Nasa's Mars rover is on its final approach to the red planet, heading toward a mountain that may hold clues about whether life has ever existed on Mars.

The rover, also known as Curiosity, has been careening toward Mars since its launch in November. The size of a compact car, it is expected to end its 567-million-km journey next Monday.

The hoped for touch down on the red planet will be monitored at Wellington's Carter Observatory.

The observatory, along with the KiwiSpace Foundation, will be hosting a live viewing of the event.

"If Curiosity survives its descent to the Martian surface that is," the observatory said.

The special event would run from 4.30pm on Monday, with a live link up for the "seven minutes of terror" as the rover descends onto the planet's surface.

The observatory is also encouraging students and social media users to help spread the word about the landing through services such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

The landing zone is a 20km by 7km area inside an ancient impact basin known as Gale Crater, located near the planet's equator.

The crater, one of the lowest places on Mars, has a 5km high mountain of what appears to be layers of sediment.

Scientists suspect the crater may have once been the floor of a lake.

If so, they believe that sediments likely filled the crater, but were carried away over time, leaving only the central mound.

Readying to travel the last stretch to its landing site, Curiosity fired its steering thrusters for six seconds early Sunday, tweaking its flight path by 1cm per second.

"I will not be surprised if this was our last trajectory correction manoeuvre," chief navigator Tomas Martin-Mur, with Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a statement.

Curiosity is expected to hit the top of the Martian atmosphere at 5.24pm NZT on August 6.

If all goes as planned, seven minutes later the rover will be standing on its six wheels on the dry, dusty surface of Mars.

Landing is by no means guaranteed. To transport the one-tonne rover and position it near the mound, engineers devised a complicated system that includes a 16m diameter supersonic parachute, a rocket-powered aerial platform and a so-called "sky crane" designed to lower the rover on a tether to the ground.

Nasa last week successfully repositioned its Mars-orbiting Odyssey spacecraft so that it would be able to monitor Curiosity's descent and landing and radio the information back to ground controllers in as close to real time as possible.

Earth and Mars are so far apart that radio signals, which travel at the speed of light, take 13.8 minutes for a one-way journey.

- Reuters