What the Future Holds
With a year under its belt, Curiosity is now off to conduct major explorations at the foot of Mount Sharp, the 5-kilometer-high peak at the center of Gale crater. The rover will climb this mountain, watching as the layers of Martian history reveal how the planet changed from wet to dry over billions of years. As long as nothing goes wrong, who knows what new discoveries it might make? Considering that its nuclear battery could last 14 years, though, there will certainly be a great deal of new findings and exciting surprises.
Curiosity is likely to rove by a few known areas of interest. Perhaps the science team will find a fairly recent crater that has punctured a hole deep into the Martian interior, giving them a good look at the Red Planet's past. There is also a strange formation ahead of the rover, a gigantic network of fractures that formed when geological processes broke up Mars' crust (seen above). In the intervening time, interesting minerals may have filled these rectangular crevices, allowing for intriguing new discoveries. Curiosity is also likely to encounter phyllosilicates at the base of Mount Sharp. These minerals formed in the presence of water and are also good at sequestering organic carbon. There is a chance Curiosity will be able to figure out a lot about Mars' ancient habitability by analyzing such rocks.
Image: Strange fractures near the base of Mount Sharp. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
