NASA ready for November rover launch

NASA's most advanced mobile robotic laboratory is to examine one of the most intriguing areas on Mars and is set to launch November 25.

This computer-generated view depicts part of Mars at the boundary between darkness and daylight, with an area including Gale Crater beginning to catch morning light. Image: NASA/JPL.

The Mars Science Laboratory mission will carry Curiosity, a rover with more scientific capability than any ever sent to another planet. The rover is now sitting atop an Atlas V rocket awaiting liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

Scheduled to land on the Red Planet in August 2012, the one-ton rover will examine Gale Crater during a nearly two-year prime mission. Curiosity will land near the base of a layered mountain 3 miles (5 kilometers) high inside the crater.

The rover will investigate whether environmental conditions ever have been favorable for development of microbial life and preserved evidence of those conditions.

Curiosity is twice as long and five times as heavy as earlier Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. The rover will carry a set of 10 science instruments weighing 15 times as much as its predecessors' science payloads.

These extracts are courtesy of NASA.

Please click here to view this original press release in full, courtesy of NASA.

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