NASA is going back to the golden age of space travel, but they’re taking it one giant leap further.

The video below was released as a kind of teaser trailer announcing their plans for the foreseeable future. The space agency plans to establish a permanent human presence on the moon, and then venture beyond to Mars.

The video itself is pretty epic, and I defy you to watch it without wanting to get on board a rocket ship.

I reckon this is the kind of video that could well inspire the next generation of astronauts:

In other Mars-related news, NASA has selected the spot where they plan on landing their next Mars rover in 2020, reports The Verge.

The region in question was likely an ancient river delta. The rover will attempt to touch down in Jezero Crater, an area that may have been habitable billions of years ago.

This new rover is the successor to the last one that NASA landed on Mars in 2012, known as Curiosity. That robot has been exploring a region on Mars known as Gale Crater, a spot that also was a lot wetter in the past than it is today.

Curiosity has learned a great deal about its little slice of Mars over the last six years. It found organic material in the Martian soil and detected methane — a gas mostly produced by life here on Earth. But with the new Mars 2020 rover, NASA hopes to finally get an answer to a long-burning question: did biological life ever actually survive on the Martian surface?

At this stage, NASA is unsure how it’s going to get any samples collected by the new rover from the Red Planet back to earth, although I think we can safely assume that the human outpost on the moon might have some part in it.

There’s still a lot of development that needs to be done to prepare the Mars 2020 rover for its launch. The robot is slated to take off on top of an Atlas V rocket in July 2020, with a landing scheduled for February 2021. In the meantime, NASA is focused on landing another spacecraft on Mars this week — a robot called InSight, which will sit on the surface of the Red Planet and study the world’s interior. InSight has been traveling to Mars since its launch in May and is scheduled to land on Monday, November 26th.

Exciting times for space travel.

[source:verge]