By Nadia Drake
NASA’s six-wheeled Mars rover Curiosity now has a destination on the Red Planet: Gale Crater, an ancient, 150-kilometer-wide depression with a large mountain in the middle. The car-sized robot will spend at least two years wheeling around the rocky basin, collecting information about martian history and looking for signs of habitable environments.
![](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/14668.jpg?resize=300%2C167&ssl=1)
NASA announced the landing site for the $2.5 billion rover on July 22. Scheduled to launch later this year for an August 2012 landing, Curiosity and its payload of instruments will wheel around examining rocks, snapping photos and eating dust. There are 17 cameras on board; one on its belly will capture the probe’s dramatic descent to the surface. A laser will help Curiosity identify intriguing rocks to study; when it finds one, the rover will approach the rock and drill into it, producing a powder that it will then ingest and analyze.
Gale Crater’s central mound is a 5-kilometer-tall stack of sediments that scientists can read like chapters in a history book. The rocky pages will reveal Mars’ geologic and environmental history, including how much water may have drenched the basin once upon a time. The crater also features canyons and fissures that may once have been habitable.