enhanced regulatory framework after the financial crisis. there is still work ahead of us, but we are making progress, and it is important we all get this right. the hearing record will be open for seven days for members to submit additional materials and questions for the record. this hearing is adjourned. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] ..

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

>> you what would that have been like to meet these people when you didn't know the ending? >> devil devil in the white city author.

>> i started looking for characters through whose eyes i could tell the story, actually outsiders are daily americans and that is when i stumbled upon the first ambassador of nazi germany. >> the story of politics and intrigue of nazi germany sunday night on q&a. >> nasa officials today said the next mars rover nicknamed curiosity will land near a mountain inside the 96-mile wide gale crater to search for evidence that the planet was once capable of supporting microbial life. the landing site was chosen after an extensive review of potential sites. the mission is expected to launch in november or december this year with a target landing date on mars of august 2012. this hour-long news conference took place at the smithsonian air and space museum in washington d.c.. >> i am delighted to welcome everyone here to the museum for this very special press

conference by nasa and the national air and museum focusing on the next great adventure in planetary science and exploration. we are here this morning to announce the landing site for the mars science laboratory and also known as the rover curiosity and share some of the details of what the mission hopes to accomplish. on july 1, 1976 just 35 years ago on the front steps of the then brand-new nationalists air and space museum a ribbon cutting ceremony was held to dedicate the smithsonian's newest museum but it was no ordinary ribbon-cutting. the task was not accomplished by the traditional large scissors but by signal sent from the viking one spacecraft orbiting mars and just days before it was sent to the surface of the red planet. it was a dramatic -- and the air and space museum but it would hardly be the last. the relationship between the museum and mars planetary research mars in planetary research which is beginning and i might add that we have a

viking spacecraft on display here in the museum and the biking that is on mars actually has been transferred to the smithsonian by nasa so we are free to pick it up anytime we would like. but i dare say that the reach of the smithsonian national air and space museum is farther than any other museum in the world but their collections on another world. this museum is world renowned for its collection of historic spacecraft in the millions of visitors that learn about them and be inspired by them. for decades we enjoyed a close relationship with nasa to ensure these extraordinary artifacts are preserved once they have completed their missions to expand the frontier of scientific understanding and broaden the human experience. this partnership to preserve the heritage will add a milestone to the national collection with the arrival of the spatial discovery at the smithsonian next spring and i would like to take this opportunity to publicly thanked nasa for selecting the national air and magnesium as the

repository for this treasure. i can assure you we will bring our best direction up to this object that represents the skill and vision of the millions of people who had a hand in its creation and fulfilling its mission. with the curé shin of these world changing artifacts and the stunning buildings that house them, this one and the center we have near dulles airport enjoy widespread awareness but what is less well-known is the smithsonian is not only a keeper of history but also a maker of history. nasa's founding director apollo command module pipe -- pilot michael collins engaged in planetary research to house mission data and imagery for all researchers to investigate. thereby establishing a dual mission of the air and space museum of history and science. deselected dr. boss to build and lead the center. it and want a principle scientist involved in selecting the landing sites for the apollo missions so mike collins knew him quite well. in addition to the earth and lunar studies research on mars, venus mercury and other satellites have been the focus

of the 35 year history. nasa scientist have been contributors to many historic missions and are currently involved with the mars exploration rovers, the mars reconnaissance orbiter featuring the high-rise camera and radar, mars express with the radar and lunar orbiter with the camera and the mercury space a mermaid ranging spacecraft and better known as messenger and of course the focus of today's announcement the mars space laboratory. is a step or to preserve the history of exploration the museum's planetary scientists to the current exploration of space with their highly-regarded research and participation on history making missions. we are fond of saying around here that it is on mars orbiting mars or on its way to mars scientists are involved. sciences collaborate with researchers and mission planners all over the world and we are extremely proud of the contributions they make to the inhabitants of this precious planet we call earth as we reach out to other worlds and strive to understand where we have been

as well as envision where we will go next. for those who are elements in the end of the shuttle program and think it is the closing of the curtain on american space expiration they need to look at the planetary data and the next one about to launch in our space program is very healthy and every day taking his place as we have never been. which brings us to the subject of today's press conference, the mars science laboratory. we are proud of her own center dr. john grant in his role with msl and they will be hearing a bit of it from him later. and i would also like to point out we have a full-size model of msl on display in the museum at the far end and i invite you to take a look at that after the press conference as well as partake in the many programs we have going on today in our annual mars the program. we have stations all of the museum talking about the researcher group does on mars and generally about mars. so with that, i would like to begin this discussion by introducing nasa chief scientist

dr. walid. [applause] >> thank you and thank you are hosting this event because i love this museum. every time i come in here, i am a kid again looking around at all the incredible and exciting stuff and since i have become chief scientist at nasa i have gotten to even nurture that child that much more. so i think it is a great event and a wonderful venue and i really appreciate that. i want to start just by saying a lot of attention has been given in the last weeks, months, years perhaps even to the event that concluded yesterday with the landing of the space shuttle, the safe and successful landing of the shuttle.

marking really the turning of a page to a new chapter in human exploration of space. things changed. things evolve but what remains constant and what brings us here today to this room for this conversation is the fact that what remains constant is the courage to explore, the urge to reach out beyond where we are and understand our surroundings and our place in it. it is really ingrained in our dna. it is that the very heart of who we are as human beings and the human spirit, so to feed god, i believe nasa is actually -- well i don't believe, i know that nasa is phenomenal, i believe the greatest agency in the world and feeding that hunger, helping us explore, helping us

understand our planet, our solar system, our universe and our place in that. and we do this in amazing ways. we have incredible people doing unbelievable things and you are hearing from several of them today. i know for a few and you are incredible and the fifth i'm going to assume by the virtue of the company you keep. but we have incredible people doing incredible things. think about it. landing a rover on mars with pinpoint accuracy. at a location you were going to hear about today and i almost wish i didn't know it because i'm scared to death i'm going to say it, just blurted out and ran everything. but i don't think i will. but really, it is not just mars. it is not just human exploration this year alone, we have entered orbit around mercury with the messenger spacecraft telling us

secrets about the planet closest to "the sun." we are launching in a couple of weeks to jupiter. we have earth observing capabilities in place. we are looking to the far reaches of the universe. we have a very very robust science portfolio and that is important for a couple of reasons. one is science really is one of the three pillars on which this agency stands. human exploration of spacespace, science and aeronautics. to see it robust and to be a part of this conversation is really incredible for me, and i hope and believe incredible for you. and with that in mind i want to invite you as you hear what you are going to hear in the next few minutes -- i want to invite you to go back to that kid in you that looked at the stars, that was fascinated.

you know what i'm talking about because i am sure you have felt it when you walked into this museum and you saw the module that landed on the moon. find that person as you hear this information, and sort of let that person come up to you, informed by all the smart stuff you have learned over the years from the time you were that kid looking up at the sky and the stars and absolute wonder. but here at this, hear what you are going to hear through that areism. i think you will really appreciate and feel how unbelievable this really is. i mean we live it and we breathe it and we burkett and we are all still and not of it. there is not a day that goes by where i don't think about matt rover -- that rove or other activities that we do and just get blown away. i encourage you to receive this information in that spirit and

then transmit that information and that spirit. at deep down inside you there is something that craves this stuff, that hungers for this stuff and to be able to feed it -- the fact that we have the technology is and the science capabilities and engineering capabilities to deliver what we are delivering is absolutely incredible. so let's not lose sight of that and in fact let's elevate that because i think it is crucial. you are going to hear some amazing things about some unbelievable capabilities and i am certainly excited to hear what everyone has to say, so with that as a set up, don't let me down. thanks. [applause] >> good morning ladies and gentlemen. my name is dwayne brown with nasa's office of communication

at nasa headquarters. as you have here today is mars day and what better venue to make this special announcement on the destination of nasa's next mars rover. we have a lot to cover. i'm going to introduce introduce her participants and they will give you an incredible presentation and then we will open it up for questions. first up, michael meyer, lead scientist mars exploration program nasa headquarters in washington d.c.. michael watkins, while an engineer whose official title is mission manager from the msl project the jet propulsion laboratory in pasadena california. john grant, geologists, smithsonian national air and space museum museum here in washington. don sumner, geologists, you see davis california. and john grotzinger, msl project scientist at the jet propulsion

laboratory in pasadena. without michael, kick it off. >> thanks. >> thanks duane. today 35 years ago viking one landed on the surface of mars and made the first astrobiology cool measurements on another planet. the landing was actually delayed because they didn't have the images to know where to land. we are in a different era. we are here today to announce exactly where we are going to put the mars science laboratory. the first asher biology mission since the viking. we indeed are in a different era and that in 1995, nasa produced a bat go biology and laid out a series of missions on how to understand the biological potential of the red planet. basically it has led to the mars exploration program to go from

global recognizance to detailed measurements on the surface to the eventual return of samples from mars. the mars science laboratory is on that path, and plays a very critical role in that. we have done our homework. the engineers have designed a spacecraft that can get us to where we want to go and the scientists have integrated terabytes of information to decide on the best places to go on the planet and we are able to do that. in fact, we have found so many wonderful places on march the science community had a tough time deciding which one might be best, and so it is through process of five science community workshops, detailed engineering evaluations, and aid directorate program management council which decided to adopt what the mars science laboratory

science team reference was and to select the sight. so we are going to the mountain and gale crater. this is a five-kilometer high mountain with terrain. it exhibits three different kinds of environmental settings, perhaps a trilogy of mars history and it is a worthy goal, a worthy challenge for such a capable rover. to tell us about the capabilities i will now turn the podium over to mike watkins, who is the mission manager of msl. >> thanks michael. it is great to be here if they if they air and space museum to announce the landing site in one of my major projects is preparing for operations and a big driver in operations as you can imagine. before we get into the characteristics of the gale site i would like to talk about the characteristics of a curiosity roper and how it compares to

previous rovers and how capabilities are factored into the landing site selection. if you go to the first graphic, this is our family tree here, family portrait of rovers and they are kind of related. they are out of the jet propulsion laboratory in pasadena and a lot of the same people worked on all three of these rovers. starting with the mars pathfinder moving up to spirit and opportunity the mars exploration rover rovers that have been so successful and of course opportunity tracking along on the surface of mars years after landing much after its nominal mission. then you seek curiosity there on the right and as mentioned earlier this model of the rover is out in the hallway. you can take a look at it here at the museum. now the progression of size as to why they are getting bigger and the reason they are getting bigger is because the mars program is michael meyer talked about is as a science driven

program. we try to carry more in summation and more science payload is you gone to a scientist laboratory. you see rooms full of measurements. we are trying to get as much of that is the cam onto the surface of mars so we have had a small payload on sojourner up to something like five or six kilograms payload on opportunity and now more than 10 times that i'm curiosity so later on john grotzinger will talk about how we will use that payload. in addition to just carrying the payload we made a lot of improvements to the landing system into the rove or capabilities to make it easier to get to better spots on mars to do more detailed scientific investigations as michael meyer talked about in the strategic plan. let's go to the next graphic. this particular, the family portrait of course is a model of the rover and this is the real thing. the rover has been shifted down to the county space center in florida.

these are images of the last testing in the assembly's facility in pasadena. you see the rover there on the bottom with the mobility of the wheels tucked up type therefore packaging inside the aero shell and on top of that is what we call the rocket pack that attaches to the top of the rover. that will land on the surface after we get through the martian atmosphere and we will show that in an animation later. it allows us to actually land directly on the wheel so we don't have a separate palette or a separate landing gear. we actually use the wheels. it allows us to use the strong capability of the mobility system as well as the weight by not building a separate landing pallet and put all the way we can into the rover in the instruments. let's go to the next graphic. the next graphic is the rover test. here you can see testing mobility systems. this is the actual flight unit

driving around that we have a full range of mobility required. you can see per scale some folks standing around it. it is quite large. is kind of car sized and actually wider and taller than most cars. go to the next graphic. the next graphic is an animation and it shows the descent and landing sequence. there are a couple of changes we have made for this mission that will really improve our ability to access the most important scientific basis on mars. one of them is, we can control the list of the vehicle during entry and we can cancel out some unexpected differences in aperture derived that would cause the landing zone to be large. previous missions have had landing zones up to 10 times larger than msl. msl will land 20 kilometers across the landing spot and that allowed us to snug that close to the important sites to explore.

after we have completed that phase we can use the heat shield. we will pull out the parachute designed to previous mars missions. then we start the engines and we go into the dissent out here so that is our rocket pack you saw in the previous picture on the assembly facility. this is a defense phase with rover tucked up underneath it. when we sarah out our horizontal velocity we will lower down on some cable and then we touch that down to the surface so directly on the mobility system as you saw earlier. that mobility system is well designed to drive around rocks and slavs on the surface so it is actually it great landing system. and then when we are done we remove those cables and send the stage several hundred meters away and get it out of the way

so doesn't affect our chemical analysis equipment and this will be a minimum of several hundred -- in the rover is prepared to execute his surface mission by driving around. the ability to drive on the surface and those who have followed spirit and opportunity know that they have shown by driving many koan murders around the landing site allows you to explore a lot of different geologic settings and learn a lot about the history of where they have been on the surface. so we have taken that ability which was kind of a bonus for spirit and opportunity and bolted into the nominal mission for msl. john grotzinger will describe, we intend to drive quite a bit up to 20 kilometers or so at our final site. in terms of how to select the landing site we have this capability of the rover and we have science goals to explore. we had to take a look at each one of those sites and assess

its safety. we took advantage of a great asset and that is the recognizance orbiter which has the high resolution camera on it called high-rise. high-rise, which was on the surface of mars -- we worked with the mlr project to basically take strips of all of our sites and do kind of a superglue of all of our landing sites so we had this one meter resolution where we could see every rocket we could land on in every slope we could land on as well as big scientific characterization of the side. on this graphic here he can see the blue swap swath that indicates where the high-resolution images are. in most cases we have two images from different view ankle so we could make a three-dimensional view of mars and show the slopes very accurately. when we were completed with this analysis, of what the characteristics of the train on

mars were, go to the next graphic, we actually then built mockups of the services and actually tested touching down the rover in driving the rover overall the ranges of services so here's an animation where we actually dropped it on a slope simulating a slope surface on mars. in some cases we put older's on the surface to see other wheels would interact with that surface. this is an engineering copy of the rover. we weren't afraid to damage and drop it on rocks and slopes. >> adopted an all possible rotations, all possible duarte shins of rocks, when we finish our conclusion of this was that all four of those final science sites were safer the mission to land on and we could safely execute the service mission. we could successfully navigated drive to the targets and execute the science mission. so at that point we turned it back to the science community and said take the best of the four from a science perspective. that is how you really want these things to play out.

you would love for the scientist could go to the side that they want the most and i think it is a tribute to the engineering team that dealt a beautiful rover here that is capable of exiting all of these great landing sites. those for landing sites that were the finals we talked about originated with dozenscome over 50 sites in a process that played out over a five-year period and mac and to talk about that process and the final thoughts i would like to turn it over to my colleague john grant from here at the museum. >> thank you rematch. 65 years, 150 scientists as michael describes, engineering doesn't become the discriminate on the final site and some of you might think that is a recipe for chaos. in fact it wasn't. in fact, the science community came together and work worked closely with the project and had very robust discussions that arrived at for terrific final four candidates sites. what i would like to do before i turn it over to don and john to

talk about gale crater is tell you a little bit about that process and remind you some of the attributes of these final four sites. so if we could go to the first graphic, please. what you will be looking at is a map of mars that has shaded areas. the way shaded areas you will see to the north and south represent latitudes that are too far to the north and south for mars science laboratory to plan. you will also see an area that is blacked out to the middle and those are areas where the surface of mars is too high for msl to land so there is a variety of color terrain there that represents the targets, the potential targets for msl to try to a value to have a to build -- habitability of mars. the red dots represent the 60 locations they were proposed by science team members by the science community and evaluated during these workshops. the four blue dots you see there represent the four key sites and i want to tell you about why those represent terrific final candidate sites. if i could go to the next graphic, please.

the show you snippets for each of the four sides. eberswalde in the top right gale crater to the right in holden crater to the bottom right. why do these represent great sites? eberswalde eland with the best delves on mars. this is an incredible system of drainage into a crater that was probably filled by water, standing body of water that accumulated deposit much like you would see at a river delves on the earth. gale crater is you have heard from michael, there is enormous tax, five kilometers thick of layered material which represents the opportunity to literally three chapters of a book of the past deposition on mars. for holden crater you have a system of driver verse much like you see flanking the edges of death valley in california that dream down into a deposit of finally layered materials which probably represents an ancient lake bed. one of the most diverse river or river lake systems on mars.

you have an incredibly detailed system of iron rich and aluminum retch clays layered in a regional setting that represent a long history of ancient water and indirection and is probably the oldest of the four sites. as john grossinger responded saying, it is sort of like different flavors of ice cream, all fantastic but slightly different twist on the general take. let me give you a couple of examples of the details of what we might have gone to look at what the next graphic. eberswalde the crater, you can see on the left ear and all the scale bars you see here and kilometers, the creators represent -- the colors represent blue and purple and high is yellow and red. the landing on the left and the yellow box you see represents a science target outside of the ellipse. all four four sides represented for a get high-value science

targets within and around the ellipse. outside of the ellipse of eberswalde the can see the squirrels that are produced as produces a drainage system came down vice like we see on her, much like the places on earth where we look for accumulated organic cereals. further out into the ellipse we sealed the riverbeds and lake beds that would be explored on the way to the delta. providing the view of a setting on earth that we are very familiar with. ..

can see the kind of sentiments that have been transported reconstruct with the environmental conditions but ultimately access the final materials for their own on the floor of the crater and decide whether or not there was an ancient lake on the floor that could have accumulated the materials that might have allowed us to evaluate. with the last graphic this is in the northern hemisphere would to the crater to the west. both within and outside the landing lift there's this incredibly detailed stratigraphy of iran rich and aluminum clay that represent the regional deposit. it's incredibly ancient deposit and records something fundamental about the interaction of water on mars with those rocks and tells something about the ancient

habit of devotee. i think i've told you of all four of the final candidate sites represent an incredible opportunity coming and as michael and michael pointed out, it was a difficult decision to arrive at a final one. i will now let don sumner tell you about the crater and why it ended up being the eventual landing site. >> i had the jolie of cochairing the project and we spent hundreds of hours discussing the sites doing the analysis on the sites and charging it to come up with the best science we can do with the payload. lots of flavors of ice cream and a certain ways to investigate those it was the best match for the role of the mission of evaluating the habit of devotee and the instrumentation that we

have. if we could get the first graphic, i am just going to show a fly through and give you a sense of what incredible place it is geologically. so it will land in the flat part towards us from the mound and the view that you see now, and within that, the landing of the material shut off the wall that would give a chance to look at what the cost is like. that material is moved by water. the rocks are transported by water and the water is either infiltrated into the ground or a separate it's a there's also a unit, very hard and dance that we are worrying about how it reflects that change in the environment. so this is the ljungqvist environment we will look at with

msl. one of the fantastic things about the rover is we can go a long way and this allows us to grow towards places where the rocks arbiter exposed, like climbing the cliffs. we got to go to those places for the first time on mars. so the area of the most scientific interest is at the base of the mountain which we are zooming into here and there we see signatures of clay and soviet salt and those are key minerals that tell us about the environment on mars and the interaction of border with that environment and it's critical to have that ability. so the rover will go towards the mountains, the early years we hope to see variations in the mineral that will tell how the minerals forma, halvey environment changed through time, and based on the signature from the orbital instruments, we

expect to find variations, particularly in the sulphate salts which will tell us about the water, how concentrated it was, whether it be fabricated in the sources of the water. and that will give a history of the ancient environments on mars, how those change and help us evaluate the and have the ability of the planet. the sulphate salts contain water and when they release the water and cool down the endorse the water and have an instrument package to look at how the water is exchanging with the modern marchand to give a better sense of the water cycle on mars. which has been very difficult to evaluate. and there's also after the definition of all the lawyers recorded in the environment, we had the time when he have water flowing down the mountain and that cut the can and will like

the grand canyon and that gives us the opportunity to read the environment through the time and changes but the canyon for cutting also represents an environment that could have been habitable so we have the flowing water and the erosion and deposition of the sediments at the mouth of the tamim which is the front view of the video here and so the fleet of things we can see represents a diverse array of and fireman's over a long period of time possibly tens to hundreds of millions of years some water in the environment and so the site represents just an incredibly rich sweep of scientific investigations we can do. and it's also going to be an incredibly beautiful place and will be a lot like the southwest areas like the monument valley where we have these cliffs with their rover going in the shallow valleys between them, and we have an incredible

instrumentation to characterize the texture and the shape of the cliff and the mobility to travel to this area. so, the science is going to be amazing and it's going to be a beautiful sight to visit. john will tell us more about how we are actually using the instrumentation to meet these investigations. >> thanks very much. what i would like to talk to you now about is the way that curiosity is going to explore the landing site. but let me draw back a minute to try to reinforce to you what an amazing precedent is being set right now with the msl mission. as mike talked about, one of the things that became obvious to the science team members in the community and john said there was about 150 that attended the workshops have 163 science team members at this time, and by the time the students are added to this and people like that, and

participating scientists we are likely to swell to 300 team members. what we saw happening was the unexpected possible outcome that we may be left with four leading sites, any of which might be chosen as the final landing site that engineering wouldn't take one or more of them out and that's what always happens in the previous missions. so we began to think about this in the project coming and when the world we were even surely going to come to get there with headquarters and a right that this decision and as michael said, it was not easy. here's why. this metaphor thinking about ice cream it's a hot day. if you go out afterwards and decide to get ice cream i that he will all will not get the same thing and if somebody asks what you choose between vanilla and chocolate you're going to say it tastes good, it's what i prefer. when you come back to the

landing sites that's what it comes down to. which one feels right? so in the end there is no hard yes or no answer. you don't make a long list of things and put numbers by them and figure out what goes on. so as a community we got together, and in the and we picked the one that felt the best. so why does it feel good? as don how was explaining, you have a mountain of rocks that's five cullom meters high. that's high year than the mountain and 48. taller than mount whitney. it looks like hawaii if you come sailing up to hawaii the thing about this mountain is it isn't a tall spire, it is a broad low mountain sheep. what that means we can drive up it with a rover. so this might be the tallest mountain anywhere in the solar system that we could actually climb with a rover so we think and plan around the mission, but we have the hope that if we look longer we might be a will to

keep going higher and higher up that mountain. that alone justifies spending the spacecraft. then when you start adding the science goals on top of it turns out the most attractive targets are at the base of the mountain and we have a payload that we can address those with. so in the two years we have to run the mission before the warranty expires, we can address the principal goals which are the kind of things that the community would really like answers to. so, what you can see in the first graphic that we have up there is the spacecraft with all the instruments that are on the coming and we have nine principal investigators that have contributed instruments that are a part of the rover down at cape canaveral, and the principal investigators are david blake, ken, of the air, ralf geller, don haslet, mike millman, paul, and roger and

they've built ten instruments scene on the rover and if i just described a few of them, we can start off with every disfavor it which are the cameras. we have 17 cameras. watch the pictures. there is a camera added to the bottom of the rover and in the video that he showed where it is rolling down the road for this camera is going to turn on and take a movie at five frames, hd resolution. it will be one of the most spectacular public outreach to the product until it's been created. we have cameras up on top that we can use to look around and find the types of rocks we would like to do chemical analysis on and when we think something is particularly promising we can drive up closer and then we laser that shoots out in front of the rover up to a distance of 7 meters away that saps the rocket creates a spark a flight

and then we look at that spark and based on the content it tells us about what chemical elements are in the rock and are they the kind of elements consistent with the habitable environment, and then if so, we drive over to the of rock and take and deploy the army and put it down on top of the rocks and we have a drill. this is just like a drill you buy at home depot. it goes into the rocket to 5 centimeters, creates a powder and the armed collects the powder, brings it back, takes it on top, drops it down into one of these holes on the top of the rover, and we have to instruments inside of the rover and what you can see in those instruments is the mineral composition of what's down there. so we hear a lot of these hydrated minerals and now we are going to be able to really determine the composition of the minerals. in addition to that, we can also

to give to get the organics. let me emphasize we are not a lie detection mission and we cannot look for fossils. microbial fossils' of any type, but we can look potentially for the organics that might be preserved. our goal in the mission is to explore habitable environment and that means we had water present, we had a source of energy from the microbes to undertake metabolism and then we also have the source of carpet as we know it. but here's the trick. if we want to look for the organic carbon, we have to be able to work with rocks that look much like this one does. this comes from the earlier it's almost 3000000000-years-old, and it tells a lot about the early environmental evolution of earth particularly the rise of oxygen and the early years that you see here on the things we are interested in, this started out as sedimentary particles and they may be associated with organic matter, but here's the problem.

when the settlement becomes a part of rock that organic matter can be destroyed. so this is a very difficult challenge that we had for us on the planet the teams with life on earth we almost never see the organic preserved but it does happen, so we hope to be able to look for the organic carbon, that's what we hope for. what we promised to deliver is an understanding of the environmental history of mars. if we go to the next one, what we can see in this life is the role for itself. mike already showed a picture of this. you can see the instruments we have been through before. so i would like to skip on to the next one, and what you can see here is where we will call and on the images on was showing. right in the center we have something that looks like one of these water deposits. we think water was flowing along and transporting sediment particles and out in front of it

in the blue outline we had a hard rock done was talking about to read this is a big mystery to us but it looks very special and it's one of the things that uniquely goes along on the site. then we can drive out of the ellipse and go up to where it says clay which is one of the minerals associated with water and formed in the environment and the patch of green is a place we would study. then we go up in to where it says sulphate that's other hydrated mineral and then we work our way up from that. so what we are doing is exploring a geological environment that consists of a stack of lawyers that tell us about the environment. now let me skip to the next one. why do these matter? well, this is the history of the geological exploration honor the and 150 years ago when the first explorers went down the color of the river and discovered the grand canyon they solve all of the leaders of rocks and what we learned from 150 years of exploration is if you start at the bottom of the pie will of

the leaders and go to the topics like reading a novel. we think the crater is going to be a great novel about the early environmental revolution of mars that offers strong prospects potentially for the discovery of the habitable environment and maybe even a shot at potentially discovering organic compounds. even if we don't find the organics what we learn from studying a place like the grand canyon is the way the environment or history and the habitable environment change on earth and we think we're going to get that. let me finish with a last one. this is what our book is going to look like as we go through. we are going to start out the first chapter will be what we have in the landing which looks pretty exciting already. if we hand out of the landing and go to the greens are and that's where the clay minerals are forming the lawyers. then after we are done with those we will head into the third chapter and look at the sulfates where the yellow star is and after we are done with that we can go to the top and

now we've gone through hundreds of meters. just for reference with the opportunity we've been working for seven years we've gone through about 20 meters. what we see in this image as hundreds of meters of rocks, so we have that many more pages to read in this book of the early environmental history of mars. just one thing that in addition to these minerals we can see from orbit that gives a lot of excitement for the site is in the next slide, the blue star is a future we can see from or but that's been published, observed elsewhere by the high rice team led by alfred. we see the factor systems. they are all over mars and in some places they are spectacularly developed. the crater is one of them and they are not down at the bottom of the mound, the good from of hundreds of meters of into that story about the environmental evolution, and what we see, the tractor the blue star is on if you look at that, it makes a line and noticed there's a dark line in the middle on either

side there's too white lines that tell that was likely in open space at which there was water that filled in with minerals and that's the kind of thing we think is a very great prospects for the habitable environment. so to summarize, we have many attractive possibilities that gail and we think it has high diversity ha for different have a when fireman's and it is possible that some of those might preserve the organic carbon. with that i will turn it back. >> thank you. i would like to ask the media attending if the getting their way to the microphone of the of questions and then we will go to the phone line, i would like to remind folks out there watching the program you can find all of this information on the www.nasa.gov/msl. for folks that have google earth, in a credible component to that. check that out. and i think it's certainly appropriate model me to give a round of applause again to the folks up here but also to the

folks across this great country and worldwide working on this mission and particularly the folks at the kennedy space center who are going to take us back to mars, ladies and gentlemen. [applause] >> some people are saying this could be a bathtub that was filled all the way to the top with water. others are worried that maybe some of these could just be carried in almost as a layer of dust. what's your best estimate for how much water was once in the crater and can you describe the ways in which it would have

gotten there? >> it's going to be when we begin to get answers to the questions you're asking. right now what we have our hypotheses so we we can go about testing them is using the payload to make particular estimates of the of the environment's water may have been present, and what i would say, the most important thing we need to be left with is to make sure that in the year that we arrive at the landing site we continue to refine our hypothesis and come up with particular observations that we would make. and i think the most important thing is the question of how much water may have been there. there may not be one answer there could be multiple answers. the reason this is attractive is because there's likely to be multiple scenarios which the water would have been present but at this time we don't know how much would have been there. >> aerospace magazine. i don't know if you could go back a couple of slides that you

were showing, but have you started to map of how you climbed the mountain to the first order? that is the three mile high mountain. i realize the relief has been exaggerated but -- >> it is a three times | exaggeration, and we are committed only to climbing the lower part of the mountain and in the project, one of the things we did to confirm the site is being viable from the engineering perspective we conducted a study by a subset of people on the team and within the project called the summit team and they were charged with the responsibility of making sure we could actually drive there. so we got together with some of the engineers and a handful of scientists to try to drive this because now don't forget this high-rise camera is an incredibly valuable because you can see this from orbit. so that means we can come up with accurate models in advance of arriving there and drive them across the terrain to make sure

we can do it as we had multiple paths we found we can get through those leaders. >> if you were to get all the way to the summit can you guess how long that would take a? of full year? >> nope, nope. i think basically where the blue star is the would take two years to get there and after that as i said, the warranty expires, but the history is a predictor of the future we would expect to have some future life left to go, but if we were to go on for ten years we think we could keep climbing it's going to take years to get to the top if it's possible. >> what is the issue with how fast we go is how long we spend on the scientific investigation. so, it's not just a matter of the engineering capability of driving, it's the fact that there is a sort of rich sweep of things to look at and so there's a balance between characterizing where you are at and going to

see the next thing, and the will be a very exciting part of the mission. >> one last one. can you say how and compare that to the opportunity? thank you. >> in some ways it's similar. we would generally be climbing around 20 degrees or so, and that's similar in terms of to the opportunity. it has similar ground pressure, and so you probably expect it to negotiate folks similar to what we've seen in the hills or the greater injuries. >> we are going to take one more question and then going to come back and try to wrap up. >> i had a similar question about the time frame and how quickly will you be getting information back from the mission and also given that opportunity in the year is going beyond, do you think that this could be going for ten years and beyond that?

>> you know, we will see what happens. we had planned for a two-year mission. the two year mission we understand we can achieve the principle science goals that we observe and create hypotheses and after that we will just have to see. but the point done was making is a good one. if we land and find something that is so incredibly interesting we want to spend six months, we probably will. so there is no requirement on this mission to drill a certain number of samples, analyze a number of rocks, drive a certain number of commuters. we are in the phase now where we are doing the true scientific exploration and test hypotheses and when we are satisfied we will move on but that said, our hope is that our plan going into this is we will move through some targets in the landing eclipse and we do want to get to the base of that. that is the target for the mission. >> let's go back to the phone.

irene? >> thank you. can you hear me all right? go ahead. >> i have two questions. the first as if you could talk about the factor in giving him gayle the edge. >> and i will take one crack at it. it's also from the very difficult and one of the things we did, we had a meeting over the science laboratory science team so the principal investigators involved in the mission and basically did a vote, and we ended up with two front runners, but there's a slight preference for gail and more discussion and asking themselves denying people who

built the ten instruments there was no preference that it's not a one trick pony. as we saw from the talks today there are several different environments, environmental sightings that can be explored any one of which might have a possibility of preserving some organics. you don't have to have the scientific hubris knowing where to go or what minerals to target, you actually have the choice of several different things so that if one doesn't work perhaps the other one gives you the great payoff. sophocles and gentlemen i'm going to have to jump in. we are out of time. it has to be reconfigured but i would like to tell the media who are sitting here and folks on the phone the folks will be available. we will make them available following this press conference and i want to thank you for joining and thank the museum for hosting us and when it comes to

mars, science never sleeps. thank you. [applause] >> amol conversations [inaudible conversations]

but what it has been like to have met these people when you didn't know the ending?