DEATH VALLEY, Calif. — Death Valley isn't a perfect stand-in for Mars — it's too hot here, for starters — but it's a great place to learn what NASA's new Curiosity rover will be doing once it arrives on the Red Planet in a few months.
The Curiosity rover is basically a huge robot geologist, and Death Valley is a geologist's dream landscape. Researchers have been coming here for decades, studying the desert's many ancient yet accessible rock layers to tease out Earth's complex and convoluted history.
One of these researchers is Caltech's John Grotzinger, who also happens to be the Curiosity mission's lead scientist. Grotzinger came out to Death Valley Monday and Tuesday to give a gaggle of journalists an inside look at how the 1-ton rover will go about its business.
A desert stand-in for Mars
Curiosity, the centerpiece of NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, launched in November and is due to touch down at the Red Planet's Gale Crater the night of Aug. 5. The rover's main task is to assess whether the Gale Crater area is, or ever was, capable of supporting microbial life. [ Photos: Curiosity's Gale Crater on Mars ]
To get at this question, Curiosity will take a variety of geological and geochemical measurements with its 10 science instruments. The MSL team will analyze this information in an effort to understand the evolution of Gale and Mount Sharp, the mysterious 3-mile-high (5 kilometers) mound rising from the crater's center.
Such detective work can be difficult enough for teams of human scientists here on Earth, so Curiosity has a big challenge ahead of it, Grotzinger said. But at least there are no plate tectonics on Mars to throw the rock layers into a confusing jumble, as has happened here in Death Valley and many other places on our planet.
"The cool thing about Gale is, a lot of what we get is just laid out flat for us to go study," Grotzinger said.
[msnbc.com]
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