Curiosity had better strap on its climbing gear. NASA has decided that the US$2.5-billion Mars rover - the most ambitious mission yet to the red planet - will land in Gale Crater, a 155-kilometre-wide bowl with a mountain at its centre. The selection, announced on 22 July, ends a competitive five-year process that considered some 60 sites for the Mars Science Laboratory mission. In the quest to discover whether Mars could ever have supported life, Gale Crater has something for everybody - including a 5-kilo-metre-tall mountain of stacked sediments. "This might be the tallest mountain-in the Solar System that we can climb with a rover," says John Grotzinger, the missions project scientist and a geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
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