The first woman and the first Australian to lead a NASA team that will search for life on Mars has criticised the Australian government's decision to slash its science budget, calling the cuts "tragic and embarrassing".

Geologist Abigail Allwood was announced as one of seven principal science investigators in NASA's next mission to the red planet, scheduled for 2020.

Dr Allwood, 41, is the first female principal investigator on a Mars mission.

"I'm pretty chuffed about that. I'd like to pave the way for other women to do the same thing."

"It's no longer an old boys club," said Dr Allwood, who went to school in Brisbane and now lives with her family in Los Angeles.

But Dr Allwood said she was disappointed to read about research funding cuts in her home country.

“I feel sad about the further cuts to science funding in Australia. It’s tragic and embarrassing,” she said.

“We have such a good education system, followed by a virtual brick wall for scientists.”

The federal government's latest budget cut $420 million dollars from several science organisations including the CSIRO, ANSTO, the Australian Research Council and the Co-operative Research Centres.

On Friday, NASA announced the seven scientific projects on its next Mars rover. The instruments will seek evidence of life, storing samples to be potentially returned to Earth in future return journeys.

The 2020 mission will also pave the way for future manned explorations.

Dr Allwood will be in charge of an instrument called the Planetary Instrument X-ray Lithochemistry, or PIXL for short, that will use X-rays to examine the chemistry of rock samples in search for evidence of life.

Any traces of life on Mars would almost certainly be microbial.

"Most people think that when we're looking for bio-signatures of life we're looking for organics or microfossils, but there are a lot of other types of traces that microbial life can leave in the rocks and our instrument will be able to detect some of those," said Dr Allwood.

Dr Allwood described the past six months since her team submitted their proposal for PIXL to be included in the 2020 mission as a "bit of a rollercoaster".

"I was starting to get the feeling that we might have been successful in the last few weeks as there were a few rumours on the grapevine, but you can never believe those."

"When the call came I was ecstatic," said Dr Allwood.

"My team and I were pretty proud," she said.

While the Mars 2020 mission will use a similar vehicle to the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars in 2012, its scientific kit will be geared for a very different type of investigation, said Dr Allwood.

The rover will carry a machine that can turn C0₂ into oxygen, two cameras and a sophisticated weather station.

"It'll be like equipping a geologist with the very best field equipment so they could do the best possible job of the field work," she said.

"The intention is that this rover will collect samples and cache them so that future missions can come and pick them up," she said.

In contrast to popular belief, there are no samples of Mars on Earth.

"The number of people that think we have samples and the that we've already found life there is mind boggling. It doesn't do justice to how difficult these things are [to find]."

Dr Allwood said the rover would most likely find clues of past life in samples that would need to be brought back to Earth to be thoroughly analysed.

"If you want to be serious about finding evidence of life you have to bring samples back, and you can't just snatch and grab samples, they have to be carefully documented," she said.

For instance, identifying one signature of past life - microfossils - would require instruments and preparation that were beyond the technical and budget scope of current Mars missions, she said.

Dr Allwood's rise to team leader has been incredibly fast considering the astrobiologist only arrived at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2006, having just completed her PhD at Macquarie University.

"It's not usually supposed to happen this quickly," she said.

In early research, Dr Allwood uncovered some of the oldest evidence of life on Earth, layered microbial sediments known as stromatolites, in the Pilbara.

When her findings were published in the journal Nature in 2006, she told the Herald: "The early Earth, like Mars, was an alien place. And this is a good guide for what we should look for there."

Eight years later, she said: "I've applied a lot of what I've learnt from doing research in the Pilbara to the Mars mission."

Dr Allwood's PhD supervisor, Malcolm Walter, said her appointment was "absolutely wonderful".

Professor Walter, the head of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at UNSW, said he was not at all surprised by her success at NASA because she was an ‘‘outstanding PhD student’’ who had compiled unparalleled evidence on ancient life on Earth.

Dr Allwood said leading her team would be both "exciting and daunting".

"I've got to deliver this instrument to NASA and that is no easy task. I've got some of the world's best engineers in my team but the buck stops at my desk," she said.

"It's not going to be all beer and skittles, that's for sure."