NASA’s Curiosity rover is doing well after fighting dust, wind and age for 4,000 Red Planet days.
Curiosity recently passed 4,000 “sols,” or Red Planet days, on Mars since landing on Aug. 5, 2012. (One sol is barely longer than an Earth day — about 24 hours and 40 minutes.) The rover is a key a part of NASA’s search for all times on Mars and continues to drag up evidence of minerals, rocks and other parts of the environment shaped by water.
A newly drilled sample may, scientists say, add to its flood of evidence. Nicknamed “Sequoia,” the clump collected from the flank of the 3-mile-high (5 kilometers) Mount Sharp could show evidence of sulfates. Those are minerals formed in salty water evaporating from Mars because it began to lose water billions of years ago, presumably as its atmosphere thinned, scientists say.
Related: Curiosity rover discovers latest evidence Mars once had ‘right conditions’ for all times
Curiosity has already found abundant sulfates, and it continues to hunt elusive carbonate reserves that look like rare on the Red Planet. (Carbonate suggests an environment wealthy in carbon dioxide, so if Mars used to have a thick atmosphere of this sort, it’s unclear why that carbonate is so hard to seek out.)
“We have been anticipating these results for many years, and now Sequoia will tell us much more,” Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles, said in an agency statement on Monday (Nov. 6).
Water was very much on Vasavada’s mind during my first interview with him as a Space.com reporter, for a bit that was published on July 27, 2012, just every week or so before Curiosity’s Aug. 5 touchdown. We were talking in regards to the Russian-made Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) experiment designed to shower the surface with 10 million neutrons per pulse. (Curiosity’s blog hasn’t mentioned DAN since December 2021, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 that severed most space partnerships with Russia.)
“The goal is, in about 20 minutes of pulsing and returning and detecting the signal, [the rover] can construct up a reasonably good understanding of how much water there’s below the surface,” Vasavada, then Curiosity’s deputy project scientist, told me of DAN in a phone interview.
I remember how surreal that conversation was for me. I had met Space.com representatives on the overnight launch of the space shuttle mission STS-130 two years before, on Feb. 8, 2010, having journeyed to Florida from Canada prospecting for business as a young reporter. (My part-time workplace’s constructing in Ottawa, Canada, also burned down the night before, which is a complete other story.)
Anyway, 30 months later, a phone call from now editor-in-chief Tariq Malik (who in some way preserved my business card within the interim) invited me to write down my first Space.com story in July 2012, on this complicated Mars instrument. Before long, a flow of Curiosity-related story requests began appearing in my inbox, allowing me to rocket away from business reporting — my specialty on the time — and flow freelance-style into my passion of space.
Space.com remained my anchor client for an incredible decade before kindly offering me a full-time job on July 20, 2022 (yes, the anniversary of the pioneering Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, and Viking 1’s first-ever Mars landing in 1976). So, as Curiosity continues its journey on Mars, I feel a special connection to the mission.
I even had the privilege of visiting Curiosity’s powerful sibling rover mission, Perseverance, at JPL during a tour for book-writing in September 2019. Each of those missions form an extended line of missions on Mars looking for signs of water and by extension, the origins of life on Earth and other planets. Perseverance, the truth is, is actively looking for signs of ancient Mars life; Curiosity, against this, is on the lookout for evidence of past habitable environments.
Many years of labor on the Red Planet, mostly for the reason that Nineteen Nineties, have revealed vast evidence of water, from each satellite missions and excursions to the surface. Polar caps have the substance locked up within the ice. Preserves of some kind may lurk beneath the surface, although how much Martian underground water exists is considerably debated. And, in my favorite example, the small NASA Spirit and Opportunity Mars Exploration Rovers (fondly remembered) got here across evidence of features nicknamed “blueberries.” These are hematite-rich concretions formed in water whose exact origins remain unclear many years after they were first found.
Curiosity’s work has been beneficial as well, including stumbling on an ancient riverbed weeks after its landing, and finding signs of past water activity high up on Mount Sharp because it ascends and thoroughly documents the rocks. Amongst quite a few other finds which have helped extend its science mission 4 times, Curiosity recently uncovered widespread evidence of rivers at its Gale Crater landing site.
Also, Curiosity’s team just published results of a magnesium sulfate mineral called starkeyite, a dry-climate mineral spotted with the rover’s Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument. The peer-reviewed work was published Oct. 30 within the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets and was led by the Planetary Science Institute’s S. J. Chipera.
While the dry find sounds paradoxical for water, NASA emphasizes that starkeyite is very important.
“The team believes that after sulfate minerals first formed in salty water that was evaporating billions of years ago, these minerals transformed into starkeyite because the climate continued drying to its present state,” agency officials wrote in the identical statement on Monday. “Findings like this refine scientists’ understanding of how the Mars of today got here to be.”
Related: Landslides on Mars suggest water once surrounded Olympus Mons, tallest volcano within the solar system
Curiosity continues to be healthy after putting in a complete of 20 miles (32 kilometers) on the road, which is bringing it near the 28 miles (45 km) that Opportunity racked up during its 14 years of labor. As of this writing, engineers are working to deal with a minor issue with a camera on Mastcam, considered one in all the important “eyes” of Curiosity that provide sharp color views. A filter under the lens has been frozen between positions, but NASA engineers try to fit it back in place.
“If unable to nudge it back all the way in which, the mission would depend on the higher-resolution 100 mm focal length right Mastcam as the first color-imaging system,” NASA officials stated. “Consequently, how the team scouts for science targets and rover routes could be affected: The precise camera must take nine times more images than the left to cover the identical area. The teams also would have a degraded ability to look at the detailed color spectra of rocks from afar.”
In the long run, Curiosity’s nuclear power source, which harnesses the energy given off by the radioactive decay of plutonium, continues to dwindle, but mission team members stress that the rover still has years of life in it. Repeated use, dust and wind are also slowly wearing down Curiosity’s rock-boring drill and the joints in its robotic arm, but, however, software updates are making the drives of Curiosity more efficient. Engineers have even slowed down the worrisome wear on the rover’s treaded wheels.
Curiosity is working by itself for the following few weeks. Until Nov. 28, NASA will freeze communications with the rover during solar conjunction, when Mars flies behind the sun from the attitude of Earth. Since plasma from the sun can interfere with communications, the agency at all times stops sending commands to its Mars robots at the moment. But Curiosity continues to be working on a “to-do list” for these next few weeks, until agency officials can talk with the long-running rover again.
Perseverance can also be doing well after its Feb. 18, 2021 landing inside Jezero Crater. The rover is caching samples of an ancient lakebed for future return to Earth (though that planned return mission is working through budget issues for the time being) that will reveal ancient signs of microbial life within the rock. Meanwhile, a companion helicopter called Ingenuity is well past 60 flights on Mars, showing that aerial vehicles can act as a scout and helper for other missions that will follow.