NASA's Curiosity Cans Cameron's Cameras

An artist's conception of NASA's next Martian rover, called Curiosity, one of many U.S. missions to the red planet.

Pasadena, California - a high-resolution camera 3-D "Avatar," director James Cameron have contributed to building the next Mars rover NASA not to fly after all.

NASA said Friday that work on the camera zoom was arrested because there was insufficient time to test it properly before launch.

Cameron last year lobbied NASA to revive a plan to give the rover a curiosity best pair of eyes and worked with engineers to build it.

Project scientist John Grotzinger said the current camera curiosity is powerful enough to achieve the objectives of the mission.

In a statement released by NASA, Cameron said he believes that future missions will benefit from the work he and others invested in curiosity did not.

Curiosity $ 2,500,000,000 is expected to launch later this year and land on Mars in August 2012.