NASA rover to scout for habitable areas on Mars

A NUCLEAR-powered rover as big as a family car is set to begin a nine-month journey to Mars this weekend to learn if the planet is or ever was suitable for life.

The launch of NASA’s $2.5 billion (€1.87bn) Mars Science Laboratory aboard an unmanned United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket is set for a 3.02pm Irish time launch tomorrow from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, located just south of the Kennedy Space Centre.

The mission is the first since NASA’s 1970s-era Viking programme to directly tackle the age-old question of whether there is life in the universe beyond Earth.

“This is the most complicated mission we have attempted on the surface of Mars,” Peter Theisinger, Mars Science Lab project manager with NASA prime contractor Lockheed Martin, told reporters at a pre-launch press conference.

The consensus of scientists after experiments by the twin Viking landers was that life did not exist on Mars.

Two decades later, NASA embarked on a new strategy to find signs of past water on Mars, realising the question of life could not be examined without a better understanding of the planet’s environment.

“Everything we know about life and what makes a liveable environment is peculiar to Earth,” said astrobiologist Pamela Conrad of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and a deputy lead scientist for the mission.

“What things look like on Mars are a function of not only the initial set of ingredients that Mars had when it was made, but the processes that have affected Mars,” she said.

Without a large enough moon to stabilise its tilt, Mars has undergone dramatic climate changes over the eons as its spin axis wobbled closer or farther from the sun.

The history of what happened on Mars during those times is chemically locked in its rocks, including whether liquid water and other ingredients believed necessary for life existed on the planet’s surface, and if so, for how long.

In 2004, the golf cart-sized rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed on opposite sides of Mars’ equator to tackle the question of water.

Their three-month missions grew to seven years, with Spirit succumbing to the harsh winter in the past year and Opportunity beginning a search in a new area filled with water-formed clays. Both rovers found signs that water mingled with rocks during Mars’ past.

The new rover, nicknamed Curiosity, shifts the hunt to other elements key to life, particularly organics.

The spacecraft, which is designed to last two years, is outfitted with 10 tools to analyse one particularly alluring site on Mars called Gale Crater. The site is a 154km-wide basin that has a layered mountain of deposits stretching 4.8km above its floor.