Targeted landing area

The Mars Science Laboratory science team divided up the location where the mission's rover, Curiosity, will land into a series of "quadrangles." This includes the targeted landing ellipse in red, and adjacent areas within Gale Crater.

More than 30 team members mapped the quadrangles, which show great diversity in their geological attributes, including: portions of an alluvial fan (quads 31, 32, 33); layered deposits (quad 50 and many others); dunes composed of dark gray sand (quads 92, 54, 28); the basal-layered deposits of Mount Sharp (quads 118, 107, 83); and buried impact craters (quad 81). Many of these features represent important targets in the search for habitable environments.