MSL Landing Sites Narrowed to Four

This article originally appeared on Ryan Anderson's "The Martian Chronicles" blog and is reposted here with permission.

I've known about this for a little while but it was finally made public: The list of MSL landing sites had now been trimmed to four. You can read the full press release here. The finalist sites are:

Gale Crater - The rover would land on an ancient alluvial fan and then work its way up a mound of sediments many kilometers high.

Eberswalde Delta - The rover would land on plains that may be an old lake-bed and work its way toward the best-preserved delta on Mars.

Holden Crater - The rover would land on a slope formed by water-carried debris, and then rove to the exposed sediments of what may have been a huge lake.

Mawrth Vallis - The rover would land on layered sediments that have some of the strongest detections of phyllosilicates on Mars.

I would love to write more, but I have to get back to work on mapping the landing site in Gale crater!