Curiosity Mars Rover Prepares For Fourth Rock Drilling b4in.org/d7LM The team operating NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has chosen a rock that looks like a pale paving stone as the mission’s fourth drilling target, if it passes engineers’ evaluation. They call it “Bonanza King.” It is not at the “Pahrump Hills” site the team anticipated the rover might reach by mid-August. Unexpected challenges while driving in sand prompted the mission to reverse course last week after entering a valley where ripples of sand fill the floor and extend onto sloping margins. However, the new target outcrop’s brightness and its position within the area’s geological layers resemble the Pahrump Hills outcrop. “Geologically speaking, we can tie the Bonanza King rocks to those at Pahrump Hills. Studying them here will give us a head start in understanding how they fit into the bigger picture of Gale Crater and Mount Sharp,” said Curiosity Deputy Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Mount Sharp is the mission’s long-term science destination, offering a stack of layers holding evidence about environmental changes on ancient Mars. The mountain rises from inside Gale Crater, where Curiosity landed in August 2012. All three rocks the rover has drilled so far have been geologically associated with the crater floor, rather than the mountain. Sample material pulled from the first two and delivered to Curiosity’s onboard analytical laboratories in 2013 provided evidence for ancient environmental conditions favorable for microbial life. A drilled sample from Bonanza King may add understanding about how environments varied and evolved. “This rock has an appearance quite different from the sandstones we’ve been driving through for several months,” Vasavada said. “The landscape is changing, and that’s worth checking out.” More b4in.org/d7LM
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 04:26:34 +0000