This computer-generated view based on multiple orbital observations shows Mars' Gale crater as if seen from an aircraft northwest of the crater. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/UA
NASA's next Mars rover will land at the foot of a layered mountain inside the planet's Gale crater.
The car-sized Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity, is scheduled to launch late this year and land in August 2012. The target crater spans 96 miles (154 kilometers) in diameter and holds a mountain rising higher from the crater floor than Mount Rainier rises above Seattle. Gale is about the combined area of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Layering in the mound suggests it is the surviving remnant of an extensive sequence of deposits. The crater is named for Australian astronomer Walter F. Gale.
"Mars is firmly in our sights," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "Curiosity not only will return a wealth of important science data, but it will serve as a precursor mission for human exploration to the Red Planet."
During a prime mission lasting one Martian year -- nearly two Earth years -- researchers will use the rover's tools to study whether the landing region had favorable environmental conditions for supporting microbial life and for preserving clues about whether life ever existed.
"Scientists identified Gale as their top choice to pursue the ambitious goals of this new rover mission," said Jim Green, director for the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The site offers a visually dramatic landscape and also great potential for significant science findings."
NASA has selected Gale crater as the landing site for the Mars Science Laboratory mission. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
Curiosity is about twice as long and more than five times as heavy as any previous Mars rover. Its 10 science instruments include two for ingesting and analyzing samples of powdered rock that the rover's robotic arm collects. A radioisotope power source will provide heat and electric power to the rover. A rocket-powered sky crane suspending Curiosity on tethers will lower the rover directly to the Martian surface.
Drop test of the Mars Science Laboratory sky-crane landing system.
The portion of the crater where Curiosity will land has an alluvial fan likely formed by water-carried sediments. The layers at the base of the mountain contain clays and sulfates, both known to form in water.
"One fascination with Gale is that it's a huge crater sitting in a very low-elevation position on Mars, and we all know that water runs downhill," said John Grotzinger, the mission's project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. "In terms of the total vertical profile exposed and the low elevation, Gale offers attractions similar to Mars' famous Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system."
Curiosity will go beyond the "follow-the-water" strategy of recent Mars exploration. The rover's science payload can identify other ingredients of life, such as the carbon-based building blocks of biology called organic compounds. Long-term preservation of organic compounds requires special conditions. Certain minerals, including some Curiosity may find in the clay and sulfate-rich layers near the bottom of Gale's mountain, are good at latching onto organic compounds and protecting them from oxidation.
This oblique view of the lower mound in Gale crater shows layers of rock that preserve a record of environments on Mars.
The rover and other spacecraft components are being assembled and are undergoing final testing. The mission is targeted to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida between Nov. 25 and Dec. 18. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena manages the mission for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of Caltech.
More information: To view the landing site and for more information about the mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/msl andhttp://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ .
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The US space agency's unmanned Curiosity rover will explore a mountain on Mars that should read like "a great novel," revealing if signs of life ever existed on the red planet, NASA said Friday.
Clues sent home from Mars are important to NASA as it aims to build a spaceship capable of toting humans there by 2030, while private companies race to replace the shuttle with a capsule suitable for low-Earth orbit.
More than 150 scientists have spent years whittling down the landing site for Curiosity, the largest US rover ever, set to launch later this year and land in August 2012.
From an initial set of 30 potential spots, they finally decided on the Gale crater, which contains a five kilometer (three mile) high mountain, over its leading rival the Eberswalde crater, which is home to a dried-up river delta.
"In the end we picked the one that felt best," said John Grotzinger, MSL project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"This could be the tallest mountain in the solar system that we could actually climb with a rover," he said.
The mountain, tucked inside the 154 kilometer (96 mile) wide crater, is shaped like a broad mound so the six-wheeled rover can climb at least halfway up.
When Curiosity arrives over Mars, the car-sized craft will be lowered onto a flat part of the crater by tethers suspended from a rocket-powered sky crane, while a camera on the rover's base snaps high resolution images of the terrain beneath.
The vehicle, which uses a radioisotope power source for heat and electricity, will carry 17 cameras and 10 science instruments, as well as a potent laser beam, drill and robotic arm.
Its main job is to hunt for rocks that look interesting.
When it spots one that appears worthy, it will zap it with a laser beam that can reach up to seven meters (23 feet), creating a spark of light that scientists can analyze for hints about the chemicals contained inside.
If NASA wants an even closer look, Curiosity can grab the rock with its robotic arm, drill a hole creating a powder, then dump that powder into one of two holes in the rover where instruments are waiting to analyze the dust.
The project is meant to last two years, but NASA hopes that like other some of its other rovers in the past, Curiosity will outlive its expected potential.
John Grant, a geologist at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, described the mountain as "this enormous stack... of layered material which represents the opportunity to literally read chapters in a book of the history of past deposition on Mars."
Minerals in clays and sulfates at the base of the mountain are of particular interest because they can reveal if any microbial life forms may have been able to survive, dating back hundreds of millions of years.
"We expect to find variations in those minerals which will tell us about the water, how concentrated it was, whether it evaporated, and the sources of the water," said Dawn Sumner, a geologist at University of California, Davis.
"And that will give us the history of some of the ancient environments on Mars, how those changed, and help us evaluate the habitability of the planet."
The area also contains signs that water once flowed down the mountain, cutting a canyon into the rocks.
"What we have learned from 150 years of exploration, is that if you start at the bottom of the pile of layers and you go to the top, it is like reading a novel," said Grotzinger, referring to the first expedition through the Grand Canyon in 1869.
"And we think Gale crater is going to be a great novel about the early environmental evolution of Mars that offers strong prospects potentially for the discovery of habitable environments."
The rover is not a "life-detection mission and we cannot look for fossils," he added. "But we can look for organic carbon that may be observed there," which would indicate some life once existed.
The announcement of Curiosity's exact destination came 35 years after the first spacecraft, the Viking 1, landed on Mars in July 1976.
NASA's solar-powered rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, landed in 2004 on what was to be a three-month mission.
Opportunity is still trucking along, but in May NASA finally gave up on Spirit, believed to have frozen to death during the harsh Martian winter.
