To be clear, this particular mission is an unmanned mission, which of course has done many times before. But it would be the heaviest payload ever landed on Mars, and would pave the way for future manned missions.
(Would be a shame if contemporary car brand rivalry was a bigger hindrance to cooperation in space exploration than cold war rivalry was in the days of the Apollo/Soyuz docking)
Nor will you find something like a "planetary protection engineer" among their open positions.
And yeah, as aerovistae said, there may be other organizations like NASA who have instruments already ready or nearly ready to go.