NASA's newest Mars rover Curiosity looks ready to soon start investigations, engineers report.
"Things are going very well," says rover science team chief John Grotzinger of Caltech, who reported that instruments continue to check out aboard Curiosity.
The rover landed on Mars on Aug. 6. The team plans to investigate a rock with a laser as a test within the week and later drive the rover to a location named "Glenelg," about five football fields away from the rover. (They picked the name from a list of names they have for investigation locations because it is a palindrome, and the location is a site they plan to drive over "coming and going" as they explore Mars, Grotzinger says.)
After completing initial investigations of the landing area of the rover, a flat, pebbly plain on the floor of Gale Crater on Mars, the team hopes to start driving toward Mount Sharp, or Aeolis Mons, around the end of the year. Mount Sharp is the real target of the two-year mission, aimed at searching for chemical signs of past habitability on Mars.
A parachute shell and other landing debris is also near the landing site and if it is not too much trouble, the rover may drive, "near but not very close," Grotzinger says, to see how the landing technology fared on its entry into the atmosphere of Mars.
