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The Curiosity On Mars Thread.

shedweller

(Thought it might be a good time to start a Mars Curiosity Rover thread, seeing as a milestone was reached recently.)

Curiosity departed Earth late last November and is now homing in on it's landing site. The landing site, on Gale Grater, has been narrowed down from an ellipse measuring 20 by 25km to just 7 to 20km.

However, an issue has cropped up. The drill has been shown to potentially introduce contaminants to the very samples it is getting! These come from the teflon seals on the drill motor and from the molybdenum disulfide grease within.
http://www.livescience.com/20886-nasa-mars-rover-contamination-landing.html

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20120611.html

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shedweller

I suppose the sample containers might spur on and help gain funding for the actual sample collection mission.

thecommander

shedweller wrote: »

And stronger tyres??!!??
I like the sample return idea. With any bit of luck it'll be a human doing the pickup...

With stronger tires!

I don't get this sample return part, it's going to have a container for rocks for another mission to collect them from. Hardly groundbreaking when you consider the place is full of rocks.

Why they didn't choose an instrument to check for current life baffles me.

shedweller

Rucking_Fetard wrote: »

NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will hunt for signs of alien life, produce oxygen from Mars atmosphere

The Next Mars Rover Will Have Better Lasers and X-Ray Vision

And stronger tyres??!!??
I like the sample return idea. With any bit of luck it'll be a human doing the pickup...

Rucking_Fetard

NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will hunt for signs of alien life, produce oxygen from Mars atmosphere

The Next Mars Rover Will Have Better Lasers and X-Ray Vision

Rucking_Fetard

Mars rover Opportunity breaks record for miles roamed

The Mars rover Opportunity has outdone itself by driving further than any other off-Earth vehicle in history. NASA announced Monday that the 10-year-old rover hit 25 miles, which breaks the previous record set by the Soviet Union's Lunokhod 2 rover.

"Opportunity has driven farther than any other wheeled vehicle on another world," said John Callas, Mars Exploration Rover project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a statement. "This is so remarkable considering Opportunity was intended to drive about one kilometer and was never designed for distance."

While often in the shadow of its popular sibling Curiosity, Opportunity has exceeded expectations by living on the inhospitable planet for more than 10 years. The rover landed on Mars in 2004 and has since been hard at work exploring the surface of the planet, collecting Martian rock samples, and beaming information back to Earth.

Rucking_Fetard

Every experienced traveler knows never to leave home without a trusty map. Thanks to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), stargazers and future explorers now have the most detailed map of Mars ever made.

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2014/07/17/see-mars-map-landmarks-for-yourself/

Klair88

I really hope NASA come out and explain it now as i really wanna know! Might post in r/Askscience!

shedweller

Maximus Alexander wrote: »

I haven't checked up on this, but I thought the rusty soil is a throwback to the formation of the planet when it would have oxidized while it was still hot and partially molten. Could be wrong on that though.

Yeah there seems to be a few theories alright. I smell a manned mission just to be sure.

Maximus Alexander

I haven't checked up on this, but I thought the rusty soil is a throwback to the formation of the planet when it would have oxidized while it was still hot and partially molten. Could be wrong on that though.

shedweller

Klair88 wrote: »

Oxygen is required for rusting i believe

Ah yes but wasn't the brown soils colour because of oxidation, albeit slowly?
Or was it solar radiation that caused it?

Edit.
I looked at the wiki page for it and my head now hurts! Seems like chemistry is responsible.
So the meteorite above is relatively new. Yay!

Klair88

shedweller wrote: »

Lol! Its only a bit of craic meteorites eire. I just couldnt help it!
She is a beauty though. Is that pic done in true colour? Whats the story with the apparent lack of rust? Is it a newish meteorite and hasnt rusted yet? Nickel maybe???

Oxygen is required for rusting i believe

Maximus Alexander

Is there anything to oxidize it on Mars? There's no oxygen in the atmosphere.

shedweller

Lol! Its only a bit of craic meteorites eire. I just couldnt help it!
She is a beauty though. Is that pic done in true colour? Whats the story with the apparent lack of rust? Is it a newish meteorite and hasnt rusted yet? Nickel maybe???

Maximus Alexander

shedweller wrote: »

Would that be here or on mars...
I'll get me coat...

Mass vs weight fail. :P

shedweller

MeteoritesEire wrote: »

that thing is gorgeous.Do we have an idea of scale.Looks like it could be at least hundreds of kilos

Would that be here or on mars...
I'll get me coat...

MeteoritesEire

that thing is gorgeous.Do we have an idea of scale.Looks like it could be at least hundreds of kilos

*oops--I see it's 2 metres wide.That thing weighs tons

shedweller

The updates seem sporadic alright. Too busy ogling hd meteorite images i guess!
Bring it on baby!!

Mountainsandh

Just noticing how late this announcement is : article published today, but it was found on Sol 640 ???

And looking at the location map, they kept that pretty quiet, no ? Maybe I just missed it.

Mountainsandh

Curiosity Finds Iron Meteorite on Mars

This rock encountered by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is an iron meteorite called "Lebanon," similar in shape and luster to iron meteorites found on Mars by the previous generation of rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Lebanon is about 2 yards or 2 meters wide (left to right, from this angle). The smaller piece in the foreground is called "Lebanon B."

This view combines a series of high-resolution circular images taken by the Remote Micro-Imager (RMI) of Curiosity's Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument with color and context from rover's Mast Camera (Mastcam). The component images were taken during the 640th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars (May 25, 2014).

More...
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/?ImageID=6433

shedweller

Curiositys ears must have been burning because here she is using APXS, i think, on a dug out sandy bit.
Theres a hazcam view from a day or two ago and the wheel looked awfully deep. Careful now!:P

There's the hazcam view:

There were a load of nice shots from the other day that had nice dune patterns too. No colour mastcam ones though. Still, here's a look back over some dune buggying tracks:

Getting close to Murray Buttes now so i expect driving progress to slow while science gets done. I saw a traverse map the other day but i can't seem to find it. It looks as though Curiosity is in line with the dark sandy bit it's been passing this past while. Real good progress and the wheels held out great!

im blue daba dee

a few days late, but

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CURIOSITY!!!

shedweller

shanered wrote: »

Regarding the large picture what is that flourescent glowing mineral where the tracks end in the dark sand and you can see it again in the more recent tracks.
I'd love to find out!

Opportunity and spirit found that too.

Is this what you're referring to?:
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/20071210a.html

SAN FRANCISCO - Researchers using NASA's twin Mars rovers are sorting out two possible origins for one of Spirit's most important discoveries, while also getting Spirit to a favorable spot for surviving the next Martian winter.

The puzzle is what produced a patch of nearly pure silica -- the main ingredient of window glass -- that Spirit found last May. It could have come from either a hot-spring environment or an environment called a fumarole, in which acidic steam rises through cracks. On Earth, both of these types of settings teem with microbial life.

"Whichever of those conditions produced it, this concentration of silica is probably the most significant discovery by Spirit for revealing a habitable niche that existed on Mars in the past," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the rovers' science payload. "The evidence is pointing most strongly toward fumarolic conditions, like you might see in Hawaii and in Iceland. Compared with deposits formed at hot springs, we know less about how well fumarolic deposits can preserve microbial fossils. That's something needing more study here on Earth."

shedweller

Mt.Sharp is looking a lot closer now eh? I don't know about you lads but i'm dying to see what all that dark sand is all about!

shanered

Regarding the large picture what is that flourescent glowing mineral where the tracks end in the dark sand and you can see it again in the more recent tracks.
I'd love to find out!

shedweller

Nice shot taken this morning at 06:34 UTC
What could that circle be? Old crater??

shedweller

Thats some photo! The sand dune looks much firmer than i thought so that bodes well for future sand dunes up near murrays butt, i mean murray buttes!

Sorry.

MeteoritesEire

cracking pic

I took that as a distant mountain range top left

what I'd give to have a half dozen of those rocks on the left.Worth millions on Earth

*edit* actually now I'm looking again they look like meteorites some of them so they could be ordinary chondrites and not Martian at all.Although the fact that they landed on Mars would of course give them special provenance <

pure conjecture

Adamantium

NASA put up this gorgeous picture of Dingo Pass:

I'm quoting a previous poster, sorry I couldn't quote your post (messed up), I don't want took like I'm stealing yours without a word of thanks

[/QUOTE]

This is easily the most impressive picture of Mars I've ever seen, endless sand dunes (upper left almost makes me want to run up them) and it looks like something out of Frank Herbert, but it's real!

Pics like this deserve to be plastered in children's mind and across the news!

shedweller

Some day we'll get there!

K.Flyer

What an age we live in, to be able to see such amazing and detailed pictures of the Martian landscape, absolutely wonderful, Thank You.:)