By Monday afternoon, we will know one of two new things about Mars: either NASA will have set a new rover down on its surface, or there will be a heap of metal where the rover tried to land. (See the ‘Seven Minutes of Terror’ video that has been making the rounds in the blogosphere.)
Given NASA’s generally strong record, we’ll bet on the former, which opens up a world of new things to know about Mars. The rover, called Curiosity, will put down at a destination within Gale Crater beginning at 1:30 AM EDT on August 6; through its homepage at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology, NASA will broadcast the proceedings online here. After it lands, it will spend nearly two years gathering mineral samples that it drills from rocks or scoops up from the ground, covering a distance of as much as a kilometer and a half each week. Curiosity’s overarching mission is to determine whether the landing area, at the base of a sedimentary mountain, “has ever had or still has environmental conditions favorable to microbial life.” If the rover provides evidence in the affirmative, it will change our understanding of the nature and history of life in our solar system. See here for more about the mission.
Curiosity will be the fourth rover on the planet. Following Sojourner’s arrival in 1997, two additional rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, landed on Mars in January 2004. They were charged with gathering information about the existence and state of water on the planet. Spirit and Opportunity, each with six wheels, analyzed the soil, rocks, and dust in the vicinity of their landing sites. Both rovers sent back evidence of past water—and Opportunity even discovered the first sedimentary rocks known to us on the planet, which appear to have lined the shore of an ancient sea.
Water is the without-which-nothing of life. Answering the question it is charged to take on, Curiosity will help fulfill one of the goals of NASA’s overall program for this initial phase of the exploration of Mars: namely, to determine whether life ever arose on the planet, to develop a comprehensive account of its climate and geology, and to prepare for human exploration of the planet. Stay tuned.