NASA’s next Mars rover — the ambitious, beleaguered, delayed Mars Science Laboratory — finally has a destination.

Mission scientists announced Friday that the rover, a nuclear-powered vehicle the size of a small S.U.V., would head to Gale Crater, a 96-mile-wide depression near the Martian equator. What attracted them there is a mountain that rises upward nearly three miles at the center, making it taller, for example, than Mount Rainier outside Seattle.

“The thing about this mountain is it’s not a tall spire,” John P. Grotzinger, the project scientist, said at a news conference at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington. “It’s a broad, low, moundlike shape. What it means is we can drive up it with a rover. So this might be the tallest mountain anywhere in the solar system that we could actually climb with a rover.”

Scientists initially identified 100 possible landing sites, which were narrowed down to four finalists. All of the four were intriguing, Dr. Grotzinger said, and getting the scientists to agree on one was like getting a group of people to decide on one flavor of ice cream.