TO GO WITH AFP STORY BY Laurent BANGUET: "The Mars 2020 rover in search of ancient life on the Red Planet, before human missions"
TOPSHOT - The Mars 2020 Rover is seen in the spacecraft assembly area clean room, December 27, 2019 during a media tour at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. - The Mars 2020 rover, which will take off in a few months to the Red Planet, will not only search for possible traces of past life, it will also serve as a "precursor to a human mission to Mars," NASA scientists said December 27, 2019, when presenting the spacecraft to the press. The Martian robot made its first turns of wheel last week in the large sterile room of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, near Los Angeles, where it was born. It is scheduled to leave Earth in July 2020 from Cape Canaveral (Florida) and land on Mars in February 2021. (Photo by Robyn Beck / AFP)