(LPAC)—As NASA gears up its in-depth and wordwide public access to coverage of the real-time landing of the Mars Curiosity rover, set for 1:31 AM EDT on Monday, August 6th, Mars Exploration Program director, Doug McCuistion, stated at a briefing today that the mission has a "huge reach" — into the past, into the future, and around the world.

NASA’s in-depth Mars exploration program — soon to come to an end, thanks to the Obama NASA budget cuts — until now has focused on finding evidence of water in Mars’ past. This is a "transition" mission, he explained, between seeking evidence of water, and the return to Earth of samples of rocks and soil from Mars, where the most sophisticated equipment might answer the question of whether there is, or was, life on Mars. The Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, is designed to assess the habitability of the area around its Gale Crater landing site. Key markers of habitability, McCuistion explained, are a solvent (water), energy, and carbon compounds. For the first time since the Viking missions of the 1970s, Curiosity will look for organic compounds on Mars. (These contain carbon, but are not necessarily biological in origin). This is a high-risk mission, with an innovative and daring system for landing on Mars (first proposed by Krafft Ehricke in 1959) which, if successful, will start Curiosity on its two-year exploration on Mars.

When the tiny breadbox-sized rover, Sojourner, landed on Mars in 1997, NASA registered more than one billion hits on its Internet mission web page — a record-setting number, at that time. The excitment about the Curiosity mission is palpable. The American Chemical Society has produced a video explaining the Martian chemistry experiments Curiosity will carry out. Ford
Motor Company has created a graphic, comparing the size of Curiosity to one of its SUVs, admitting that Curiosity uses decaying radioactive plutonium, not gasoline, for fuel. Dozens of museums around the country have created Mars exhibits and models of Curiosity, and New Yorkers can see what mission control at the Jet Propulsion Lab is seeing during the landing, by standing in Times Square watching the huge screen that most people watch on New Year’s Eve. [MGF]

For a map and listing of Mars events in more 80 cites in the U.S., see
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars/eventlocations/index.html

and:
http://search.nasa.gov/search/search.jsp?nasaInclude=curiosity&baynoteOrGSA=baynote&cn=nasa&cc=gov