After traveling for more than eight months and traversing 352
million miles, NASA's Curiosity rover is now on Mars. From
conception to landing, the rover mission took eleven years to
complete and cost an estimated $2.6 billion. NASA scientist Jim
Garvin appears on Starting Point this morning to discuss the
significance of the mission and to explain what scientists hope
to accomplish with the rover. "We'd like to find the kind of
chemical fingerprints that show that Mars may have been a
habitable world [...] and that would maybe tell us that we're
not alone" Garvin explains. "So this mission is all about
understanding the rocks and soils on Mars as if we were chemical
fossil hunters so we have to do a lot of exploring to address
that question."