The Curiosity rover continues to hold out experiments, drilling higher than 40 holes on Mars to us help larger understand the Purple Planet.
The drill aboard the Curiosity rover created the outlet in a rock investigators identify Mammoth Lakes. The sensible spot to the left of the outlet is the place the rover smoothed a small area to assemble spectroscopic information. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
NASA’s Curiosity rover is fixed to hold out experiments in Mars’ Gale Crater, even after higher than 4,200 days on the martian flooring. On Curiosity’s sol (the establish given to a martian day) 4,214, which corresponds to June 12, 2024, the rover was given directions to drill a 0.63-inch (1.6 centimeters) hole in a rock dubbed “Mammoth Lakes.” The establish comes from a metropolis in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains.
The very very first thing the rover does is to conduct a pre-load verify, which determines whether or not or not the drill is working and as well as if the chosen rock is safe adequate to drill into. Sadly, it was not. So, the science workers, after lots dialogue, moved the rover barely and tried as soon as extra on sol 4,222 (June 21).
As workers member Alex Innanen, atmospheric scientist at York School, wrote in a NASA weblog put up“All our affected individual prepared has been rewarded, as now we have been greeted with the data that our drill strive was worthwhile.”
Nonetheless drilling the outlet is simply the first step. Subsequent, the rover’s alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer ought to accumulate information. To do that, an instrument brushes and smooths the ground, after which the finding out is taken. After that, the workers determines whether or not or not or not a small sample of what was drilled will most likely be delivered to the rover’s Chemistry and Mineralogy X-ray Diffraction (CheMin) instrument.
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Lastly, the investigation of the material will most likely be achieved by the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite. In response to Innanen, that course of is “pretty vitality hungry,” nevertheless by rigorously conserving vitality and altering the order of plenty of the rover’s goals, the method has been achieved and the data has been despatched once more to Earth for analysis.
There are higher than 40 holes drilled on Mars
This line of labor is one in every of Curiosity’s specialties — in 2013, it grew to change into the first rover to drill a spot on the Purple Planet. The mission workers launched its fortieth worthwhile drill hole in March 2024. Analyzing the rock powder helps scientists examine additional about Gale Crater’s earlier, when it was a lake stuffed with water.