Over the last few weeks I have been following the coverage of NASA’s rover Curiosity following it’s landing in ‘Yellowknife’ Quad 51 of Aeolis Palus area of Mar’s Gale Crater.
The crater itself is estimated to be a 2 billion year old impact crater and scientists hypothesised that this is the best chance for the rover to complete it’s mission as it will have a vast array Martian history within its sediment. The landing site is also near an alluvial fan which is expected to be the result of a flow of ground water; interesting stuff indeed.
The mission is set to last two years and should give us an idea of whether the local red planet ever had the ability to support life. I suppose it’s lucky that ‘the seven minutes of terror’ landing was a success of the $2.6 billion dollars would have been another expensive embarrassment.
The spacecraft that originally left Earth on 26th November last year on the 352 million mile trip, is being controlled from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and holds a full suite of sophisticated tools for exploring Mars including 17 cameras, lasers to survey the rocks for a distance and also analysis tools to work on nearby samples.
The Curiosity rover has eight main scientific objectives (taken from Wikipedia):
1. Determine the nature and inventory of organic carbon compounds
2. Inventory the chemical building blocks of life (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulphur)
3. Identify features that may represent the effects of biological processes (bio signatures)
4. Investigate the chemical, isotopic, and mineralogical composition of the Martian surface and near-surface geological materials
5. Interpret the processes that have formed and modified rocks and soils
6. Assess long-timescale (i.e., 4-billion-year) Martian atmospheric evolution processes
7. Determine present state, distribution, and cycling of water and carbon dioxide
8. Characterize the broad spectrum of surface radiation, including galactic radiation, cosmic radiation, solar proton events and secondary neutrons
It’ll be an interesting few months ahead as the difficult terrain and research option become more key to the adventure. I would love to find out that at some point Mars was capable of sustaining life and if so maybe the great minds at NASA can even work out what happened to it.
I really hope they don’t find the Borg – we aren’t ready for that shit!
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