NASA footage reveals its Mars 2020 rover doing a 'bicep curl' that will let the robot grab samples

It will be one of NASA's most ambitious missions and, to prove its prowess, the space agency has released footage of it Mars 2020 rover flexing its proverbial muscles - by performing heavyweight bicep curls. In a time-lapse video taken at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, earlier this month, the rover's 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) arm handily maneuvers 88 pounds' (40 kilograms') worth of sensor-laden turret as it moves from a deployed to a stowed configuration. This is no mean feat considering it's fitted with five heavy electrical motors and five joints - known as the shoulder azimuth joint, shoulder elevation joint, elbow joint, wrist joint and turret joint. Buff: The rover's 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) arm handily maneuvers 88 pounds' (40 kilograms') worth of sensor-laden turret as it moves from a deployed to a stowed configuration The turret itself includes HD cameras, a scanning instrument, X-ray technology and a coring mechanism for digging into the red planet. On Mars, the arm and turret will work together, allowing the rover to work as a human geologist would: by reaching out to interesting geologic features, abrading, analysing and even collecting them for further study. This will be done via the Mars 2020's Sample Caching System, which will collect samples of Martian rock and soil that will be returned to Earth by a future mission.