Mars ho!

Early this morning EDT, NASA landed the largest rover yet onto the planet Mars, the fourth rock from the Sun. The Mars Science Laboratory, containing a car-sized rover named Curiosity, landed in Gale Crater via a sophisticated "sky-crane" technique involving a hovering component that gradually and gently lowered the rover to the surface.

Once it had landed, it beamed back a signal of its success and its first images of the crater surface in black and white:

Color images will come later when the main cameras have been activated. At this point, mission scientists are no doubt chomping at the bit to get the rover moving and exploring. Its primary mission is to determine whether Mars was ever capable of supporting life. While this may seem like an ambitious goal, NASA scientists have tried this type of thing before with the Viking landers so they know what sorts of tests don't work as expected. The Curiosity rover, outfitted with a huge array of instruments, should be able to perform far more complex measurements and analyses to measure the mineralogical composition of the Martian surface and to search for any potential chemical building blocks for life. Orbiting spacecraft had previously identified certain minerals within the crater that may have formed in a watery environment, so Curiosity will study these minerals further. If water did indeed exist to facilitate this mineral formation, then it may have also allowed microbial life to exist within the environment as well. Within the Gale Crater there also exists a mountain roughly 3 miles high named Aeolis Mons that Curiosity intends to investigate.

Mars has drawn the attention and inspired the imagination of humanity for well over 100 years. Since Percival Lowell's time spent at the telescope observing what he believed to be canals made by an intelligent but dying civilization, mankind has wondered about the existence of life on our red neighbor. While the existence of such canals was later dismissed, observations of changing dark features on the Martian surface and a spectrum that mimicked that of chlorophyll seemed to suggest that Mars may be covered with some form of vegetation that changed with the seasons. These observations led to the development of many great science-fiction thrillers, from "The War of the Worlds", written in 1898 by H.G. Wells and adapted into both a terrifying radio program and two movies, to "Invaders from Mars" and "Mars Attacks", people have wondered about the possibility of

hostile life on this mysterious world. Other speculative movies linking life on Mars to life on Earth include "Mission to Mars" and "Red Planet". And let's not forget "John Carter" and "Total Recall." While these movies vary in quality, they all address the idea of sending humans to Mars or being visited by beings from Mars.

While the Mariner missions revealed to us that Mars appears to be a dead planet, it does retain some characteristics that make it somewhat Earth-like. A wispy thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, canyons, mountains, and polar ice caps all bring to mind thoughts of Earth. However, its vast lifeless deserts and cratered surface more closely resemble the Moon. Mineralogical evidence that liquid water may have at one time existed on Mars have motivated mission after mission to explore its surface and look for fossilized evidence of life. Now that we have landed the most sophisticated instrument lab yet, we may be able to finally answer this question once and for all.

You can keep up with the Curiosity rover's progress and scientific findings via the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's website at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/.