NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory hopes to answer the question has Mars ever been able to sustain life. The new rover will have on-board equipment to experiment on soil samples testing for possible microbial life forms past or present. Watch full animation depicting the mission at the link.
The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a rover that will assess whether Mars ever was, or is still today, an environment able to support microbial life. In other words, its mission is to determine the planet’s “habitability.” Scheduled to launch in November or December of this year, the Curiosity rover should land on Mars in August 2012. (Just before the apocalypse, yay!)
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I think it is time for an artsy director to make a movie about non-advanced martians stumbling across one of these rover's and attempting to communicate with it. NASA back on Earth would send commands to have the rover's laser write in the sand. Martian tribes would fight over ownership over the rover. They'd think it was a god for a period of time. Then grasp the concept that we were communicating to them through it. All are commands delayed hours. It would shut down every night, or every time they brought it into a cave. It would be awesomely surreal.
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