Mars Science Laboratory
The aim of the Mars Science Laboratory mission, and its surface robotic payload Curiosity rover, is to search for signs of ancient life. It is hoped that a later mission could then return samples that the laboratory identified as probably containing remains of life. To safely bring the craft down, a 12 mile wide, smooth, flat circle is needed. Geologists hope to examine places where water once ponded. They would like to examine sediment layers. The Mars Science Laboratory landed on Aeolis Palus near Aeolis Mons in Gale Crater on 6 August 2012. The landing was 2.279 km (1.416 mi) from the target (4°35′31″S 137°26′25″E / 4.591817°S 137.440247°E / -4.591817; 137.440247), closer than any previous rover landings and well within the target oval.
Read more about this topic: Aeolis Quadrangle
Famous quotes containing the words mars, science and/or laboratory:
“Human beings will be happier—not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That’s my utopia.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922)
“The universe is the externisation of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore superficial. The earth, and the heavenly bodies, physics, and chemistry, we sensually treat, as if they were self-existent; but these are the retinue of that Being we have.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)