Mars 2020 rover
Development of Mars 2020 remains on schedule despite uncertainty about when future phases of the overall Mars sample return effort will launch.

The five-week partial government shutdown earlier this year that delayed elements of other NASA missions may have provided a reprieve of sorts for a troubled instrument on the agency’s next Mars mission.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...