NASA Announces First Driving Path and Destination for Curiosity Rover

The team of NASA scientists and engineers managing the Curiosity Mars rover mission announced the first driving destination for their laboratory-on-wheels on the Red Planet. The first driving destination for Curiosity, announced during Friday’s media teleconference, will be an area called “Glenelg.” The location is reportedly a natural intersection of three kinds of Martian terrain, including a bedrock layer which will be Curiosity’s first drilling target.

“With such a great landing spot in Gale Crater, we literally had every degree of the compass to choose from for our first drive,” said Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology. “We had a bunch of strong contenders. It is the kind of dilemma planetary scientists dream of, but you can only go one place for the first drilling for a rock sample on Mars. That first drilling will be a huge moment in the history of Mars exploration.”

Glenelg is approximately 1,300 feet (400 meters) east-southeast of Curiosity’s landing site location and will be a good test of the maneuverability of the rover and coordination with controllers back on Earth. “We’re about ready to load our new destination into our GPS and head out onto the open road,” Grotzinger said. “Our challenge is there is no GPS on Mars, so we have a roomful of rover-driver engineers providing our turn-by-turn navigation for us.”

“There will be a lot of important firsts that will be taking place for Curiosity over the next few weeks, but the first motion of its wheels, the first time our roving laboratory on Mars does some actual roving, that will be something special,” said Michael Watkins, mission manager for Curiosity from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.