After months of trial runs, NASA's Curiosity rover is ready to
scratch the surface of Mars, positioning itself this week to drill into
the crust of the red planet and wildcat for evidence of life for the
first time.
Scientists at the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California said
Tuesday that they have targeted a fine-grained fractured slab of bedrock
for the rover's first drilling attempt—a tricky procedure made all the
more difficult by the complexities of the rover.
In a milestone for planetary exploration, researchers expect to extract and remotely analyze a mineral sample from the interior of Mars beginning in about two weeks. Scientists hope the specimen—its chemistry unsullied by the harsh surface conditions—will reveal whether conditions on the cold, arid world were once favorable for life.
"We will go into the sequence of rocks that are the brightest prospects for telling us about the early habitability of Mars," said mission project scientist John Grotzinger at the California Institute of Technology. "We are at a very sweet spot to do that."
The spacecraft voyaged 352 million miles to reach Mars this past August, but its next critical step will be measured in fractions of an inch. The rover's drill can chip about 2 inches into the interior of Mars to extract a small spoonful of powdered rock for analysis in an onboard chemistry kit. The effort may take six weeks or more. Researchers want to ensure the rock won't break the drill bit and that the mineral sample won't be contaminated by machinery as the rover scoops it onboard.
"Drilling into a rock to collect a sample will be this mission's most challenging activity since the landing. It has never been done on Mars," said Mars Science Laboratory project manager Richard Cook.
In the months since Curiosity's landing, the mission has mostly generated waves of rumor about life-related chemistry on the distant world that, one by one, mission scientists debunked as they made their findings public. So far, they have detected no traces of methane in the Martian air, no unequivocal chemical evidence of water on Mars today, and no native organic compounds that would indicate that life had once been present.
What they are finding in Gale Crater, where the rover landed, is an arid landscape of wind-swept badlands that in some ways seems hauntingly like Earth. Wheeling across the uneven terrain at 1.5 inches per second, the rover has recorded panoramic vistas that often resemble the Mojave Desert. It spotted rounded pebbles that scientists believe were likely shaped by an ancient ankle-deep, fast-flowing stream. Its chemical sensors detected basalt rocks that could have been lifted from a Hawaiian lava flow.
By all accounts, engineers are finding the $2.5 billion Curiosity rover—the most complex spacecraft ever landed on another planet—more difficult to operate than anticipated. The 1-ton, nuclear-powered vehicle totes 11 instruments, from a laser to a robotic whisk broom designed to sweep samples clear of the Martian dust. Even as routine a task as extending the craft's heavy mobile arm has proved tricky because the craft can more easily overbalance than engineers had estimated.
"It is a complicated beast," said Rob Manning, chief engineer for the Mars Science Laboratory, as the Curiosity craft's overall mission is called. "Everything is taking longer than we had hoped."
Even so, the mission's 425 scientists are feasting on data. "Scientifically, it is fantastic," said NASA planetary soil scientist Doug Ming at the Johnson Space Center in Texas, who helps run the rover's X-ray spectroscopy apparatus. So far, the craft has beamed back 18,226 images and nearly 10 gigabytes of raw information about the planet's geology, mineral chemistry, soil composition, and atmosphere. In five months of prospecting, scientists have thoroughly analyzed three air samples and three soil samples. The researchers also have tested 100 rocks and soil specimens by blasting them with the rover's laser and then scrutinizing the vaporized material.
In all, the rover has traveled 2,312 feet from where it touched down on Aug. 5. Recently it rolled by a sinuous set of dark-colored rocks that NASA scientists named "Snake River," before parking itself in a shallow flat depression called Yellowknife Bay.
There, the rover's cameras and sensors revealed a range of rocks that may have been formed by water, including veins, nodules, cross-bedded layering, and a lustrous pebble embedded in sandstone.
NASA officials named the rocky outcrop chosen for drilling after John Klein, a former Mars Science Laboratory deputy project manager who died in 2011.
In a milestone for planetary exploration, researchers expect to extract and remotely analyze a mineral sample from the interior of Mars beginning in about two weeks. Scientists hope the specimen—its chemistry unsullied by the harsh surface conditions—will reveal whether conditions on the cold, arid world were once favorable for life.
"We will go into the sequence of rocks that are the brightest prospects for telling us about the early habitability of Mars," said mission project scientist John Grotzinger at the California Institute of Technology. "We are at a very sweet spot to do that."
The spacecraft voyaged 352 million miles to reach Mars this past August, but its next critical step will be measured in fractions of an inch. The rover's drill can chip about 2 inches into the interior of Mars to extract a small spoonful of powdered rock for analysis in an onboard chemistry kit. The effort may take six weeks or more. Researchers want to ensure the rock won't break the drill bit and that the mineral sample won't be contaminated by machinery as the rover scoops it onboard.
"Drilling into a rock to collect a sample will be this mission's most challenging activity since the landing. It has never been done on Mars," said Mars Science Laboratory project manager Richard Cook.
In the months since Curiosity's landing, the mission has mostly generated waves of rumor about life-related chemistry on the distant world that, one by one, mission scientists debunked as they made their findings public. So far, they have detected no traces of methane in the Martian air, no unequivocal chemical evidence of water on Mars today, and no native organic compounds that would indicate that life had once been present.
What they are finding in Gale Crater, where the rover landed, is an arid landscape of wind-swept badlands that in some ways seems hauntingly like Earth. Wheeling across the uneven terrain at 1.5 inches per second, the rover has recorded panoramic vistas that often resemble the Mojave Desert. It spotted rounded pebbles that scientists believe were likely shaped by an ancient ankle-deep, fast-flowing stream. Its chemical sensors detected basalt rocks that could have been lifted from a Hawaiian lava flow.
By all accounts, engineers are finding the $2.5 billion Curiosity rover—the most complex spacecraft ever landed on another planet—more difficult to operate than anticipated. The 1-ton, nuclear-powered vehicle totes 11 instruments, from a laser to a robotic whisk broom designed to sweep samples clear of the Martian dust. Even as routine a task as extending the craft's heavy mobile arm has proved tricky because the craft can more easily overbalance than engineers had estimated.
"It is a complicated beast," said Rob Manning, chief engineer for the Mars Science Laboratory, as the Curiosity craft's overall mission is called. "Everything is taking longer than we had hoped."
Even so, the mission's 425 scientists are feasting on data. "Scientifically, it is fantastic," said NASA planetary soil scientist Doug Ming at the Johnson Space Center in Texas, who helps run the rover's X-ray spectroscopy apparatus. So far, the craft has beamed back 18,226 images and nearly 10 gigabytes of raw information about the planet's geology, mineral chemistry, soil composition, and atmosphere. In five months of prospecting, scientists have thoroughly analyzed three air samples and three soil samples. The researchers also have tested 100 rocks and soil specimens by blasting them with the rover's laser and then scrutinizing the vaporized material.
In all, the rover has traveled 2,312 feet from where it touched down on Aug. 5. Recently it rolled by a sinuous set of dark-colored rocks that NASA scientists named "Snake River," before parking itself in a shallow flat depression called Yellowknife Bay.
There, the rover's cameras and sensors revealed a range of rocks that may have been formed by water, including veins, nodules, cross-bedded layering, and a lustrous pebble embedded in sandstone.
NASA officials named the rocky outcrop chosen for drilling after John Klein, a former Mars Science Laboratory deputy project manager who died in 2011.
"We are now less than a mile from where we landed yet the geology is
intensely diverse," said space scientist Roger Wiens at the Los Alamos
National Laboratory in New Mexico, who is principal investigator for the rover's laser sensor. "It is a scientist's dream."
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