Curious Mars Rover to Search for Life

On Saturday, a $2 billion science project will begin what NASA is calling a flagship mission to Mars to see if the red planet is capable of sustaining microbial life.

Equipped with 17 cameras, an on-board science lab, the six-wheeled rover named Curiosity will do what its predecessors Spirit and Opportunity failed to do — determine if there is liquid water on Mars that has the building blocks of life.

With the countdown at just over two days, team members are ready for launch. They say the robot-like rover will not be able to determine if there is life on Mars, unless something jumps out in front of the camera once the rover has safely landed in what scientists believe could be a dry lake or sea bed.

The Mars Science Laboratory has four mission goals, including determining if life ever arose on Mars, characterizing the climate, understanding the geology and preparing for human exploration in the future.

The Curiosity rover has 10 science instruments to search for evidence about whether Mars ever had environments favorable for microbial life, including the chemical ingredients for life like carbon. The rover will use a laser to look inside rocks and release their gases so its spectrometer can analyze and send the data back to Earth.

The flight to Mars will take the rover about nine months. It is scheduled to land in Gale crater, a 96-mile wide crater with an three-mile high island in the middle in August 2012.

While Curiosity begins where Spirit and Opportunity left off, a second Mars space orbiter nicknamed MAVEN will join the new roving science lab in 2014 to take upper atmosphere samples in an effort to understand what caused the Martian atmosphere -and water- to be lost to space, making the climate increasingly inhospitable for life.

Paul Mahaffy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center says, “The ultimate driver for these missions is the question, did Mars ever have life? Did microbial life ever originate on Mars, and what happened to it as the planet changed? Did it just go extinct, or did it go underground, where it would be protected from space radiation and temperatures might be warm enough for liquid water?”

Curiosity will answer those questions.