Category: RTG power

Bon voyage Curiosity, daughter of Mars Science Laboratory, the big wheeled bruiser of a rover that NASA hopes to get off the ground Saturday. The aim is to land next August in ancient, gnarly Gale Crater not far south of the planet's equator. It is about 100 miles (154 km) across. Its midsection sports a pile of debris about as high as the Andes. The pic shows just part of the crater's complex terrain, gathered from orbit by NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter and its THEMIS imaging system.  Grist has a link to the whole eye boggling gallery. The jumbled edifice, it appears, is a bit of a geologic mystery other than that an impact made it early in Mars's history, sediments buried it, and erosion has slowly re-exposed it...