Advertise on NYTimes.com NASA Picks Rover Destination: Mountain on Mars

At least we will have this, at least for now.
NASA would like to continue with space exploration, aside from this they have also announced plans to put Astronauts on a Asteroid.

Funding, of course, stands to be cut from the NASA Budget leaving us with nothing to pay attention to in space.




The New York Times
NASA’s next Mars rover — the ambitious, beleaguered, delayed Mars Science Laboratory finally has a destination.

Mission scientists announced Friday that the rover, a nuclear-powered vehicle the size of a small S.U.V., would head to Gale Crater, a 96-mile-wide depression near the Martian equator. What attracted them there is a mountain that rises upward nearly three miles at the center, making it taller, for example, than Mount Rainier outside Seattle.

“The thing about this mountain is it’s not a tall spire,” John P. Grotzinger, the project scientist, said at a news conference at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington. “It’s a broad, low, moundlike shape. What it means is 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.”