NASA Mars Rover Begins Driving at Bradbury Landing

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 PHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Guy Webster/D.C. Agle 818-354-6278/818-393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov / agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
Dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

News release: 2012-256 Aug. 22, 2012

NASA Mars Rover Begins Driving at Bradbury Landing

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-256&cid=release_2012-256

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has begun driving from its landing site, which
scientists announced today they have named for the late author Ray Bradbury.

Making its first movement on the Martian surface, Curiosity's drive combined forward, turn and
reverse segments. This placed the rover roughly 20 feet (6 meters) from the spot where it landed 16
days ago.

NASA has approved the Curiosity science team's choice to name the landing ground for the
influential author, who was born 92 years ago today and died this year. The location where Curiosity
touched down is now called Bradbury Landing.

"This was not a difficult choice for the science team," said Michael Meyer, NASA program scientist
for Curiosity. "Many of us and millions of other readers were inspired in our lives by stories Ray
Bradbury wrote to dream of the possibility of life on Mars."

Today's drive confirmed the health of Curiosity's mobility system and produced the rover's first wheel
tracks on Mars, documented in images taken after the drive. During a news conference today at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., the mission's lead rover driver, Matt Heverly,
showed an animation derived from visualization software used for planning the first drive.

"We have a fully functioning mobility system with lots of amazing exploration ahead," Heverly said.

Curiosity will spend several more days of working beside Bradbury Landing, performing instrument
checks and studying the surroundings, before embarking toward its first driving destination
approximately 1,300 feet (400 meters) to the east-southeast.

"Curiosity is a much more complex vehicle than earlier Mars rovers. The testing and characterization
activities during the initial weeks of the mission lay important groundwork for operating our precious
national resource with appropriate care," said Curiosity Project Manager Pete Theisinger of JPL.
"Sixteen days in, we are making excellent progress."

The science team has begun pointing instruments on the rover's mast for investigating specific targets
of interest near and far. The Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument used a laser and
spectrometers this week to examine the composition of rocks exposed when the spacecraft's landing
engines blew away several inches of overlying material.

The instrument's principal investigator, Roger Weins of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New
Mexico, reported that measurements made on the rocks in this scoured-out feature called Goulburn
suggest a basaltic composition. "These may be pieces of basalt within a sedimentary deposit," Weins
said.

Curiosity began a two-year prime mission on Mars when the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft
delivered the car-size rover to its landing target inside Gale Crater on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT). The
mission will use 10 science instruments on the rover to assess whether the area has ever offered
environmental conditions favorable for microbial life.

In a career spanning more than 70 years, Ray Bradbury inspired generations of readers to dream,
think and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and nearly 50 books, as well as
numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, teleplays and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most
celebrated writers of our time.

His groundbreaking works include "Fahrenheit 451," "The Martian Chronicles," "The Illustrated
Man," "Dandelion Wine," and "Something Wicked This Way Comes." He wrote the screenplay for
John Huston's classic film adaptation of "Moby Dick," and was nominated for an Academy Award.
He adapted 65 of his stories for television's The Ray Bradbury Theater, and won an Emmy for his
teleplay of "The Halloween Tree."

JPL manages the Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in
Washington. The rover was designed, developed and assembled at JPL, a division of the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

More information about Curiosity is online at:
http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl .

Follow the mission on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at:
http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

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