THE MARS SCIENCE LABORATORY MISSION

Scheduled for launch in November of 2011, Mars Science Laboratory’s rover, Curiosity, will conduct an investigation of modern and ancient habitable environments. Curiosity has a designed lifetime of one Mars year (~2 Earth years), and drive capability of 20 km. The MSL payload was specifically assembled for the purpose of assessing habitability and includes a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer and gas analyzer that will search for organic carbon in rocks, soils and in the atmosphere; an x-ray diffractometer that will determine mineralogical diversity in rocks and soils; color cameras that can image landscapes and rock/soil textures in unprecedented resolution; an alpha-particle x-ray spectrometer for in situ determination of rock and soil chemistry; a laser-induced breakdown spectrometer to remotely sense the chemical composition of rocks and minerals; an active neutron spectrometer designed to search for water in rocks and soils; a weather station to measure modern-day environmental variables; and a sensor designed for continuous monitoring of background solar and cosmic radiation.

Gale Crater was chosen as Curiosity’s landing site based on several exceptional attributes: an interior mound of early Hesperian age flat-lying strata extending almost 5 km above the elevation of the landing site; the lower few hundred meters of the mound show a progression with relative age from clay-bearing strata to sulfate-bearing strata, separated by an unconformity from overlying anhydrous strata; the landing ellipse is characterized by a mixture of alluvial fan and high thermal inertia/high albedo stratified deposits; and a number of stratigraphically/chronological distinct fluvial features. Gale’s regional context and strong evidence for a progression through multiple potentially habitable environments represented by a stratigraphic record of extraordinary extent insure preservation of a rich record of the environmental history of Mars.