The U.S. space agency is poised to launch the most powerful and advanced robotic rover ever built to explore Mars and hunt for signs that life may once have existed on the red planet.
The Mars Science Laboratory, a six-wheeled vehicle powered by nuclear fuel, is scheduled to begin its journey at 10:02 a.m. (1502 GMT) Saturday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida atop an Atlas V rocket.
“This is a Mars scientist's dream machine,” Ashwin Vasavada, MSL deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told reporters. “This is the most capable scientific explorer we have ever sent out... We are super excited.”
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At a price of $2.5 billion, the rover, known as Curiosity, aims to provide scientists with detailed information about the rocks on the surface of Mars, and clues about whether life ever existed on Earth's nearest neighbour.
To do that, the SUV-sized rover is equipped with a robotic arm, a drill, a set of 10 science instruments including two colour video cameras, a laser beam for zapping interesting rocks and a tool kit for analysing their contents.
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If all goes as planned and Curiosity lands intact in about nine months, on August 5, 2012, the rover will be able to report back to scientists on what it finds without ever bringing the rock samples back to Earth.
NASA's exploration of Mars began with the 1976 landing of the Viking spacecraft and has continued with, most recently, the twin rovers known as Spirit and Opportunity that began tooling around on the Martian surface in 2004. Spirit finally died last year, but Opportunity is still working.
NASA sees Curiosity as the midway point in a long journey of Mars discovery that may lead to a human mission there, or to one of its two moons, in the 2030s.
Any clues it can send back about the habitability of the fourth planet from the Sun, and about the radiation levels there will be important to NASA as it devises future exploration missions.
The landing spot, the Gale Crater near Mars' equator, was chosen after lengthy study because it contains a three-mile high mountain and many layers of sediment that could reveal a lot about the planet's wetter past.
The crater itself is at a low elevation so scientists believe that if water ever did pool on Mars, it likely found its way there and may have left behind traces of life.
Everywhere that water exists on Earth, so does some form of life. So scientists are hopeful that they may find more than just hints that life used to thrive there — perhaps even signs that microbial life still does.
“It is going to look for places that are habitable either in the past or potentially even in the future or currently,” said an official.