Random Walk
The Crater-to-Canyon Tour
JPL’s latest rover, Curiosity, is now at Cape Canaveral awaiting its November 25 to December 18 launch window. On July 22, NASA announced its destination: Gale Crater, 154 kilometers in diameter (about the combined area of Connecticut and Rhode Island) and with an imposing central mountain five kilometers tall that looms higher over the crater floor than Mount Rainier does over Seattle. The plan is to set the rover down on an alluvial fan formed of loose material washed down from the crater walls. After studying the soil, Curiosity should be able to drive to the mountain, whose lowest layers contain clay minerals and sulfate salts usually formed in wet conditions on Earth. “Gale Crater is very low,” says John Grotzinger, the Fletcher Jones Professor of Geology and Curiosity’s project scientist. “It’s a place where water might have pooled and formed lakes.”
And where there was water, there may have been life; if microbes once flourished there, they may have left organic molecules behind. Unlike its predecessors, Sojourner, Spirit, and Opportunity, Curiosity is equipped with a mass spectrometer, a gas chromatograph, and a tunable laser spectrometer, all for detecting these molecules.
A canyon cuts deep into the mountain; as Curiosity trundles up the sloping canyon floor, rock layers representing tens or even hundreds of millions of years of Martian history will be exposed to its view. Curiosity’s primary mission will last one Martian year, or very nearly two Earth years, during which Earthbound scientists will be able to chronicle unprecedented eons of environmental change on our sister planet.
After the primary mission ends, Grotzinger hopes Curiosity will climb to a region of lighter-colored rocks near the top of the mountain. These rocks appear to be very soft and easily eroded by the wind, unlike the rock layers lower down, and their composition is a mystery; if Curiosity can make it that far, the rover will be able to determine their makeup and possibly their origin. —DS
Gale Crater is at 4.5 degrees south latitude, 137.4 degrees east longitude. The The target ellipse (yellow) is 20 by 25 kilometers. This southward-looking view of the landing site was created by combining images from JPL’s Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter with elevation data from JPL’s Mars Global Surveyor. The vertical dimension is not exaggerated.
Watch a video of the landing site, narrated by Grotzinger, at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.cfm?id=1005
On June 3, Curiosity was still in the JPL clean room where it was built, undergoing some final tests before being shipped to Cape Canaveral.
