Mars Science Laboratory

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a NASA mission to land and control a rover named Curiosity on the surface of the planet Mars. The MSL was launched on November 26, 2011. The MSL successfully did the first-ever precision landing on Mars. It landed on Mars at Gale Crater on August 5, 2012 and began exploring the surface.

The goal of the Curiosity rover is to study the history of Mars. It was to see whether Mars has, or ever had, an environment able to support microbial life.  It indeed did that, finding evidence that 3 Billion years ago there was once water and an environment that could support life.  This means it found that life could have existed, but not that it certainly did.  It will also carefully look at samples scooped up from the soil and drilled powders from rocks.

Curiosity is five times as heavy as the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit or Opportunity and carries more than ten times their mass of scientific instruments . It was launched by an Atlas V 541 rocket. Curiosity will be expected to work for at least 1 Martian year (668 Martian sols/686 Earth days), but may live a lot longer than that. It will explore Mars with greater range than any other rover.

Mars Science Laboratory mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. The program is a long-term mission of robotic exploration of Mars. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology manages the program for NASA. The total cost of the MSL project is about US$2.3 billion.

References

More reading

Other websites

 MSL Home Page
MSL - Mission Summary - Animated/Extended Video (11:20)
MSL - Entry, Descent & Landing (EDL) - Animated Video (02:00)
MSL - Gale Crater Landing Site - Animated/Narrated Video (02:37)
MSL - NASA/JPL News Channel Videos
MSL - NASA/JPL Virtual Tour - Rover 
MSL - Construction - Recorded Video
 Send Your Name To Mars
 MSL - Demo , reported by The Planetary Society.
 MSL - Entry, Descent & Landing (EDL) - Description.  (PDF)
 ChemCam Mounted with LIBS for Classifying Carbonate Minerals on Mars  (PDF)
 MSL Press Kit

Category:NASA spacecraft
Category:Mars
Category:Spacecrafts launched in 2010s