Mars Curiosity rover touches rock, 'does a science'

Curiosity spent the past several days investigating a strange pyramid-shaped stone named 'Jake Matijevic,' testing out some of the gear at the end of its 7-foot-long arm.

|
NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA's Curiosity rover performs "contact science" operations on a rock called "Jake Matijevic" in this photo, which was snapped Sept. 22, 2012.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity reached out and touched a Martian rock with its huge robotic arm for the first time, then took off on its longest Red Planet drive to date.

Curiosity spent the past several days investigating a strange pyramid-shaped stone named "Jake Matijevic," testing out some of the gear at the end of its 7-foot-long (2.1 meters) arm. These tools include the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS), which measures elemental composition, and the Mars Hand Lens Imager close-up camera, or MAHLI.

The rover performed these initial "contact science" operations on Saturday and Sunday (Sept. 22 and 23), researchers said. Photos snapped on those days show Curiosity's arm sidled up against "Jake Matijevic," with the arm's turret obscuring most of the 16-inch-tall (40 centimeters) rock.

"I did a science! 1st contact science on rock target Jake," the Curiosity team announced Saturday (Sept. 22) via the rover's Twitter feed @MarsCuriosity, which has more than 1.1 million followers. "Here's an action shot." [Curiosity Mars Rover: 11 Amazing Facts]

Curiosity also zapped "Jake Matijevic" with the laser on its ChemCam instrument, which reads rock composition from the vaporized bits. Comparing the results should help cross-calibrate the two instruments, researchers said.

The ChemCam work wrapped up Monday (Sept. 24), at which point Curiosity embarked on a 138-foot (42 m) drive — the longest one-day jaunt for the rover since it landed inside Mars' Gale Crater on the night of Aug. 5.

Curiosity is making its way toward a site called Glenelg, which lies 1,300 feet (400 m) from the rover's touchdown site. Before Monday's drive, the mission team had said Curiosity was about halfway to Glenelg.

Scientists will likely soon begin looking for sandy areas to try out Curiosity's scooping system for the first time. The arm will deposit bits of Martian soil into the analytical instruments on the rover's body, which are known as SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) and CheMin (short for Chemistry & Mineralogy).   

The first use of Curiosity's rock-boring drill, which also sits at the end of the rover's arm, will come sometime after that, researchers have said.

While team members are keen to see what Curiosity discovers at Glenelg, the $2.5 billion rover's main destination is the base of Mount Sharp. This odd mountain rises 3.4 miles (5.5 km) into the Red Planet sky from Gale Crater's center, and its foothills show signs of long-ago exposure to liquid water.

Those foothills lie about 6 miles (10 km) away from Curiosity's landing site. The rover — whose main task is to determine if the Gale area could ever have supported microbial life — may be ready to turn its wheels toward the interesting deposits near the end of the year, scientists have said.

The rock "Jake Matijevic" takes its name from Curiosity's surface operations systems chief engineer, who died Aug. 20 at the age of 64. Matijevic, who was based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., also worked on all three previous Mars rovers — Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity — NASA officials said.

Follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also onFacebook and Google+.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Mars Curiosity rover touches rock, 'does a science'
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0925/Mars-Curiosity-rover-touches-rock-does-a-science
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe