...The Mars Science Laboratory (click title to entry - thank you) rover, nicknamed Curiosity, is slated to launch around Thanksgiving this year and to arrive at Gale crater in the late spring of 2012. The car-size rover will be the first astrobiology experiment on Mars since the Viking mission in 1976....
NASA has unveiled new details (click here) on its first big post-shuttle mission, and the agency has already picked the perfect name for the rover that will be doing all the heavy lifting: Curiosity.
The $2.5 billion, car-sized rover will be fired off into space later this year, tasked with navigating its 10 different science instruments and 17 cameras over to the Gale Crater on Mars. It's a 96-mile-wide area just a little south of the planet's Martian equator that scientists hope will be able to shed more clues about the possibility of life on Mars at a prior point in its history.
"We believe that at Gale Crater, we have located that boundary where life may have sprung up and where it may have been extinguished," said John Mustard, planetary geologist at Brown University, in a statement. "That's why we're going there."
Scientists caution that the purpose of this mission is not to find...
