Mars rover Curiosity getting a taste of the base of Mt. Sharp
After two years of roving the Martian surface, NASA’s rover Curiosity has finally drilled its ultimate target: Mt. Sharp, the 3-mile-high mountain in the middle of Gale Crater. The robotic explorer is set to get a taste of Martian rock Tuesday night when the rover feeds its sample to the laboratory in its belly.
“It feels great. It’s been a long time coming, but I think we’re going to find that it was worth the drive,†said Ashwin Vasavada, deputy project scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory (as Curiosity’s mission is known). “There was a reason we came here.â€
Last week the rover drilled about 2.6 inches into an outcrop on the base of Mt. Sharp and pulled out a sample of powdered rock. The rock was one of the softest yet drilled, Vasavada said – a good sign because scientists will be looking for clay-rich material that could hold signs of past water on the Red Planet.
The drilling marks the start of a new period in Curiosity’s career on Mars. The rover took a detour soon after its August 2012 landing to study a spot called Yellowknife Bay, where it dug up evidence of a past wet environment with the right chemical ingredients for microbial life. Though their calculated risk paid off, the scientists have been pushing to get to their original target: Mt. Sharp, whose clay-rich layers could hold the story of the Red Planet’s past habitable environments.
“I think we just all feel that it’s nice to have all the pressure of driving behind us,†Vasavada said.
The rover has certainly been through a few rough patches, literally: Curiosity’s drivers had been picking their way carefully across the rocky surface after the team noticed an alarming amount of damage on the rover’s thin wheels.
“We really worked ourselves hard the last year to keep pushing forward,†Vasavada said. “And we gave up some opportunities to do science along the way because we wanted to make sure we had enough time in the mission to spend†at Mt. Sharp.
The rover was scheduled Tuesday at 10:30 p.m. Pacific time to feed a bit of its first sample to the Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument, a tool in the rover’s laboratory that hits the powdered rock with X-rays to examine its mineral structure. The CheMin instrument reveals the basic composition of the rock, as well as the temperature under which it formed and perhaps even the acidity of water that may have altered the rock.
If the mineralogy examination looks promising, then the sample may also be fed to the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument suite, which will use a mass spectrometer (one of three instruments in its arsenal) to look at elemental abundances. SAM can confirm some of the same things as CheMin but can also look for organic matter and perhaps even age-date the rocks, as it did for the rock known as Cumberland.
Vasavada says the plan is for Curiosity to stick around the spot for a week or two while they run the sample through parts of the rover’s internal chemical lab.
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