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
Crewed Mars rover rovers, because they need to know at least roughly where they are and where they are going to get to a destination. Dead reckoning was the method used by the Mars Pathfinder rover "Sojourner" for navigation. A GPS satellite network for Mars would mean a constellation of satellites in Mars orbit, but one alternative would be a surface based pseudo-satellites array. These devices would have to be emplaced with high precision, unless they were self-calibrating. An example of criteria for humaned Mars surface rover was expressed by NASA in the surface variant of the aforementioned SEV, in development in during