Record Crowd Expected for Unmanned Launch at the Cape

Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll, chair of Space Florida, will take a break from her Thanksgiving vacation to join a large holiday weekend crowd watching the latest mission to Mars that will belaunched from Cape Canaveral on Saturday.

The car-sized Mars Science Laboratory and Curiosity rover, aboard an unmanned Atlas 5, is set to launch at 10:02 a.m.

"We're expecting about 13,500 people on NASA Kennedy Space Center property for the Mars Science Laboratory launch," NASA spokesman Allard Beutel said according to SPACE.com. "That's VIPs, media at the press site and guests at our visitor complex."

NASA reported that 12,300, the current record turnout, watched the Juno spacecraft launch to Jupiter in July.

The Curiosity rover, twice as long and three times as heavy as the Mars exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity, is designed to sample Martian soil and rock cores seeking signs of microbial life.