Mars Mission: Curiosity - Page 61

NASA's Curiosity rover has, for the first time, used a drill carried at the end of its robotic arm to bore into a flat, veiny rock on Mars and collect a sample from its interior. This is the first time any robot has drilled into a rock to collect a sample on Mars.

The fresh hole, about 0.63 inch (1.6 centimeters) wide and 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters) deep in a patch of fine-grained sedimentary bedrock, can be seen in images and other data Curiosity beamed to Earth Saturday. The rock is believed to hold evidence about long-gone wet environments. In pursuit of that evidence, the rover will use its laboratory instruments to analyze rock powder collected by the drill.

"The most advanced planetary robot ever designed now is a fully operating analytical laboratory on Mars," said John Grunsfeld, NASA associate administrator for the agency's Science Mission Directorate. "This is the biggest milestone accomplishment for the Curiosity team since the sky-crane landing last August, another proud day for America."

For the next several days, ground controllers will command the rover's arm to carry out a series of steps to process the sample, ultimately delivering portions to the instruments inside.

"We commanded the first full-depth drilling, and we believe we have collected sufficient material from the rock to meet our objectives of hardware cleaning and sample drop-off," said Avi Okon, drill cognizant engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena.

The $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover is beginning detailed analysis of the first subsurface rock sample acquired on another planet, keeping researchers on "pins and needles" about whether Curiosity has struck Martian paydirt 216 million miles (348 million km) from Earth.

Preliminary examination of the greenish, mudstone-like sample is peaking interest and debate about whether the flat rocks under Curiosity's wheels could be a type that perhaps preserved organic carbon relevant to potential past life on Mars, JPL geologist Robert C. Anderson told CuriousMars.

But nobody will know the answer to that question until Curiosity completes its chemical and mineralogical analysis just getting underway with the CheMin and SAM instruments, said Anderson, a member of the MSL Surface Sampling System (SSS) team that weighs both science and engineering factors to advise the Science Team.

The analysis is by far the most significant scientific investigation carried out by the rover since its landing last August. "Everybody is holding their breath to see what the sample is," he said.

The first instrument to process a portion of the sample will be the NASA Ames Research Center's CheMin Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument, which will identify and measure the abundances of various minerals in the rock powder.

"This stuff we drilled is new material to us," said David Blake, CheMin Principal Investigator. "We are all sitting on pins and needles about what it is," he told CuriousMars.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has beamed home photos confirming that it recovered samples from deep within a Red Planet rock, cementing the robot's place in exploration history.

The Curiosity rover drilled 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters) into a Martian outcrop on Feb. 8, and today (Feb. 20) mission scientists first set eyes on images showing drill tailings sitting in Curiosity's scoop, waiting to be transferred to analytical instruments on the robot's body.

The photos confirm that Curiosity has pulled off an historic achievement, scientists said.

"This is the first time any robot, fixed or mobile, has drilled into a rock to collect a sample on Mars," Louise Jandura, sample system chief engineer for Curiosity at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., told reporters today.

"In fact, this is the first time any rover has drilled into a rock to collect a sample anywhere but on Earth," Jandura added. "In the five-decade history of the space age, this is indeed a rare event."

Scientists with the $2.5 billion Mars rover Curiosity will reveal potentially historic discoveries about Mars next week in Washington D. C.

There are indications that the planned March 12 NASA Headquarters briefing could reveal the finding of organic carbon on Mars - "key ingredients" for life on Mars, as the space agency reinforced this week.

In what may - or may not - be a coincidence, the day prior to announcing the rover science briefing that will be broadcast on NASA Television, the agency's Curiosity web site posted a new video titled: "Why is Curiosity Looking for Organics?"

The video opens with the narrator saying, "Organics are carbon-based molecules-key ingredients to life".

After an organics related geology discussion, the video concludes by saying, "If Curiosity finds organics, it wouldn't prove life existed, but it sure would improve the odds that Mars once had the right ingredients for life".

Previous Curiosity rover science briefings have simply been telecons based at JPL. But 9 years ago when the rover Opportunity made the historic finding that water had flowed on Mars - that announcement was also made during a televised briefing in Washington.

The Curiosity drilled rock sample briefing comes as BAE Systems and Jet Propulsion Laboratory computer experts complete fixes to the two BAE RAD750 computers systems. One of the rover's two computers, the A-side processor and memory malfunctioned February 28 requiring more than a week of work to fully program the B-side backup to take full command, while the A-side problem was diagnosed and corrected so it could become the new backup.

PASADENA, Calif. -- An analysis of a rock sample collected by NASA's Curiosity rover shows ancient Mars could have supported living microbes.

Scientists identified sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon -- some of the key chemical ingredients for life -- in the powder Curiosity drilled out of a sedimentary rock near an ancient stream bed in Gale Crater on the Red Planet last month.

"A fundamental question for this mission is whether Mars could have supported a habitable environment," said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "From what we know now, the answer is yes."

Clues to this habitable environment come from data returned by the rover's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) and Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instruments. The data indicate the Yellowknife Bay area the rover is exploring was the end of an ancient river system or an intermittently wet lake bed that could have provided chemical energy and other favorable conditions for microbes. The rock is made up of a fine-grained mudstone containing clay minerals, sulfate minerals and other chemicals. This ancient wet environment, unlike some others on Mars, was not harshly oxidizing, acidic or extremely salty.

The patch of bedrock where Curiosity drilled for its first sample lies in an ancient network of stream channels descending from the rim of Gale Crater. The bedrock also is fine-grained mudstone and shows evidence of multiple periods of wet conditions, including nodules and veins.

Curiosity's drill collected the sample at a site just a few hundred yards away from where the rover earlier found an ancient streambed in September 2012.

Curiosity breaks a rock with lots of white hydrated calcium material

On February 16 2013 07:22 EleanorRIgby wrote:
wow that's amazing how its a fully functional mobile lab on another planet. People in the 1800's would have laughed at the very idea, makes me think whats gonna happens in the next century.

After being stuck behind the sun for most of April, Curiosity’s science adventures on Mars have resumed, with another drilling operation: On May 20, the rover drilled into a rock named Cumberland, creating a hole measuring a bit more than half an inch across.
According to USGS scientist Ken Herkenhoff, the drilling went perfectly.


Cumberland is pale and veiny, a flat rock with a bumpy surface located about 9 feet west of Curiosity’s first drilling target, a rock called John Klein. Results from that first experiment suggested ancient Mars environments were potentially microbe-friendly; scientists are hoping data from Cumberland will confirm the original finding.

The valleys, channels and deltas viewed from orbit have long been thought to be the work of water erosion, but it is Nasa's latest rover, Curiosity, that has provided the "ground truth".

Researchers report its observations of rounded pebbles on the floor of the Red Planet's 150km-wide Gale Crater.

Their smooth appearance is identical to gravels found in rivers on Earth.

Rock fragments that bounce along the bottom of a stream of water will have their edges knocked off, and when these pebbles finally come to rest they will often align in a characteristic overlapping fashion.

Curiosity has pictured these features in a number of rock outcrops at the base of Gale Crater.

It is confirmation that water has played its part in sculpting not only this huge equatorial bowl but by implication many of the other landforms seen on the planet.

"For decades, we have speculated and hypothesised that the surface of Mars was carved by water, but this is the first time where you can see the remnants of stream flow with what are absolutely tell-tale signs," Dr Rebecca Williams from the Planetary Science Institute, US, told BBC News.

The American space agency first announced the discovery of the pebbles in September last year, barely seven weeks after Curiosity had landed in Gale.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission is approaching its biggest turning point since landing its rover, Curiosity, inside Mars' Gale Crater last summer.

Curiosity is finishing investigations in an area smaller than a football field where it has been working for six months, and it will soon shift to a distance-driving mode headed for an area about 5 miles (8 kilometers) away, at the base Mount Sharp.

In May, the mission drilled a second rock target for sample material and delivered portions of that rock powder into laboratory instruments in one week, about one-fourth as much time as needed at the first drilled rock.

"We're hitting full stride," said Mars Science Laboratory Project Manager Jim Erickson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We needed a more deliberate pace for all the first-time activities by Curiosity since landing, but we won't have many more of those."

PASADENA, Calif. -- A billion-pixel view from the surface of Mars, from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, offers armchair explorers a way to examine one part of the Red Planet in great detail.

The first NASA-produced view from the surface of Mars larger than one billion pixels stitches together nearly 900 exposures taken by cameras onboard Curiosity and shows details of the landscape along the rover's route.

The 1.3-billion-pixel image is available for perusal with pan and zoom tools at: http://mars.nasa.gov/bp1/ .

The full-circle scene surrounds the site where Curiosity collected its first scoops of dusty sand at a windblown patch called "Rocknest," and extends to Mount Sharp on the horizon.

"It gives a sense of place and really shows off the cameras' capabilities," said Bob Deen of the Multi-Mission Image Processing Laboratory at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "You can see the context and also zoom in to see very fine details."

Deen assembled the product using 850 frames from the telephoto camera of Curiosity's Mast Camera instrument, supplemented with 21 frames from the Mastcam's wider-angle camera and 25 black-and-white frames -- mostly of the rover itself -- from the Navigation Camera. The images were taken on several different Mars days between Oct. 5 and Nov. 16, 2012. Raw single-frame images received from Curiosity are promptly posted on a public website at: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/ . Mars fans worldwide have used those images to assemble mosaic views, including at least one gigapixel scene.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has found that surface soil on the Red Planet contains 2 percent water by weight. That means astronaut pioneers could extract roughly 2 pints (1 liter) of water out of every cubic foot (0.03 cubic meters) of Martian dirt they dig up, scientists said.