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02.12.2013

curosity meets rock

Curiosity rover rock

Mars curiosity drilled this hole in this rock.

The Mars rover Curiosity has drilled the first ever hole into Martian rocks. From Alicia Chang:

Using the drill at the end of its 7-foot-long robotic arm, Curiosity on Friday chipped away at a flat, veined rock bearing numerous signs of past water flow. After nearly seven minutes of pounding, the result was a drill hole 2 1/2 -inches deep.

The exercise was so complex that engineers spent several days commanding Curiosity to tap the rock outcrop, drill test holes and perform a ‘‘mini-drill’’ in anticipation of the real show. Images beamed back to Earth overnight showed a fresh borehole next to a shallower test hole Curiosity had made earlier.

‘‘It was a perfect execution,’’ drill engineer Avi Okon at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Saturday.

Previous Mars landings carried tools that scraped away the exterior layers of rocks and dirt. Opportunity and Spirit — before it died — toted around a rock grinder. Phoenix, which touched down near the Martian north pole in 2008, was equipped with an ice rasp to chisel frozen soil.

Now onto analyzing the rock’s chemical make up.

12.04.2012

what is curiosity finding

Curiosity left these imprints in Martian soil after scooping up rock samples.

Curiosity has been analyzing rocks on Mars for a while now. Popular Science updates on it’s findings:

The presence of perchlorate may be the biggest news from the press conference, which kicked off the day at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco. The Mars Phoenix lander also saw evidence of this chlorine-oxygen compound, which could conceivably be used as an energy source by Martian microbes. The analysis of these chemicals–which involves baking samples inside SAM’s oven and measuring the vapors that come out–in and of itself created new chemicals which the sensitive instruments picked up. Among those newly formed chemicals were some chlorinated methane compounds.The chlorine is from Mars, Mahaffy said. The carbon’s origin is still unclear. Scientists will try to figure it out by measuring isotope ratios and making other measurements.

Other results from Curiosity’s first few months on Mars include some analysis of the soil and rocks, which are apparently very similar in both chemical composition and appearance to rocks in other spots on the planet. The Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity rovers saw very similar soil in different locations. At Curiosity’s present location, a site in Gale Crater called Rocknest, the soil is about half volcanic material and half crystalline materials, like glass. Interestingly, the water bound up in this soil is much, much heavier than water in Earth’s oceans, Mahaffy said.

So no extraterrestrial life just yet. But the data is still pouring in.

09.15.2012

mars is the next frontier

Mars Insight

An artist’s render of the Mars InSight probe

The next mission to Mars includes plans to explore beneath the planet’s surface. The plan is called InSight and is scheduled for launch in 2016. The goal is to collect information on the crust, mantle and core of Mars to determine how the planet has evolved. This should enhance any knowledge that is gained from Curiosity’s surface exploration.

From Science:

 $425 million lander that would drill a few meters into Mars in order to probe its crust, mantle, and core will be NASA’s next major planetary science mission. In a teleconference late Monday, NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, John Grunsfeld, announced that he has selected the InSight mission to Mars as NASA’s next cost-capped mission to explore the solar system. The craft will set a seismometer on the surface and send a temperature sensor down a drill hole to better understand how that rocky planet evolved from a nascent ball of magma.

InSight (Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport) beat out two other finalists for NASA’s Discovery Program award. One would have splashed a craft onto a lake of liquefied natural gas on Titan, and another would have touched down on an active comet. InSight team members, led by planetary scientist W. Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, had made a strong pitch for their mission quickly returning the maximum science for the buck. InSight is based on the lander and spacecraft design that successfully delivered the Phoenix lander to Mars, they noted, which reduces both cost and risk. And while seismological studies have detailed Earth’s interior, the interiors of the three other rocky planets—Mercury, Venus, and Mars—have remained largely unknown. Mars, they argued, is large enough to have separated into crust, rocky mantle, and metallic core, but it has not been so tectonically active that it erased the record of that evolution.

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