PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — If you were packing for Mars, what would you bring?

NASA’s latest tourist, the roving robot named Curiosity, will lug around a suite of gadgets to snap pictures, sniff, taste and even drill. It will study the environment to figure out whether the giant crater where it lands ever possessed a habitable environment for microbial life.

The six-wheel, nuclear-powered rover is far more tech-savvy than anything that has landed before on the red planet. Here’s a glimpse of some of the cool things Curiosity can do:

It carries a laser that can zap a hole in rocks up to about 25 feet away and identify the chemical elements inside. This point-and-shoot strategy saves time because if a rock looks boring, Curiosity can roll on.

Its 7-foot-long robotic arm has a power drill at the end that can bore into rocks and soil. Like a scientist in a laboratory, it can transfer the ground-up powder to its onboard workbench to tease out minerals and sniff for organics, considered the chemical building blocks of life.

Curiosity promises to be a shutterbug, toting around a set of 2-megapixel color cameras that can beam panoramas back to Earth. With YouTube fans in mind, it also packed a video camera that will record the last few minutes of its hairy descent to Mars.

Like Mars rovers before it, Curiosity carries a weather station to take daily temperature and pressure readings and record seasonal changes.

Even before landing, Curiosity has been doing experiments, tracking radiation during the 8 1/2-month cruise to Mars. That should help NASA gauge radiation risk to future distance-traveling astronauts.

As sophisticated as Curiosity is, it won’t be able to tell us whether primitive life existed on Mars once upon a time or if it’s there now. The one-ton rover isn’t equipped for that and its cameras are not powerful enough to see fossil relics — if they exist.

Smarts aside, engineers also outfitted Curiosity with a sense of style. It boasts 20-inch aluminum wheels — twice the size of the wheels on twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity that landed in 2004 — with spokes made of titanium and cleats for traction.

Curiosity may be tricked out, but expect some slow going. Its top speed one-tenth of a mile per hour.

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Follow Alicia Chang’s Mars coverage at http://www.twitter.com/SciWriAlicia