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Airbus is designing a Mars rover to return soil samples
Back in April, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) agreed to figure out whether it's possible to bring Martian soil samples back to Earth. Now, the ESA has granted Airbus a $5.2 million contract to design a concept for a rover that can collect those samples on the red planet. The space agency has chosen Airbus' team in Stevenage, England, because they're already building the ExoMars rover that's scheduled to head to our neighboring planet in 2021. Unlike ExoMars and all its scientific instruments, the fetch rover's lone task is to find and collect the canisters of samples NASA's Mars 2020 rover prepares and leaves behind. However, that doesn't mean that designing the vehicle would be easy.
