Curiosity shatters Mars rock, discovers potential treasure trove of science
Before and After images of the Martian rock 'Mojave'. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.
Meteorologist/Science Writer
Thursday, January 15, 2015, 12:41 PM - When it comes to interacting with the Martian environment around it, NASA's Curiosity rover plays rough, it seems.
A couple of Sols ago, the rover put drill-bit to stone while conducting science at Pahrump Hills, along the base of Aeolis Mons (aka 'Mt. Sharp'), while attempting to extract a sample for analysis from a rock named 'Mojave'. However, rather than smoothly drilling down to the full six centimetre depth, Curiosity ended up fracturing the rock, bringing the drilling effort to an abrupt halt.
DID YOU KNOW? A Martian day is called a 'Sol' (short for 'solar day'). Curiosity is just starting Sol 869, while Opportunity, on the other side of the planet, is on Sol 3903 - 3813 Sols past 'warranty'!
As it often does in these situations, the parody Twitter account @SarcasticRover weighed in on the development, in its usual witty fashion:
LET THAT BE A LESSON TO THE REST OF THEM! MT“@BBCWorld: Curiosity tries to drill into Mars rock - but smashes it pic.twitter.com/eJxnXPVf7L”
— SarcasticRover (@SarcasticRover) January 14, 2015
"We've seen similar fractured bedrock before and even cracked it on previous drill attempts in other locations," Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity Project Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), told Discovery News. "So while we can't necessarily predict it in advance, it also wasn't terribly surprising to crack the rock and dislodge a few fragments of it."
"One nice outcome of yesterday's drill test was that a few rock chips were created and now are sitting on the surface of the bedrock," Vasavada added in the interview. "It's rare for Curiosity to get to study freshly broken rock surfaces, where the effects of weathering or dust might be minimized. It's the reason geologists on Earth carry rock hammers, to create fresh surfaces. So we’re pretty excited to take some close-up images and compositional measurements of those fragments."
According to a JPL press release, Mojave was chosen as a prime science target due to the abundant mineral crystals that appear in its structure:
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| "The crystal shapes are apparent in the earlier images of Mojave, but we don't know what they represent," said Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "We're hoping that mineral identifications we get from the rover's laboratory will shed more light than we got from just the images and bulk chemistry."
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While Curiosity's primary mission in Gale Crater was to discover whether an environment suitable to life existed there at some point in the past - an objective the rover ticked off as 'complete' within five months of arriving - the science it sends back over the next while could result in some amazing discoveries. As Curiosity climbs the slopes of Mt. Sharp, drilling and lasering away, no doubt fracturing even more rocks along the way, it will be using the mountain - which was laid down, layer by layer over eons and then eroded away just as slowly afterward - to construct a detailed timeline of Mars' geologic (and possibly even biologic) history.
