A human mission to Mars has long been considered one of NASA’s strategic exploration objectives. Prior robotic missions have provided information that will help get humans safely to Mars and back, supporting human exploration has never been an explicit goal of a Mars surface mission.

One of the four stated primary objectives of the Mars 2020 mission is to acquire data and test technologies that will help prepare for crewed missions to Mars. Several new experiments onboard the rover will directly address this objective. The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) instrument will attempt to turn Mars’ carbon dioxide atmosphere into oxygen that can be used for astronaut consumption and rocket propellent. In situ resource utilization will likely play a vital role in any human surface mission, primarily due to a large amount of propellant needed to launch a crewed MAV off the Martian surface to return to Earth. Bringing a large reserve of propellant all the way from Earth is costly, so there is great interest in identifying Martian resources that could be utilized to produce fuel on the surface and decrease spacecraft payloads.

The Martian atmosphere is one potential propellent source and subsurface ice is another. The Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX) instrument on Perseverance is the first ground-penetrating radar ever sent to the surface of Mars. It uses radar sounding to “see” many meters below the surface. Radar instruments in orbit around Mars have revealed evidence of vast subsurface ice deposits in some parts of the planet. If this ice could be extracted from the subsurface it could be used to produce fuel in situ. An instrument like RIMFAX could aid in the identification of these ice deposits from the surface.