NASA's Mars rover, Curiosity, has completed its longest trek yet, according to CBS News, driving 464 feet to the top of Panorama Point, where it took photographs of Waypoint 1, a collection of interesting rocks en route to the vehicle's final destination: Mount Sharp, a three-mile-high mountain.
Along the way, Curiosity has taken photographs of what will be, in total, a 5.3 mile journey, mapped out by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter from space.
In March of this year, scientists announced that a stretch of Mars, labeled Yellowknife Bay, was capable of supporting microbial life billions of years ago. Now scientists are attempting to use the $2.5 billion land vehicle to see how Mount Sharp compares.
"We want to know how the rocks at Yellowknife Bay are related to what we'll see at Mount Sharp," Curiosity's project scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology, said in a statement. "That's what we intend to get from the waypoints between them. We'll use them to stitch together a timeline -- which layers are older, which are younger."
As for life on the red planet, the curiosity surrounding it may relate less to the past than it does to the future.
Mars One, a foundation intending to put a permanent settlement on Mars by the year 2023 has received over 200,000 applications from citizens interested in living the rest of their lives on the first Mars colony, reports the Christian Science Monitor. Of the 202,586 total applications, a quarter came from the United States, 10 percent came from India, and 6 percent came from China. Latin Americans from Mexico and Brazil each covered 4 percent of total applications as well.
That mission, which the foundation estimates will cost $6 billion, will select six teams of four, starting in 2015, and - after the groups spend seven years training - will being sending earthlings to the planet in 2022. To help raise funds, Mars One wants to turn the selection process and the colonies into a television show.
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