Deployment Practice

Cape Canaveral, Fla. -- Technicians at the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, put the instrument mast and science boom on NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover, known as Curiosity, through a series of deployment tests. A United Launch Alliance Atlas V-541 configuration will be used to loft MSL into space. Curiosity's 10 science instruments will search for habitable environments on Mars that could support life, past or present. The unique rover will use a laser to look inside rocks and release the gasses so that its spectrometer can analyze and send the data back to Earth, as well as sophisticated chemistry experiments and high-powered microscopes. MSL is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida Nov. 25. For more information visit: www.nasa.gov/msl.