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Beyond water on Mars

Nature Geoscience volume 2, pages 231–233 (2009)Cite this article

Mars exploration has been guided by the search for water. The more complex quest by Mars Science Laboratory for habitable environments should illuminate the Martian environmental history, and possibly deliver insights into extraterrestrial life.

We live in the golden era of Mars exploration. Two rovers and three orbiters routinely analyse the current and past states of the planet's environment. These missions build systematically on earlier explorations and all have performed well past their nominal operational period, each generating impressive and sometimes astonishing results. With all the hardware in motion around Mars these days, the most remarkable achievement of Mars exploration is the high degree of both tactical and strategic coordination among the missions. It is the combination of results from a variety of missions and instruments that has propelled us ever closer to fathoming the broad range of environmental processes that have transformed the surface of Mars, beginning over four billion years ago.

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Figure 1: Scale models of Mars Science Laboratory (right) next to Pathfinder (centre) and Mars Exploration Rover (left).

NASA/JPL

Figure 2: Four potential landing sites for Mars Science Laboratory.

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Acknowledgements

Work on Mars Science Laboratory was sponsored by NASA. J. Crisp, W. Fischer, A. Knoll, R. Milliken, E. Stolper and A. Vasavada commented on the manuscript.

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  1. John Grotzinger is in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA. grotz@gps.caltech.edu,

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Grotzinger, J. Beyond water on Mars. Nature Geosci 2, 231–233 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo480

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