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Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has been exploring the Martian surface for over a decade - that's an amazing ten years longer than the 3-month primary mission it began in January 2004. But with its great successes, inevitable age-related issues have surfaced and mission engineers are being challenged by an increasingly troubling bout of rover "amnesia."

Nasa's next Martian rover will attempt to make oxygen on the surface of the red planet when it lands there in 2021.

The rover will carry seven scientific projects, aimed at paving the way for future manned missions, seeking evidence of life and storing samples to be brought back in the future.

Among them is a device for turning the CO2 that dominates the thin Martian air into oxygen.

This could support human life or make rocket fuel for return missions

Joining Curiosity and Opportunity in 2020, the rover's payload will carry instruments that will cost about $130 million to develop. One of the major goals of NASA's next Mars rover is to process the atmosphere's carbon dioxide into oxygen for human breathing and potentially to oxidize rocket fuel. Scientists also hope to collect rock and soil samples that a future mission could bring back to Earth.

As soon as NASA announced finding evidence of liquid water on Mars last month, speculation erupted that scientists may be able to answer the age-old question: Is there life on Mars?

Technically, we already know the answer.

"The answer is, 'Yes,' and it's probably our own life," says David J. Smith, a scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View.

Here on Earth, bacteria cover every surface we touch. And despite efforts to keep spacecraft as clean as possible, bacteria have likely hitchhiked all the way to Mars on NASA missions. Bacterial contamination was detected on the rovers that have driven across the red Martian desert.