‘Curiosity’ Should Provide Insight Into Mars

November 14, 2011 — It’s bigger and better. And it’s about to launch to Mars. NASA's most advanced mobile robotic laboratory, which will examine one of the most intriguing areas on Mars, is in final preparations for a November 25 launch, weather permitting, from Florida's Space Coast. The Mars Science Laboratory mission will carry Curiosity, a rover with more scientific capability than any ever sent to another planet. The rover is now sitting atop an Atlas V rocket awaiting liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Scheduled to land on the Red Planet in August 2012, the one-ton rover will examine Gale Crater during a nearly two-year prime mission. Curiosity will land near the base of a layered mountain 3 miles high inside the crater. The rover will investigate whether environmental conditions ever have been favorable for development of microbial life and preserved evidence of those conditions. Curiosity is twice as long and five times as heavy as earlier Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. The rover, which is about the size of a Mini Cooper, will carry a set of 10 science instruments weighing 15 times as much as its predecessors' science payloads. However, the mission is challenging and risky. Because Curiosity is too heavy to use an airbag cushioned touchdown, the mission will use a new landing method, with a rocket-powered descent stage lowering the rover on a tether like a kind of sky-crane. The mission will pioneer precision landing methods during the spacecraft's crucial dive through Mars' atmosphere next August to place the rover onto a smaller landing target than any previously for a Mars mission. Follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter.

The payload fairing containing NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft is attached to its Atlas V rocket on November 3. Photo credit: NASA A side view of the rover, Curiosity, which will launch on November 25. Photo credit: NASA

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