At a press conference this morning at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, NASA announced that Gale Crater will be the landing site for the Mars Science Laboratory. Scheduled to launch in late 2011 and arrive at Mars in August 2012, Mars Science Laboratory is a rover that will assess the planet’s “habitability”—if it ever was, or is today, an environment able to support microbial life.
“Having the right instruments and knowing where to go are equally important,” said John Grant, Smithsonian geologist and co-chair of the landing site steering committee. “We looked for a site that has water associated with it, materials of interest that are concentrated and preserved and that is accessible so we can get to it. Gale Crater is a good place to explore because there is a mountain of layered materials rising from its floor. Much like chapters in a book, the sediments, minerals and layers in this stack record the story about what Mars was like in the past. The rover will investigate where sediments forming the layers came from and explore how the layers relate to the environments in which they formed.” Grant, who is a researcher in the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies, is also a member of the science team for Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity.
The announcement was made during the museum’s annual Mars Day!, a daylong educational event in which visitors meet scientists from CEPS and learn about the latest Mars research and current and future missions.
The National Air and Space Museum has been involved with planetary science research since before it opened to the public. In 1972, Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, the museum’s director, asked Farouk El-Baz to start a research center. El-Baz was one of the main scientists involved in selecting the landing sites for all Apollo missions and brought with him an extensive collection of lunar maps and photography. Under his direction CEPS became a unit devoted to active research in analysis of lunar and planetary spacecraft data.
On July 1, 1976, a signal from Viking 1, orbiting Mars, triggered the ribbon cutting at the opening of the museum. With the emphasis on Mars research in the late 1970s, the museum received several ongoing grants to study the geology of Mars, as well as analogs of Mars landforms in western Egypt. In the 1980s and 1990s additional staff added expertise in various areas of Mars research, including volcanology, geomorphology, mapping and climate change, all of which have terrestrial analogs.
Scientists at CEPS now perform original research and outreach activities on topics covering planetary science, terrestrial geology and geophysics and the remote sensing of environmental change. The scope of activities includes work on Mercury, Venus, the moon, Mars, asteroids and some satellites of the outer solar system, as well as corresponding field studies in terrestrial analog regions.
Staff scientists are currently at work on the following NASA and European Space Agency missions:
A life-size model of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity, on view for Mars Day!, will continue to be on display through Labor Day. To provide visitors with a panoramic 3-D view of the landing site, Gale Crater has been programmed into the Google Earth Station, also known as the Liquid Galaxy, an interactive display in the museum’s Moving Beyond Earth gallery. The National Air and Space Museum is on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., at Sixth Street and Independence Avenue S.W. The museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center is located in Chantilly, Va., near Washington Dulles International Airport.
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