Most of the Martian attention these days is fixed on the NASA Perseverance life-seeking mission, but we shouldn’t forget that the agency’s Curiosity is still going strong as it also looks for signs of ancient habitability.
Percy hit the headlines late last week when it was discovered that its first sampling attempt did not go to plan. The new rover is supposed to cache a bunch of promising rocks and samples for a future sample-return mission, to bring Martian stuff back to Earth by 2031 if funding and tech development holds. (The thinking is it would be easier to search for ancient Martian microbes using high-tech equipment on Earth.)
But Perseverance’s mission is greatly informed by Curiosity, which stuck the landing in Gale Crater on Aug. 6, 2012. Within days of arriving, Curiosity found signs of an ancient streambed. Within a few months, it was slowly on the road to its ultimate destination — Aeolis Mons (Mount Sharp). Curiosity is still climbing that mountain in a bid to understand the history of water on Mars, and how habitable the planet might have been in the past.
On the 6th (Earth time), Curiosity was working on analyzing a couple of rocks and it also did a short drive of just 46 feet (14 meters), NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported in an Aug. 6 update. Curiosity began to accidentally tear up its wheels early in the mission and JPL remains very protective of them, because without wheels that rover won’t go far.
“The terrain is so rocky that it’s hard to see too far beyond the rover’s current position. We don’t want to use too much autonomous driving in this rocky terrain and risk damaging the wheels,” JPL stated Aug. 6. Happily, the Perseverance rover’s wheels were reinforced in such a way that it should stand up to rocky terrain for many years, without the holes that Curiosity has been carefully managing by driving on smooth surfaces as much as possible.
Fresh off the presses: Curiosity continues to send out images regularly from its mission, including … [+]
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Curiosity is moving along in its 10th year of observations in the wake of a new study that has an alternate view about the area it is exploring. A new Science Advances study suggests that volcano- and wind-blown deposits modified by acid rain — not water — was responsible for the weathering that the rover has observed in Gale Crater and its surroundings for the past decade.
For example, the study discusses the Yellowknife Bay formation near Curiosity’s landing site, which contains sandstones “interbedded” with mudstones. Such a formation is difficult to explain through lake depositions alone, the authors assert, and say that the rocks would require “several episodes of eolian-dominated [wind] activity”, perhaps through “airfall deposition of dust or likely volcanic ash.”
The authors’ work suggests that any lakes that Curiosity saw were smaller and more transient, meaning it would be harder for life to get a foothold. That said, none of the authors are on the long-running Curiosity team, and we will need to see if more studies confirm their findings.
The clays Curiosity keeps seeing on the slopes of Mount Sharp,, however, do suggest a lot of water-bearing activity in that region. Moreover, the rover has found multiple examples of organics — the building blocks of life — along with spikes of methane (a gas that can be indicative of life or non-life bearing processes; which is happening on Mars is not yet known.)
With Curiosity having been approved for multiple extended missions, it’s clear that the rover so far has been delivering on its mandate to produce valuable science about the evolution of the Martian climate and its possibilities for hosting life. So far, the rover has driven 16.17 miles (26 km) on Mars and it remains in good shape, despite the wheels. Curiosity should therefore keep rolling on Mars for at least several more years in search of more information about the planet’s history.
