NASA says it is ready to proceed with the final design and construction of its next and arrive on the Red Planet in February 2021, according to a NASA press release.

, with landing in a yet-to-be-determined spot in February 2021, where it will explore the Martian surface for at least two years, mission team members said.

"While we're there, the major scientific objective of the mission is to seek the signs of life," Mars 2020 project scientist Kenneth Farley, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said during a on Friday.

Similar to Curiosity

The 2020 rover, which will be similar to its six-wheeled, one-ton predecessor, Curiosity, will probe Martian rocks for evidence of past life in a region of Mars where the ancient environment may have been favorable for microbial life. While the rover will not bring back samples to Earth, it will collect samples of soil and rock and cache them on the surface for potential return to Earth by a future mission.

“The Mars 2020 rover is the first step in a potential multi-mission campaign to return carefully selected and sealed samples of Martian rocks and soil to Earth,” said Geoffrey Yoder, acting associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “This mission marks a significant milestone in NASA’s Journey to Mars – to determine whether life has ever existed on Mars, and to advance our goal of sending humans to the Red Planet.”

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The Mars 2020 rover, with a price tag of $1.9 billion, will also carry other instruments, including an instrument called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resources Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), which will generate oxygen from the carbon-dioxide-dominated Martian atmosphere. Researchers hope MOXIE will demonstrate technology that future human explorers could use on the Red Planet, NASA officials said.

Looking For Signs of Past Life

The SuperCam will fire a powerful laser at rocks to vaporize them and allow Mars 2020 to determine their composition from afar. Other instruments will include an advanced weather station and spectrometers that will potentially enable mission scientists to detect carbon-containing organic molecules, an indicator of life, in Martian samples.

The Mars 2020 rover will use the same sky crane landing system as Curiosity, but will be modified to allow the rover to land in more challenging terrain, making more rugged sites eligible as safe landing candidates, according to the press release.

"As it is descending, the spacecraft can tell whether it is headed for one of the unsafe zones and divert to safe ground nearby," Allen Chen, Mars 2020 entry, descent and landing lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, said in the same statement.

"With this capability, we can now consider landing areas with unsafe zones that previously would have disqualified the whole area," Chen added. "Also, we can land closer to a specific science destination, for less driving after landing."

Sounds From the Red Planet

There will be high-resolution cameras and a microphone that will capture the never-before-seen or heard imagery and sounds of the entry, descent and landing sequence. NASA says information from the descent cameras and microphone will "provide valuable data to assist in planning future Mars landings, and make for thrilling video."

"This will be a great opportunity for the public to hear the sounds of Mars for the first time, and it could also provide useful engineering information," said Mars 2020 deputy project manager Matt Wallace of JPL.

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