NASA Narrows List Of Mars Landing Sites

Nov 20, 2008 Craig Covault/Cape Canaveral covault@...

The NASA Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover team has selected four finalist landing sites, all with ties to Martian water, as it moves toward final site selection next summer to support an Atlas V launch in September 2009.

The nuclear-powered MSL rover is the size of a small car and carries much more powerful instrumentation to assess whether life evolved at any of the watery sites.

"All four of these sites would be great places to use our roving laboratory to study the processes and history of early Martian environments and whether any of these environments were capable of supporting microbial life and its preservation as biosignatures," said John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology, the MSL project scientist.

For their Mars landings in 2004, Spirit and Opportunity needed safe target areas about 70 kilometers (40 miles) long. Mars Science Laboratory is designed to hit a target area roughly 20 kilometers (12 miles) in diameter. A new "skycrane" technology to lower the rover on a tether for the final touchdown can accommodate steeper slopes than the airbag method used for Spirit and Opportunity.

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