In one week, Curiosity grew by approximately 1 meter (3.5 feet) when spacecraft technicians and engineers attached the rover's neck and head (called the Remote Sensing Mast) to its body. At around 2 meters (about 7 feet) tall, the next rover to Mars now stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Mounted on Curiosity's mast are two navigation cameras (Navcams), two mast cameras (Mastcam), and the laser-carrying chemistry camera (ChemCam).

A downward-pointing camera on the front-left side of NASA's Curiosity rover will give adventure fans worldwide an unprecedented sense of riding a spacecraft to a landing on Mars.

The Mars Descent Imager, or MARDI, will start recording high-resolution video about two minutes before landing in August 2012. Initial frames will glimpse the heat shield falling away from beneath the rover, revealing a swath of Martian terrain below illuminated in afternoon sunlight. The first scenes will cover ground several kilometers (a few miles) across. Successive images will close in and cover a smaller area each second.

The wheels that will touch down on Mars in 2012 are several rotations closer to spinning on the rocky trails of Mars.

A video clip shows engineers in the JPL clean room where the rover is being assembled as they put all six wheels into motion for the first time.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, is sitting pretty on a set of spiffy new wheels that would be the envy of any car show on Earth.

The wheels and a suspension system were added this week by spacecraft technicians and engineers. These new and important touches are a key step in assembling and testing the flight system in advance of a planned 2011 launch.

NASA's Curiosity rover, coming together for a late 2011 launch to Mars, has a newly installed component: a key onboard X-ray instrument for helping the mission achieve its goals. Researchers will use Curiosity in an intriguing area of Mars to search for modern or ancient habitable environments, including any that may have also been favorable for preserving clues about life and environment.

The team assembling and testing Curiosity at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., fastened the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument inside the rover body on June 15. CheMin will identify the minerals in samples of powdered rock or soil that the rover's robotic arm will deliver to an input funnel.

NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center recently provided logistics and range support for a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory team that tested a landing radar system for the next Mars rover mission adjacent to Dryden's Edwards Air Force Base facilities.

Testing for the JPL-managed Mars Science Laboratory or MSL project included suspending a full-scale engineering model of the MSL rover from a helicopter and flying pre-planned flight trajectories over Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards to simulate the rover's descent stage carrying the rover to the surface of Mars. JPL engineers needed to verify that the radar will provide accurate altitude and velocity measurements at Mars and that the suspended rover will not confuse the ability of the descent stage's radar to accurately calculate the rover's descent speed for a safe, on-target landing.

Planners of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity mission have selected a flight schedule that will use favorable positions for two currently orbiting NASA Mars orbiters to obtain maximum information during descent and landing.

Continuing analysis of the geometry and communications options for the arrival at Mars have led planners to choose an Earth-to-Mars trajectory that schedules launch between Nov. 25 and Dec. 18, 2011. Landing will take place between Aug. 6 and Aug. 20, 2012. Due to an Earth-Mars planetary alignment, this launch period actually allows for a Mars arrival in the earlier portion of the landing dates under consideration.

This spring, engineers are testing a radar system that will serve during the next landing on Mars.

Recent tests included some near Lancaster, Calif., against a backdrop of blooming California poppy fields. In those tests, a helicopter carried an engineering test model of the landing radar for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory on prescribed descent paths. The descents at different angles and from different heights simulated paths associated with specific candidate sites for the mission.

Malin Space Science Systems, Inc. (MSSS), has delivered the last two of four science cameras it developed for the NASA 2011 Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover mission.

These cameras, known collectively as the Mast Camera (or Mastcam) are designed to be the science imaging "workhorse" for the MSL rover. The cameras, capable of taking full color images analogous to those taken by consumer digital cameras, will be mounted on the rover's remote sensing mast, where they can be panned and tilted to provide image coverage around the rover, both near the rover and out to the horizon.

The quest to discover whether Mars ever hosted an environment friendly to microscopic forms of life has just gotten a shot in the arm.

"Mars was a lot different 3-1/2 billion years ago. It was more like Earth with liquid water," said Jennifer Eigenbrode, a scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Maybe life existed back then. Maybe it has persisted, which is possible given the fact that we've found life in every extreme environment here on Earth. If life existed on Mars, maybe it adapted very much like life adapted here."

A team of researchers from the CSIC-INTA Astrobiology Centre in Madrid has confirmed that the type of mineralogical composition on the surface of Mars influences the measuring of its temperature.

The study is published this week in the Journal of Environmental Monitoring and will be used to interpret the data from the soil temperature sensor of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) vehicle, whose launch is envisaged for 2011.

The finished heat shield for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, with a diameter of 4.5 meters (14 feet, 9 inches), is the largest ever built for descending through the atmosphere of any planet.

This image shows the heat shield and a spacecraft worker at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, which built and tested the heat shield.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover, scheduled for launch in 2011, has a new name thanks to a sixth-grade student from Kansas. Twelve-year-old Clara Ma from the Sunflower Elementary school in Lenexa submitted the winning entry, "Curiosity."

As her prize, Ma wins a trip to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., where she will be invited to sign her name directly onto the rover as it is being assembled.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory will launch two years later than previously planned, in the fall of 2011. The mission will send a next-generation rover with unprecedented research tools to study the early environmental history of Mars.

A launch date of October 2009 no longer is feasible because of testing and hardware challenges that must be addressed to ensure mission success. The window for a 2009 launch ends in late October. The relative positions of Earth and Mars are favorable for flights to Mars only a few weeks every two years. The next launch opportunity after 2009 is in 2011.

Out of more than 30 sites considered as possible landing targets for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, by November 2008 four of the most intriguing places on Mars rose to the final round of the site-selection process.

The four finalists are, alphabetically:

• Eberswalde - where an ancient river deposited a delta in a possible lake.
• Gale - with a mountain of stacked layers including clays and sulfates.
• Holden - a crater containing alluvial fans, flood deposits, possible lake beds and clay-rich deposits.
• Mawrth - which shows exposed layers containing at least two types of clay.