Life on Mars Ca(ClO) in the Phoenix soil has not interacted with liquid water of any form, perhaps for as long as 600 Myr. If it had, the highly soluble Ca(ClO) in contact with liquid water would have formed only CaSO. This suggests a severely arid environment, with minimal or no liquid water interaction. The Mars Science Laboratory mission is a NASA project that launched on November 26, 2011, the "Curiosity" rover, a nuclear-powered robotic vehicle, bearing instruments designed to assess past and present habitability conditions on Mars. The "Curiosity" rover landed on Mars on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater, near Aeolis Mons
Mars Pathfinder Tony Spear. This mission was the first of a series of missions to Mars that included rovers, and was the first successful lander since the two "Vikings" landed on the red planet in 1976. Although the Soviet Union successfully sent rovers to the Moon as part of the Lunokhod program in the 1970s, its attempts to use rovers in its Mars program failed. In addition to scientific objectives, the "Mars Pathfinder" mission was also a "proof-of-concept" for various technologies, such as airbag-mediated touchdown and automated obstacle avoidance, both later exploited by the Mars Exploration Rover mission. The "Mars Pathfinder" was