Curiousity is up next this weekend. I hope there will be live broadcast of this.
Mars Curiosity: the 'Super Bowl' of space quests | FLORIDA TODAY | floridatoday.com
Quote:
If all goes well, the Curiosity rover will set down just south of the Martian equator, on the eastern side of the planet, inside a giant, gaping chasm.
Gale Crater spans almost 100 miles — an area as large as Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. Its most impressive feature: a central mountain that rises three miles from the crater’s floor. That’s higher than Mount Rainier looms above Seattle.
Planetary geologists are intrigued because data from the U.S. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter suggest the low-lying crater floor once was wet with water.
Sedimentary rocks form the mountain’s foundation. The base is topped by layer after geological layer of material laid down in sequential stacks.
Similar strata exposed in Arizona’s Grand Canyon exhibit evidence of the geological history of Earth. Scientists expect the layers within Gale Crater to yield evidence of the epoch-to-epoch evolution of the east-central region of Mars.
“What’s incredible about Gale (Crater) is that it’s all in one place here. Probably the entire early history of Mars is here for us,” said Ashwin Vasavada, a NASA deputy project scientist. “We couldn’t be more excited about that.”
Scientists also think the site might be rife with “organics” — carbonaceous compounds that are key chemical building blocks for life.
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