NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has pounded into a Red Planet rock with its drill for the first time, bringing the 1-ton robot a big step closer to initiating its first full-bore drilling operations.
The Curiosity rover hammered the rock using the arm-mounted drill’s percussive action over the weekend, completing another test along the path toward spinning the bit and biting into rock for the first time.
“We tapped this rock on Mars with our drill. Keep it classy everyone,” Curiosity flight director Bobak Ferdowsi — who gained fame as “Mohawk Guy” during the rover’s nail-biting landing on the night of Aug. 5, 2012 — wrote in a Twitter post Sunday, sharing a photo of the pounded rock.
After imaging during the holidays, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity resumed driving Jan. 3 and pulled within arm’s reach of a sinuous rock feature called “Snake River.”
Snake River is a thin curving line of darker rock cutting through flatter rocks and jutting above sand. Curiosity’s science team plans to get a closer look at it before proceeding to other nearby rocks.
“It’s one piece of the puzzle,” said the mission’s project scientist, John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “It has a crosscutting relationship to the surrounding rock and appears to have formed after the deposition of the layer that it transects.”
The drive during the mission’s 147th Martian day, or sol, on the Red Planet took Curiosity about 10 feet (3 meters) northwestward and brought the mission’s total driving distance to 2,303 feet (702 meters). The rover is within a shallow depression called “Yellowknife Bay,” which is a flatter and lighter-toned type of terrain from what the mission crossed during its first four months inside Gale Crater.
During a holiday break for the rover team, Curiosity stayed at a location within Yellowknife Bay from which the rover took images of its surroundings. The team is evaluating possible first targets for use of Curiosity’s hammering drill in coming weeks. The drill will collect powdered samples from the interior of rocks for analysis by instruments inside the rover.
“We had no surprises over the holidays,” said the mission’s project manager, Richard Cook of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena. “Now, Curiosity is back on the move. The area the rover is in looks good for our first drilling target.”
NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Project is using Curiosity to assess whether areas inside Gale Crater ever offered a habitable environment for microbes. JPL, a division of Caltech, manages the project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
The Mars rover Curiosity may be the most famous robot on - or off - the planet but an ocean-going bot named Papa Mau just set a world’s record for robot-kind by traveling more than 10,000 miles from San Francisco to Australia powered only by waves and sunlight.
Liquid Robotics, the Silicon Valley startup that makes the surfboard-sized robot called a Wave Glider, announced Wednesday that Papa Mau arrived off the coast of Queensland, Australia, on Nov. 20 after surviving storms, sharks and 25-foot surf while its solar-powered sensor arrays collected terabytes of data on ocean and atmospheric conditions during the year-long journey.
“The vehicle actually surprised me by the condition it was in when we pulled it out,” Graham Hine, Liquid Robotics’ senior vice president of product management, told me Wednesday. “The paint was scuffed and there was some wear on the bushings but other than that and a few critters attached here and there it could have kept going.”
It has six legs and one arm. Instead of feet, it rides around on metal wheels as thin as cardboard. Its brain is in its belly, where it also digests and analyzes the remains of Martian rocks. It eats plutonium for breakfast.
Despite its resemblance to a one-armed, 1-ton praying mantis, Curiosity is the most advanced machine ever sent to another planet. If all goes according to plan, the rover will touch down on Mars on Aug. 5 and begin rolling along the surface a few days later.
Curiosity will be the eyes and ears for an international team of about 350 earthbound scientists. The rover’s goal is to climb a 3-mile-tall mountain and gather evidence that could resolve a long-standing mystery: Was there life on Mars in its warmer, wetter past — and could it sustain life today?
The rover’s suite of 10 primary instruments was designed with these questions in mind. It can shoot lasers at rocks to see what they’re made of. It can record hours of high-quality color video of the Martian landscape and relay the footage back to Earth. It can even drill into stone to look for specific organic compounds thought to be necessary for life to begin.
“It is a mind-blowing machine,” said Michael Watkins, a mission project engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, where Curiosity was designed and built.
“We’re really talking about, effectively, a field geologist/astrobiologist remotely operating on Mars,” said Jeff Simmonds, the science payload manager for the mission.