THEMIS Night time infrared view of Gale Crater

Image produced in collaboration with the THEMIS team for NASA. Original text from the THEMIS webpage:

Data from THEMIS helped scientists choose a landing site for the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), NASA's next-generation rover spacecraft, due to arrive at Gale Crater in August 2012.

MSL's mission is to collect Martian soil and rock samples, and analyze them for organic compounds, looking for environmental conditions that could have supported microbial life now or in the past.  At a workshop in October 2009, scientists chose 4 sites (PDF) as possible landing site locations.  After that, several additional sites were proposed and evaluated for both scientific merit and engineering feasibility. NASA chose Gale Crater as the final landing site in 2011.

The objective of this work is to improve our understanding of the physical and mineralogical characteristics of the surface at the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) candidate landing sites and to aid in the selection of a final landing location by generating THEMIS-derived daytime infrared (IR), nighttime IR, visible, thermal inertia, and decorrelation stretched mosaics for each MSL candidate landing site. These mosaics are generated in collaboration with the United States Geologic Survey Astrogeology Science Center (Robin L. Fergason).