Gale Crater
Eberswalde Crater
This Friday, NASA is set to announce just where the Mars Science Laboratory will set down on the red planet.
The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), or Curiosity robot, will land on the surface of Mars in August 2012. But where?
The two candidate sites are Eberswalde Crater and Gale Crater – both fascinating areas to study up close and personal, for now, by a robot. Curiosity is about twice as long and more than five times as heavy as any previous Mars rover.
Curiosity is being assembled and readied for a November launch at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The large Mars rover is geared to study whether the landing region had environmental conditions favorable for supporting microbial life and for preserving clues about whether life existed.
NASA and the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum will host a news conference at 10 a.m. EDT, Friday, July 22 to announce the selected landing site.
Eberswalde expert
“Naturally, since I have been the strongest advocate for the Eberswalde delta site dating back to the very first MSL landing site meeting five years ago, I feel this is the best location to dispatch MSL,” said James Rice, Jr., Co-Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover Missions. He is a scientist at the Planetary Geodynamics Laboratory of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Rice told this Coalition reporter that Eberswalde Crater is a closed basin that contained a lake in the past and the “smoking gun” is that “beautifully preserved” delta, Rice said.
“For the non geologist out there deltas are landforms created when rivers enter a ponded body of water and dump their sediment load thus forming the delta. This setting provides the ideal environment to preserve any possible biologic or organic materials,” Rice said. “MSL will land on what was once the bottom of this lake and examine these rocks before driving several km to explore the delta.”
Gale crater
In contrast, Rice also spotlighted Gale Crater.
“It contains a enigmatic mound of layered rock that rises several kilometers from its floor. So mountain climbing will be the order of the day once MSL drives several km across a dusty alluvial fan surface. Both sites contain clay minerals (phyllosilicates) which form in the presence of water,” Rice said.
Viking 1 landing: 35 years ago!
By the way, July 22 is Mars Day at the National Air and Space Museum. The annual event marks the July 20, 1976 landing of Viking 1, the first spacecraft to operate on Mars.
“I was still in high school when Viking 1 landed, but that mission ignited my desire to explore Mars,” Rice added. “And now 35 years later I am exploring Mars. It has been an amazing journey and I could never have imagined all that we have accomplished since then.”
By Leonard David