NASA’s Next Mars Rover to Land at Gale Crater

Gale Crater: Future Home of Mars Rover Curiosity
This view of Gale is a mosaic of observations made in the visible-light portion of the spectrum by the Thermal Emission Imaging System camera on NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter

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.

This drawing of the Mars Science Laboratory mission’s rover, Curiosity, indicates the location of science instruments and some other tools on the car-size rover.

Clockwise from upper left:

Mastcam is the Mast Camera instrument.
ChemCam is the Chemistry and Camera instrument.
RAD is the Radiation Assessment Detector instrument.
CheMin is the Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument.
SAM is the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument.
DAN is the Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons instrument.
MARDI is the Mars Descent Imager instrument.
MAHLI is the Mars Hand Lens Imager instrument.
APXS is the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer instrument.
The brush, drill, sieves and scoop are tools on the rover’s robotic arm.
REMS is the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station.

Mars Science lab mission site with photos

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.

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.

“Gale gives us attractive possibilities for finding organics, but that is still a long shot,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program at agency headquarters. “What adds to Gale’s appeal is that, organics or not, the site holds a diversity of features and layers for investigating changing environmental conditions, some of which could inform a broader understanding of habitability on ancient 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.

If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon. Thanks