$2.5B rover reignites NASA's search for habitability on Mars
— -- NASA is aiming its next Mars rover, a laser-equipped and nuclear-powered lab on wheels, for a Nov. 25 launch.
The space agency's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory "Curiosity" rover will reignite the search for signs that Red Planet could have harbored, or still could harbor, life forms, mission scientists say.
"It's not your father's rover," says NASA's Doug McCuistion. The 1,982-pound vehicle, "the largest and most complex machine ever placed on the surface of another planet," he says, now sits atop an Atlas V rocket at NASA's Kennedy Space Center.
Since 1997, NASA has tried to "follow the water" on Mars, seeking to answer whether life ever thrived there. In 2004, the agency's still-operating Opportunity rover discovered crater rock layers deposited by water, a crucial ingredient for life.
The new rover aims to build on those discoveries looking for signs of whether Mars' Gale Crater, could once have been habitable.
Following its launch, which could happen from Nov. 25 to Dec. 18, Curiosity will travel nine months to Mars, on a 354-million-mile trip. It will land in unprecedented fashion, first using a braking heat shield, then high-speed parachute and finally a rocket-powered "sky crane" to safely deposit the rover on the martian surface. "It is clearly not risk-free," JPL mission chief Peter Theisinger says.
"I am cautiously optimistic about the probability of (Curiosity's) landing success," says descent expert Robert Braun of Georgia Tech in Atlanta, a former space agency official. "There is residual risk in everything NASA does," he adds. "The rest is up to Mars."
"For planetary scientists, this rover is a 'dream machine,' " says mission researcher Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Outfitted with a drill-equipped robotic arm, chemistry-sensing laser and eight other instruments, the rover will roam Mars powered by a nuclear battery rated for a minimum lifetime of 14 years. Like previous nuclear generators used in lunar and deep space missions, the rover battery has been tested for impact integrity in the event of a launch disaster.
The rover lacks life-detection experiments, but instead investigates whether carbon and minerals used by living things persisted on Mars, focusing on the walls of ravines that appear shaped by water. "If we find those things, we will let you know," Vasavada says.
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