'Curosity' Starting Trek to 1st Science Destination The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel: Sci, Space, TechFollow the Daily Galaxy
« Enigma? Black Holes Glow with a Bright Ring of Light (Today's Most Popular) |Main| Extraterrestrial Life --"Alternative Biochemistries" (Weekend Feature) »August 17, 2012 'Curosity' Starting Trek to 1st Science Destination
The scientists and engineers of NASA's Curiosity rover mission have selected the first driving destination for their one-ton, six-wheeled mobile Mars laboratory. The target area, named Glenelg, is a natural intersection of three kinds of terrain. The choice was described by Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology during a media teleconference on Aug. 17.
"With such a great landing spot in Gale Crater, we literally had every degree of the compass to choose from for our first drive," Grotzinger said. "We had a bunch of strong contenders. It is the kind of dilemma planetary scientists dream of, but you can only go one place for the first drilling for a rock sample on Mars. That first drilling will be a huge moment in the history of Mars exploration."The trek to Glenelg will send the rover 1,300 feet (400 meters) east-southeast of its landing site. One of the three types of terrain intersecting at Glenelg is layered bedrock, which is attractive as the first drilling target.
"We're about ready to load our new destination into our GPS and head out onto the open road," Grotzinger said. "Our challenge is there is no GPS on Mars, so we have a roomful of rover-driver engineers providing our turn-by-turn navigation for us."
Prior to the rover's trip to Glenelg, the team in charge of Curiosity's Chemistry and Camera instrument, or ChemCam, is planning to give their mast-mounted, rock-zapping laser and telescope combination a thorough checkout. On Saturday night, Aug. 18, ChemCam is expected to "zap" its first rock in the name of planetary science. It will be the first time such a powerful laser has been used on the surface of another world.
"Rock N165 looks like your typical Mars rock, about three inches wide. It's about 10 feet away," said Roger Wiens, principal investigator of the ChemCam instrument from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. "We are going to hit it with 14 millijoules of energy 30 times in 10 seconds. It is not only going to be an excellent test of our system, it should be pretty cool too."
Mission engineers are devoting more time to planning the first roll of Curiosity. In the coming days, the rover will exercise each of its four steerable (front and back) wheels, turning each of them side-to-side before ending up with each wheel pointing straight ahead. On a later day, the rover will drive forward about one rover-length (10 feet, or 3 meters), turn 90 degrees, and then kick into reverse for about 7 feet (2 meters).
"There will be a lot of important firsts that will be taking place for Curiosity over the next few weeks, but the first motion of its wheels, the first time our roving laboratory on Mars does some actual roving, that will be something special," said Michael Watkins, mission manager for Curiosity from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
The first destination,Glenelg, lies in the shadow of Mount Sharp. Twice as tall as the sequence of colorful bands exposed in Arizona's Grand Canyon, the stack of layers in Mount Sharp results from changing environments in which layers are deposited, younger on top of older, eon after eon, and then partially eroded away.
"Mount Sharp is the only place we can currently access on Mars where we can investigate this transition in one stratigraphic sequence," said Grotzinger. "The hope of this mission is to find evidence of a habitable environment; the promise is to get the story of an important environmental breakpoint in the deep history of the planet. This transition likely occurred billions of years ago -- maybe even predating the oldest well-preserved rocks on Earth."
Possible explanations for how erosion shaped the mountain after layers were deposited include swirling winds carving away the edges, and perhaps later wet episodes leaving channels down the sides and fresher sediments on the crater floor. Clues about those episodes present Curiosity with other potentially habitable environments to investigate.
The Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft delivered Curiosity to its target area on Mars at 10:31:45 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5 (1:31:45 a.m. EDT on Aug. 6), which included the 13.8 minutes needed for confirmation of the touchdown to be radioed to Earth at the speed of light.
The audio and visuals of the teleconference are archived and available for viewing at: http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl.
The Daily Galaxy via NASA/JPL
Posted at 05:40 PM | PermalinkComments
What I want to know is, who came up with the palindromic name Glenelg, and why?
Posted by:AC |August 17, 2012 at 07:43 PMIt's a Scottish Highland placename so likely a Brit named it. Or maybe an Australian...there's a Glenelg there too.
Posted by:Markiwi |August 18, 2012 at 09:51 AMTry this link... http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCABRE87G11V20120817
Posted by:Markiwi |August 18, 2012 at 09:57 AMThe name Gleneig, of what I have been able to research, is from the Village/Parish in the Lochalsh Highland area of Western Scotland. It is Gaelic.
Posted by:kristi276 |August 18, 2012 at 11:53 PMPost a comment
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