on Mars that could be found on rocks or underground.

The as yet unnamed rover will be launched towards Mars in 2020. It takes about eight months to travel to the Red Planet.

Like Us on Facebook

To attain this aim, the car-size rover will carry seven instruments designed to work together to identify rocks and soil samples. Among these instruments are lasers and ground-penetrating radar.

The 2020 Mars rover will have six wheels, weigh one ton and land with the aid of a rocket-powered sky crane.

The Mars 2020 mission's science payload "overlap, and they complement each other," said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program.

"All of this leads to picking out those rocks that we want to core and cache and potentially bring back to Earth."

The new Mars rover will be equipped to detect signs of life. The mission's "science definition team" last year recommended the 2020 rover search for "biosignatures," store samples for potential return to Earth and advance NASA's goal of putting astronauts on Mars in the decade of the 2030s.

Examining Martian rocks and soil in well-equipped labs on Earth is the best way to search for signs of Martian life, according to scientists.

NASA said its 2020 rover will follow in the wheel tracks of its predecessor Curiosity rover, which landed in August 2012 to determine if Mars could ever have supported microbial life.

Scientists said Curiosity did achieve that goal by determining an area near its landing site was habitable billions of years ago.

Two of the 2020 rover's instruments are located on its head-like mast. MastCam Z is a stereoscopic camera system that can zoom in on interesting targets.

A laser-shooting SuperCam is an advanced version of Curiosity's ChemCam that allows the rover to determine the chemical composition of rocks from afar.

The rover will also carry two science instruments on its robotic arm: PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) and SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals).

PIXL is an X-ray flourescence spectrometer with a high-resolution imager. It will allow mission scientists to perform fine-scale investigations of Martian rocks.

SHERLOC is a spectrometer that will enable detailed study of rocks and also potentially detect organics.

The other three instruments will be housed in the rover's body. These instruments are a high-tech weather station called MEDA (Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer); a ground-penetrating radar system called RIMFAX (Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Exploration) and MOXIE, short for Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment.

MOXIE is designed to produce oxygen from Martian air to demonstrate technology that could be useful to allow human explorers to survive longer on Mars. The planet is is rich in carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

The ability to turn Martian carbon dioxide into breathable oxygen is useful for both propulsion and breathing.