NASA - 'Curiosity's' New Discoveries

"New Discoveries From NASA's 'Curiosity' Rover's Mission to Mars" PBS Newshour 2/8/2013

Excerpt

SPENCER MICHELS (Newshour):  At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, scientists and engineers cheered when a vehicle designed to roam across Mars landed last August in an area called the Gale Crater, practically right on target.  It was an amazing feat, putting a one-ton rover the size of a car onto the Martian surface.

The trip took eight-and-a-half months and the project cost $2.5 billion dollars.  The rover, called Curiosity, has been on Mars for nearly six months now, and it is sending back results. High-resolution photos coming from the surface of the planet are like nothing man has ever seen before, and scientists believe they could shed light on whether life ever existed on the fourth rock from the sun.

At JPL's lab, where a duplicate of Curiosity is used for testing, space scientist and engineer Adam Steltzner says the geologists are fired up over what they can see from 17 cameras mounted on the recently landed rover.

ADAM STELTZNER, Lead Landing Engineer:  It's fantastic.  You know, one thing about putting a rover on the surface of Mars is you get images of the surface that you can never get from orbiters, right?  You resolve down to the millimeter level.  You get right up, up close and personal with the Martian terrain, and whenever we do that, we learn new things.

NASA - Rumors of Curiosity Major New Finding Wrong

"Press Release - Update Set In San Francisco About Curiosity Mars Rover" by Veronica McGregor, Jet Propulsion Laboratory 11/29/2012

The next news conference about the NASA Mars rover Curiosity will be held at 9 a.m. Monday, Dec. 3, in San Francisco at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Rumors and speculation that there are major new findings from the mission at this early stage are incorrect. The news conference will be an update about first use of the rover's full array of analytical instruments to investigate a drift of sandy soil. One class of substances Curiosity is checking for is organic compounds -- carbon-containing chemicals that can be ingredients for life. At this point in the mission, the instruments on the rover have not detected any definitive evidence of Martian organics.

The Mars Science Laboratory Project and its Curiosity rover are less than four months into a two-year prime mission to investigate whether conditions in Mars' Gale Crater may have been favorable for microbial life. Curiosity is exceeding all expectations for a new mission with all of the instruments and measurement systems performing well. This is spectacular for such a complex system, and one that is operated so far away on Mars by people here on planet Earth. The mission already has found an ancient riverbed on the Red Planet, and there is every expectation for remarkable discoveries still to come.

MARS - Will 'Curiosity' Change Our Perception?

"NASA Keeping Curiosity ‘Secret’ For Now" by John, The Droid Guy 11/23/2012

Robotic rover Curiosity has reportedly taken a data sample of a Martian soil that could potentially change the perception of man about the red planet forever.

According to a latest report by CNET correspondent Erik Mack, the people at NASA are trying to keep something earth-shattering at least for several weeks until they are able to verify the sample.

NASA is starting to receive significant information from the mobile chemistry lab mounded on Curiosity. SAM or sample analysis at Mars has been reading really important facts about the components of the Martian soil.

NPR science correspondent Joe Palca said the people at NASA, especially Curiosity mission lead scientist John Grotzinger, are crossing their fingers that it is really a breakthrough finding on Mars.

“This data is going to be one for the history books, it’s looking really good,” Grotzinger said in the story that aired yesterday, according CNET.

Asked on the reason behind their decision to keep the findings a secret for now, Grotzinger said NASA needs to make sure that the data was not erroneous.

Lewiss Dartnell, a leading astrobiologist at the Center for Planetary Science at UCL/Birkbeck in London, said scientists not associated with NASA also have less information regarding the current discovery on the red planet. Dartnell added there is likely no option for now but to wait for NASA’s announcement.

“The SAM instrument is designed to detect organic molecules on Mars, so the smart money is on an announcement along those lines.”

Even NASA’s much awaited revelation could be months away from today, people are now starting to debate over a never ending issue on whether there’s really life on Mars.

In fact, CNET reporter Mack is already thinking of human colony on Mars with condominiums or maybe a five-star resort.

“The seas may be rising and more superstorms may continue to threaten humanity’s most important megalopolises, but there could soon be an emerging market for condominiums on Mars to take our minds off of such challenges,“ said Mack.

MARS - Soil Similar to Hawaii's

"NASA rover finds Mars' soil similar to Hawaii's" by Irene Klotz (Reuters), Chicago Tribune 11/30/2012

In the first inventory of minerals on another planet, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity found soil that bears a striking resemblance to weathered, volcanic sand in Hawaii, scientists said on Tuesday.

The rover uses an X-ray imager to reveal the atomic structures of crystals in the Martian soil, the first time the technology, known as X-ray diffraction, has been used to analyze soil beyond Earth.

"This was a 22-year journey and a magical moment for me," NASA's David Blake, lead scientist for the rover's mineralogical instrument, told reporters during a conference call.

Curiosity found the Martian sand grains have crystals similar to basaltic soils found in volcanic regions on Earth, like Hawaii.

Scientists plan to use the information about Mars' minerals to figure out if the planet most like Earth in the solar system could have supported and preserved microbial life.

"The mineralogy of Mars' soil has been a source of conjecture until now," said Curiosity scientist David Vaniman of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.

"This interest isn't just academic," he added. "Soils on planets' surfaces are a reflection of surface exposure processes and history, with information on present and past climates."

Specifically, scientists want to understand what conditions existed to allow the particular minerals to form. The first Martian soil scoop is mineralogically similar to basaltic materials and comprised primarily of feldspar, pyroxene and olivine.

About half the soil is non-crystalline materials, like volcanic glass, that form from the breakdown of rocks.

Several processes can account for this weathering, including interaction with water or oxygen, similar to how rust forms on iron-metal surfaces.

Brute force, such as sandstorms or meteorite impacts, also could account for the soil's weathered components, said chemist Douglas Ming of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The Curiosity rover landed inside a giant impact crater near the Martian equator in August for a two-year, $2.5-billion mission, NASA's first astrobiology expedition since the 1970s-era Viking probes.

The rover is scouting a site where three types of rock intersect. Next year, scientists plan to drive it over to a three-mile (5-km) mound of sediment, named Mount Sharp, rising from the floor of the crater.

"We're hopeful that once we get into the truly ancient materials on Mount Sharp, we will find minerals that suggest there was a habitable environment of some kind there. We haven't had that happen yet, but we have a lot of time left," Blake said.

While X-ray diffraction has been around for a century, using the technology on Mars required years of work to scale down refrigerator-sized equipment into something that would fit into the space of a shoe box.

The miniaturized, low-power instrument is used in the mining, oil and gas industries and is being evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to screen for counterfeit pharmaceuticals.