NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NASA's Marsoweb Web site now includes high-resolution images of candidate 2009 landing sites for the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover.

The rover, 1,875 pounds (850 kilograms), will assess whether Mars ever had an environment that could support microbial life. The Internet site, created to support the MSL landing site selection process, includes pictures taken from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite (http://marsoweb.nas.nasa.gov/landingsites/msl/mro_images/).

"As with the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) sites selection effort, we are providing an interactive Web site containing images and other information for anyone interested in helping to choose the MSL landing site," said Virginia Gulick, a planetary geologist at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

"We want to make sure that we select a site where it is safe to land, scientifically interesting and also maximizes the unique capabilities of the instruments on the MSL rover," she added. The Web site will help the scientific community to provide its input about the potential landing sites on Mars, according to Gulick.

Large images of the 33 candidate Mars landing sites, converted to 'zoomable' images, that users can navigate by clicking and dragging a cursor across the picture on the special Web pages.

"With these web resources, users can quickly and easily explore the enormous images in full-resolution over the Web," noted Glenn Deardorff, a computer scientist at NASA Ames, who created the Web pages.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) is the source of 23 of the images on the pages. Another 14 images came from the satellite's Context Imager.

NASA's Science Mission Directorate funded development of the Marsoweb MSL site selection web pages.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory mission for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. For more information about the mission, please visit:

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/

John Bluck
NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
Phone: 650-604-5026
Email: jbluck@mail.arc.nasa.gov