Aiming to nail down whether Mars could have nurtured life in the past, the Mars Science Laboratory will live up to its name, with a state-of-the-art internal chemical and mineralogical laboratory. The rover will pick up rocks, chew, swallow, then analyze the minerals in detail

How do you follow a flat-out success like the Mars Exploration Rovers, still cruising Mars after all these months? By thinking "bigger and better." The Mars Science Laboratory, currently scheduled for launch in 2009, will land a rover three times as massive as Spirit or

If the Mars Exploration Rovers' twin panoramic cameras represent a pair of eyes, then the Mini-TES (Mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometer) is its third eye. Mini-TES analyzes a scene in infrared, rather than in visible light. Scientists can interpret its data to determine the mineral composition of

Instruments on the Athena Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, will measure the composition of Martian rocks, searching for evidence of past water. But how will they "see" the real rock beneath all the dust? The Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) comes to the rescue, cutting

Instruments on the Athena Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, will measure the composition of Martian rocks, searching for evidence of past water. But how will they "see" the real rock beneath all the dust? The Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) comes to the rescue, cutting

A key goal for the Mars Exploration Rovers is to find out what Mars rocks are made of. That's no simple matter, requiring several tools mounted on the Instrument Deployment Device. One, the Alpha-Particle-X-Ray Spectrometer, analyzes many of the chemical elements in a rock or

To the Mars Exploration Rover mission, water, past or present, is the grail. One way to look for past water is to analyze soil and rock surfaces for evidence of iron-containing minerals (or compounds), which differ depending on whether the environment in the past was

After the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, land in January 2004, they'll take their first look around, literally, with their Pancam imaging system, a pair of cameras capable of panning 360-degrees around the rover's mast. Pancam will make the sharpest pictures yet of Mars'

The Mars Exploration Rovers provide geologists with their first chance to do field work on Mars, so the rovers took along the space version of a common geologist's tool, the pocket magnifying glass or hand lens.

Caves - some pitch black, some with poisonous atmospheres - teem with microbes that rot rock and make unique crystals and chemicals. Cave-microbe researchers hope to gain insight from these unusual microscopic creatures about what life signs to search for in extraterrestrial environments.