Curiosity, a state-of-the-art rover that will be launched Saturday with the Mars Science Laboratory probe, will attempt to discover whether life can or could have lived in the Red Planet.

To be launched atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, the car-sized Curiosity is expected to land in early August 2012.

According to NASA, Curiosity carries instruments to search for evidence about whether Mars had environments favorable for microbial life, including the chemical ingredients for life. It will use a laser to look inside rocks and release their gases so its spectrometer can analyze and send the data back to Earth.

"This is a vehicle on Mars, cruising around, drilling into rocks, chipping away at stuff to see what that planet's made out of," said Omar Baez, the launch director of the MSL mission. "And even if it didn't do that, if it just cruised around Mars and took pictures, the value in that is tremendous."

Curiosity will be the fourth NASA rover to touch down on Mars since the Pathfinder probe with the Sojourner rover landed in July 1997 for a study that suggested early Mars was much like Earth.

What makes Curiosity more special is that it is equipped with a mobile suite of instruments that will survey the Gale Crater to find answers to one of the most intriguing questions of modern science, possible life on Mars.

"The hope is that we can land there and basically unlock the secrets of an environment that existed there a few billion years ago on Mars that was potentially a place that life could have survived," said Ashwin Vasavada, MSL deputy project scientist.

Aside from the pictures which Curiosity can take of the Gale Crater, the rover has a laser that will vaporize tiny segments of rocks so an instrument on board can find out what they are made of.

"The MSL rover is essentially like a geologist in a self-contained laboratory and the capabilities that exist are probably the next best thing to sending a human to do the same job," said Wanda Harding, the MSL's mission manager for the Launch Services Program.