MSL landing sites Options

[tuvas]

As there are some pictures being released from HiRISE of proposed MSL landing sites, I thought I'd give you what little I know about the process. As of the HiRISE team meeting a month ago or so, there were about 40 proposed sites to land MSL. These sites were prioritized, and are being photographed roughly in priority order. Each site requires a picture from each of the 3 main cameras (CTX, CRISM, and HiRISE) in their highest resolution in order to proceed. If it's determined that there can be a safe landing site, as well as interesting science targets, then they will advance to the next level, where I presume they will "wallpaper" the areas with HiRISE and CRISM (CTX, well, they get the whole landing ellipse in one shot, I think...). They likely will also photograph science areas near the proposed sites to look for interesting targets. After that, well, your guess is as good as mine. Note that none of this is official, but it's what I would expect. Also note that the landing site selection is still opened to new suggestions, the ones they have so far are not a complete list. The priority also doesn't mean anything right now other than they are the targets which will be photographed first, these priorities are still subject to change. But, well, I thought I'd send this out there for you all sink your teeth on, it really is quite interesting!

[PDP8E]

...more musings on a caffeine powered Sunday night (I should really do something about that)
I was over at the MSL Landing Site Workshop website for a few hours and ...boy.... PLEASE PICK GALE!

5km central mound that's traverse-able (that's Pikes Peak tall, 14,000 to 16,000 feet, depending where you are in the crater)
layers, sediments, most likely an ancient lake was there, and the mystery -- the mound itself. The top is higher than the crater walls. Good Luck MSL Steering Committee with your final choice next year!
Have there been any known recent active gullies spied at Gale?

[tharrison]

...more musings on a caffeine powered Sunday night (I should really do something about that)
I was over at the MSL Landing Site Workshop website for a few hours and ...boy.... PLEASE PICK GALE!

5km central mound that's traverse-able (that's Pikes Peak tall, 14,000 to 16,000 feet, depending where you are in the crater)
layers, sediments, most likely an ancient lake was there, and the mystery -- the mound itself. The top is higher than the crater walls. Good Luck MSL Steering Committee with your final choice next year!
Have there been any known recent active gullies spied at Gale?

No, there are no active gullies in Gale—it's way outside the latitude range where gullies occur.

Any of the landing sites will tell us something interesting about Mars, but they are all very different and each have their different issues. Eberswalde is the easiest to sell to the general public because it's easy to understand—there's a delta there. Problem is the landing ellipse is very rugged, so the engineers aren't too keen on it. Mawrth has been built upon the mineralogy, but the geology of the area is incredibly complex and so it's hard to put the story together (I've been attending the MSL Landing Site Working Group telecons and Mawrth is so complex we needed more than one session to talk about it). It's the safest of the landing sites though, so it's high on the list. Holden is kind of one-note compared to the other sites, and it has some ruggedness issues like Eberswalde. Gale is definitely interesting, and even if MSL never made it to the mound, a panorama of the mound from the Mastcam would undoubtedly look amazing compared to the flat, bouldery landscapes we're used to seeing from other rover/lander missions. However, I don't think a beautiful panorama would be worth the >$2 billion price tag of MSL, so we have to take the fact that the landing ellipse is so far from the mound into account. The price tag should be (but won't, NASA HQ doesn't think like that) one of the big factors in picking a landing site—which site has enough to keep the rover occupied for 1 Mars year doing work worth the enormous price tag (which means no stopping to look at meteorites for weeks on end like Opportunity!).