Following the Curiosity landing, NASA has announced a return in 2016. Tom Pike will be part of the InSight mission, exploring the planet's interior.

The InSight robot lander will carry instruments which will be used to study deep inside the planet, and help us understand more about how the rocky planets such as Mars and Earth were formed.

InSight beat two other proposals submitted to Nasa. It will be led from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Dr Tom Pike, who was part of the successful Phoenix lander team in 2008, leading the building of the microscope that examined the planet's soil, and helped detecting the ice that was present just under the surface, will be part of the forthcoming Insight mission.

The design of the InSight lander (which stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) leans heavily on the design of the Phoenix, with new instrumentation to carry out the investigations.

'A Phoenix rises'  Tom explains more about the new mission  in a BBC article. 21 August 2012