Curiosity

            By Janet Raloff / August 8, 2012 
http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/2012/08/curiosity-lands-on-mars/
             A person may just be curious by hearing the word Mars, but what about if you hear someone say "curiosity"landed on Mars.However curiosity, stands as a noun. After a journey lasting longer than 8 months, on August 5th curiosity, "a car-like rover" landed on Mars. The whole point of this sending was for the moving science lab to find evidence that the Red Planet once contained any type of life-no matter if one-celled organisms-. The vehicle landed on so called Mount Sharp where he will spend 2 years exploring the planet with its 10 research instruments it carries in its 2.8meters long "body". There are seventeen separate cameras on the vehicle (including one on the rover’s belly, to scan below it) which will record experiments and take pictures of the landscape.
Hi, my name is Curiosity:
 
"The rover’s primary goal “is to explore habitable environments,” says project scientist John Grotzinger of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. By habitable, he means an environment that can support life. His team interprets that to mean there must be water, carbon — a basic building block of life on Earth — and food to fuel an organism’s activities, he told Science News."

  The decay of plutonium, a radioactive element, will be the power source of this rover which can travel 200 meters per day, it is not the first rover to ever be sent to Mars, however it is the biggest and most sufficient from all.
 'as Curiosity moves by, it will shoot out a laser beam at the mountain and then direct onboard chemical samplers to “taste” the vaporized rock. Another onboard device can drill into rock, pulverizing it into a fine powder for the rover’s chemical samplers to taste.'-from those samplers later on it will be determined weather Mars could have been hosting living life. Scientists suspect that there one, a billion years ago, could have been an ocean on Mars leading to the fact that in that case the temperature should have been similar to Earths, this is where the questions come in, could there have been life? The landing of Curiosity was managed from Earth, making sure the landing wasn't too hard other wise the wheel could have gotten crushed and tat would make it impossible for Curiosity to obtain its main goal. 
The landing:


'President Obama has asked NASA to plan for sending humans to Mars in the mid-2030s. This week’s successful landing “marks a significant step toward achieving this goal,” NASA director Bolden says. '

I chose to read about this article because it sounded interesting that a robot has been sent to Mars to do investigation and that people are actually considering doing an exploration like this. However it was not my favorite article but it was still fun to read.