The agency's car-sized Curiosity rover celebrates eight (Earth) years on the Red Planet today (Aug. 5), less than a week after the Perseverance rover took flight toward Mars. .
And the new rover will build upon the many discoveries that Curiosity has made over the years.
Related: Amazing Mars photos by NASA's Curiosity rover (latest images)Â .
The main goal of Curiosity's $2.5 billion mission, officially known as Mars Science Laboratory, involves assessing whether Gale could ever have supported Earth-like life.
The nuclear-powered robot has returned exciting news on this front, finding that the crater hosted a potentially habitable lake-and-stream system for long stretches in the ancient past, perhaps millions of years at a time.
Curiosity has also detected complex organic chemicals, the building blocks of life as know it, in Gale Crater rocks.
For the past six years, the rover has been climbing through the mountain's foothills, reading the rocks for clues about Gale's past habitable environments and how Mars transitioned into the cold, dry desert planet we know today.
The new rover will hunt for signs of ancient life in Mars' 28-mile-wide (45 km) Jezero Crater, which was home to a lake and a river delta long ago. .
UK
Australia
France
Germany
Russia
India
Canada