Tantalizing

BTW, you know that I was JK yesterday about Mars civilizations and Bradbury rovers and such, right? We'll be lucky if we ever stumble across a 10 million year old microbial fossil. And the Curiosity team has been careful to say that it's mission is not to look for life or signs of life, but rather to see if conditions are good for past or future life on Mars.

So landing at the base of an alluvial fan is a great place to start that mission. Signs of water in the past are key to this expedition for Curiosity. Just look at the tantalizing geographic features in the image below, color coded for elevation, red highest, blue lowest. It sure looks like a river feature emptying into a shallow ocean basin.

We want to know more! Why? Because we have CURIOSITY!

altimeter map of the south margins of the northern plains of Mars