Curiosity: Mars Science Laboratory

[rstevenson]

If you click through and track down the largest version of that image, you can see that the wheels are getting pretty dinged up in the flat areas, which are quite thin. But I think the rims, being folded over, act as a kind of circular beam, and all those cross ribs are also acting as beams, and that's where the real strength of the wheel is.

It might be a worry if the hole gets big enough to allow a large stone to get stuck in it, but I suspect the resulting racking and rolling would just make the hole a bit larger and the stone would fall out.

I think maybe they should send along a mechanic with a few spare parts. While she's there she could pop around and give Spirit a push out of its sand pit, get its stuck wheel working again, dust off the solar panels, and give it a quick checkup. Where's AAA when you need 'em?

Rob

[BMAONE23]

Isn't it called
Martian Automated Rover Servicing

Nice acronym

[saturno2]

What is making the Curiosity Rover now?

[BDanielMayfield]

What is making the Curiosity Rover now?

Something might be missing in the way you have asked this question saturno2. Could you please rephrase your question.

[saturno2]

What is making the Curiosity Rover now?

Something might be missing in the way you have asked this question saturno2. Could you please rephrase your question.

In what is working now, what is the current mission
of the Curiosity Rover?

[JohnD]

saturno2,
What is Curiosity doing now?
You can monitor the latest news and pics at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html.

There you will find that it has arrived at waypoint The Kimberly (named after hills in Australia) and while preparing to investigate the variety of 'geology' there has taken the fist pic showing asteroids, from Mars' surface!

John

[Nitpicker]

The Kimberley, after which the Martian waypoint is named, is a very big region, in the north of Western Australia. There are several ranges in the Kimberley.

Click to view full size image

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberley_ ... Australia)

[saturno2]

JohnD
Nitpicker
Thanks for your notes

[bystander]

Two Years and Counting on Red Planet
NASA | JPL-Caltech | SSE | MSL Curiosity | 2014 Aug 05

NASA's most advanced roving laboratory on Mars celebrates its second anniversary since landing inside the Red Planet's Gale Crater on Aug. 5, 2012, PDT (Aug. 6, 2012, EDT).

During its first year of operations, the Curiosity rover fulfilled its major science goal of determining whether Mars ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life. Clay-bearing sedimentary rocks on the crater floor in an area called Yellowknife Bay yielded evidence of a lakebed environment billions of years ago that offered fresh water, all of the key elemental ingredients for life, and a chemical source of energy for microbes, if any existed there. ...

[bystander]

Mars Curiosity Rover Arrives at Martian Mountain
NASA | JPL-Caltech | MSL Curiosity | 2014 Sep 11

[img3="This image from NASA's Mars Curiosity rover shows the "Amargosa Valley," on the slopes leading up to Mount Sharp on Mars. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)"]http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/msl/2014 ... 73-440.jpg[/img3]

NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has reached the Red Planet's Mount Sharp, a Mount-Rainier-size mountain at the center of the vast Gale Crater and the rover mission's long-term prime destination.

"Curiosity now will begin a new chapter from an already outstanding introduction to the world," said Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "After a historic and innovative landing along with its successful science discoveries, the scientific sequel is upon us."

Curiosity's trek up the mountain will begin with an examination of the mountain's lower slopes. The rover is starting this process at an entry point near an outcrop called Pahrump Hills, rather than continuing on to the previously-planned, further entry point known as Murray Buttes. Both entry points lay along a boundary where the southern base layer of the mountain meets crater-floor deposits washed down from the crater's northern rim.

"It has been a long but historic journey to this Martian mountain," said Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "The nature of the terrain at Pahrump Hills and just beyond it is a better place than Murray Buttes to learn about the significance of this contact. The exposures at the contact are better due to greater topographic relief." ...

[BDanielMayfield]

Or … The Wheel weason the climb must commence sooner rather than later.

Curiosity had to take a short cut to the mountain due to mounting wheel damage. For anyone curious about Curiosity these two articles are must reads, if you haven’t already seen them:

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronom ... p-09122014

and Emily Lakawalla’s outstanding article answering many questions about the seriousness of this wheel damage issue:

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-la ... amage.html

Safe climbing, Curiosity.

[MargaritaMc]

The excellent Emily Lakdawalla has today posted a

Curiosity update, sols 764-781: Work complete at Confidence Hills; puzzling arm issues

She adds:

And here is the detailed breakdown from the USGS Astrogeology blog. I haven't embedded USGS blog content for a while, so this summary goes back a little farther than the subject line of the blog post, to the beginning of Confidence Hills drill activities. I thought it would be useful, later, to have all of this concatenated into a single post.

Don't you have to admire someone who uses the word "concatenated"?

Margarita

[Nitpicker]

The excellent Emily Lakdawalla has today posted a

Curiosity update, sols 764-781: Work complete at Confidence Hills; puzzling arm issues

She adds:

And here is the detailed breakdown from the USGS Astrogeology blog. I haven't embedded USGS blog content for a while, so this summary goes back a little farther than the subject line of the blog post, to the beginning of Confidence Hills drill activities. I thought it would be useful, later, to have all of this concatenated into a single post.

Don't you have to admire someone who uses the word "concatenated"?

Margarita

Today's trivia: the term "concatenate" is used a lot in computer programming, to direct a program to join a list of items together. The "con" prefix means "to direct" and in English, Emily could just as correctly have used the term "catenated".

[MargaritaMc]

Today's trivia: the term "concatenate" is used a lot in computer programming, to direct a program to join a list of items together. The "con" prefix means "to direct" and in English, Emily could just as correctly have used the term "catenated".

Ah, thanks for that: all new trivia gratefully received!

Hitherto, I only knew the noun form, but the verb and adjectival forms precede it:

Concatenation
[Late Latin concatēnāre, ... com- + catēnāre, to bind (from Latin catēna, chain).]

a chain; a sequence of things or sounds dependent on each other. See also catena, chain.
Examples: concatenation of bungles and contradictions, 1880; of causes and effects, 1753; of explosions; of felicity, 1622; of ideas, 1867; of orgiasts; of straight lines, 1845.
Dictionary of Collective Nouns and Group Terms. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved

Interesting to learn the specific computer programming meaning of the prefix "con", which usually means with. As it still does in Spanish, but which can also be translated as "by" - which then leads to the programming meaning of "to direct".

I love etymology!

Margarita

[Nitpicker]

Today's trivia: the term "concatenate" is used a lot in computer programming, to direct a program to join a list of items together. The "con" prefix means "to direct" and in English, Emily could just as correctly have used the term "catenated".

Ah, thanks for that: all new trivia gratefully received!

Hitherto, I only knew the noun form, but the verb and adjectival forms precede it:

Concatenation
[Late Latin concatēnāre, ... com- + catēnāre, to bind (from Latin catēna, chain).]

a chain; a sequence of things or sounds dependent on each other. See also catena, chain.
Examples: concatenation of bungles and contradictions, 1880; of causes and effects, 1753; of explosions; of felicity, 1622; of ideas, 1867; of orgiasts; of straight lines, 1845.
Dictionary of Collective Nouns and Group Terms. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved

Interesting to learn the specific computer programming meaning of the prefix "con", which usually means with. As it still does in Spanish, but which can also be translated as "by" - which then leads to the programming meaning of "to direct".

I love etymology!

Margarita

I am not certain that the prefix "con" means "to direct" specifically in any context, it is just one interpretation that I've seen. The words catenate and concatenate seem almost entirely synonymous (which I find interesting), with the latter being much more common, especially in mathematics and computer science. Yet the terms catenate and decatenate are used in organic chemistry. I love etymology too, but words sure are weird sometimes.

[MargaritaMc]

... I love etymology too, but words sure are weird sometimes.

That's why I love etymology! Do you know this site?

I'll drag this thread back on topic by giving this link to the essay that won the prize for naming the Curiosity Rover
As Clara Ma wrote:

Curiosity is an everlasting flame that burns in everyone's mind. It makes me get out of bed in the morning and wonder what surprises life will throw at me that day

M

[bystander]

Curiosity Finds Mineral Match
NASA | JPL-Caltech | MSL Curiosity | 2014 Nov 04

This image shows the first holes drilled by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity at Mount Sharp. The loose material near the drill holes is drill tailings and an accumulation of dust that slid down the rock during drilling. [b][i](Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)[/i][/b]

---

Reddish rock powder from the first hole drilled into a Martian mountain by NASA's Curiosity rover has yielded the mission's first confirmation of a mineral mapped from orbit.

"This connects us with the mineral identifications from orbit, which can now help guide our investigations as we climb the slope and test hypotheses derived from the orbital mapping," said Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Curiosity collected the powder by drilling into a rock outcrop at the base of Mount Sharp in late September. The robotic arm delivered a pinch of the sample to the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument inside the rover. This sample, from a target called "Confidence Hills" within the "Pahrump Hills" outcrop, contained much more hematite than any rock or soil sample previously analyzed by CheMin during the two-year-old mission. Hematite is an iron-oxide mineral that gives clues about ancient environmental conditions from when it formed.

In observations reported in 2010, before selection of Curiosity's landing site, a mineral-mapping instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provided evidence of hematite in the geological unit that includes the Pahrump Hills outcrop. The landing site is inside Gale Crater, an impact basin about 96 miles (154 kilometers) in diameter with the layered Mount Sharp rising about three miles (five kilometers) high in the center. ...

[geckzilla]

I immediately saw a frog's head in that picture. The top drill hole is an eye.

[Beyond]

You've been hanging around Boomer12k tooo long.

[bystander]

Curiosity Finds Clues to How Water Helped Shape Martian Landscape
NASA | JPL-Caltech | MSL Curiosity | 2014 Dec 08

[url=http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA19074][b][i]Sedimentary Signs of a Martian Lakebed[/i][/b][/url] - [b][i]Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS[/i][/b] [i]This evenly layered rock photographed by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover on Aug. 7, 2014, shows a pattern typical of a lake-floor sedimentary deposit not far from where flowing water entered a lake.[/i]

---

Observations by NASA's Curiosity Rover indicate Mars' Mount Sharp was built by sediments deposited in a large lake bed over tens of millions of years.

This interpretation of Curiosity's finds in Gale Crater suggests ancient Mars maintained a climate that could have produced long-lasting lakes at many locations on the Red Planet.

"If our hypothesis for Mount Sharp holds up, it challenges the notion that warm and wet conditions were transient, local, or only underground on Mars," said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "A more radical explanation is that Mars' ancient, thicker atmosphere raised temperatures above freezing globally, but so far we don't know how the atmosphere did that."

Why this layered mountain sits in a crater has been a challenging question for researchers. Mount Sharp stands about 3 miles (5 kilometers) tall, its lower flanks exposing hundreds of rock layers. The rock layers - alternating between lake, river and wind deposits -- bear witness to the repeated filling and evaporation of a Martian lake much larger and longer-lasting than any previously examined close-up. ...

Simulated View of Gale Crater Lake on Mars - Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
'Mount Sharp' Inside Gale Crater - Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/MSSS

[bystander]

Curiosity Finds Active and Ancient Organic Chemistry on Mars
NASA | JPL-Caltech | MSL Curiosity | 2014 Dec 16

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has measured a tenfold spike in methane, an organic chemical, in the atmosphere around it and detected other organic molecules in a rock-powder sample collected by the robotic laboratory's drill.

"This temporary increase in methane -- sharply up and then back down -- tells us there must be some relatively localized source," said Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, a member of the Curiosity rover science team. "There are many possible sources, biological or non-biological, such as interaction of water and rock."

Researchers used Curiosity's onboard Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) laboratory a dozen times in a 20-month period to sniff methane in the atmosphere. During two of those months, in late 2013 and early 2014, four measurements averaged seven parts per billion. Before and after that, readings averaged only one-tenth that level.

Curiosity also detected different Martian organic chemicals in powder drilled from a rock dubbed Cumberland, the first definitive detection of organics in surface materials of Mars. These Martian organics could either have formed on Mars or been delivered to Mars by meteorites. ...

Mars methane detection and variability at Gale crater - Christopher R. Webster, et al, MSL Science Team

• Science (online 2014 Dec 16) DOI: 10.1126/science.1261713

The imprint of atmospheric evolution in the D/H of Hesperian clay minerals on Mars - P. R. Mahaffy, et al, MSL Science Team

• Science (online 2014 Dec 16) DOI: 10.1126/science.1260291

[BMAONE23]

Day 924 Yields this location: A field of standing material left from erosion

Click to view full size image

[BDanielMayfield]

Day 924 Yields this location: A field of standing material left from erosion

Click to view full size image

Yikes! This is the type of ventifact (hard pointy protusions sticking up out of the bedrock) infested terrain that is chewing up Curiosity's wheels.

Bruce

[BMAONE23]

Obviously Martian City Ruins and the little green men are really only Two inches tall

[BMAONE23]

Click to view full size image

Now this place is really interesting. The pulverized pile being the grinding tailings poured out over the reddened surface and reflecting the real color of the rocks beneath. But the small flat rocks strewn about resemble shell pieces. It is a Very Interesting Place that day 930 has brought Curiosity to