The decision has finally been made. A giant rover known as Curiosity (or the Mars Science Laboratory) that is the size of a Mini will be launched to make a landing in Gale crater on Mars.
As we’ve said, MSL is huge. The size of mini. Over twice the size when compared to the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity. The Sojourner rover insignificant in comparison.
Gale crater is pretty big too, 154km across, and is an ideal place for a rover. It’s thought to hold a lot of evidence for past water on the Red planet. MSL itself has been designed to look for evidence of past life, whether Mars was ever habitable at all in its past. The rover will spend 1 Martian year exploring the surface (about 2 Earth years) and if the MER’s are anything to go by, Curiosity should last longer (although they are using different power generating sources).
The rover is also going to carry out the first precision landing on Mars. It’ll be using a very unique and ambitious system, a sky crane. I’d compare it to being as difficult as a manned lunar module landing, as in Apollo. It’s a pretty incredible system.
Curiosity will be launching sometime between the 25th November and the 18th December 2011 and landing between the 6th and 20th August 2012, so keep checking NASA’s website for updates.
Here are two videos showing the operation of the sky crane and another describing what Curiosity will be doing at Gale.