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Mars NASA Space Science

Curiosity Rover Collects First Martian Bedrock Sample 51

Posted by timothy from the cosmetics-use-in-3-2-1 dept.
littlesparkvt writes "NASA's Curiosity rover has, for the first time, used a drill carried at the end of its robotic arm to bore into a flat, veiny rock on Mars and collect a sample from its interior. This is the first time any robot has drilled into a rock to collect a sample on Mars."
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Curiosity Rover Collects First Martian Bedrock Sample More

Curiosity Rover Collects First Martian Bedrock Sample

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  • Was there an article? (Score:5, Informative)

    by oodaloop ( 1229816 ) on Saturday February 09, 2013 @03:28PM (#42845017)
    I've been clicking on TFS, but no webpage comes up. Is there a link somewhere?

  • It's a place right out of his-tor-ry.

  • Article (Score:5, Informative)

    by skelly33 ( 891182 ) on Saturday February 09, 2013 @03:36PM (#42845081)
    Link [nasa.gov]

    • Re:Article (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ColdWetDog ( 752185 ) on Saturday February 09, 2013 @04:12PM (#42845327) Homepage

      The hell with bedrock! Curiosity has found a piece of metal [theatlantic.com] embedded in rock. Doesn't appear to be Mardi Gras beads either.

      They should be tugging on that thing to see what happens!

      • So far it does not appear they plan to turn back to study the "metal penis" closer. It took a few weeks before anybody noticed the artifact in photos and the rover has moved on since. It would be a crying shame to not go back to check it out.

        I bet it's a worn-down meteorite, but you never know.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by FooRat ( 182725 )

        That'll turn out to be the tip of an old statue of liberty, weathering in the sand

  • ...indicate the bedrock originally formed during a phase of Mar's geological history refered to as the Yabbadabbadoall Time.

  • coat hangar [theregister.co.uk]

    This is weird, or is that wired?

    • Zoom in far enough and you can see the "Craft Services" stamp. Damn lazy grips.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What's a coat hangar? Seems like a waste of space to use a hangar for one coat. People usually keep airplanes in hangars.
  • Let me guess. Inside of rock is chemically exactly the same as its surface. At least, that is what I would expect since the rocks eroded.

    • Re:Erosion (Score:5, Informative)

      by sensei moreh ( 868829 ) on Saturday February 09, 2013 @04:22PM (#42845393)
      Erosion exposes a new surface to weathering, and a weathered surface can have a chemical composition significantly different than the unweathered interior.

      • Re:Erosion (Score:4, Informative)

        by kipsate ( 314423 ) on Saturday February 09, 2013 @04:36PM (#42845507)
        Wind, temperature changes and radiation from the sun pretty much define the weather on Mars. Any changes to the chemical composition on the rock surface will be due to these factors. Therefore don't expect anything exciting.

        • Re:Erosion (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Kaldaien ( 676190 ) on Saturday February 09, 2013 @05:18PM (#42845751)

          Do not forget that volcanism and liquid water were also once a factor in weathering. There is no life, that we know of, to speed up erosion - so it is possible that drilling only a few cm will reveal geologic history on different timescale than the equivalent depth on Earth.

          Granted the top layer, which is all we have studied up until now will be nothing exciting (likely layers of dust deposited over millennia), but unexposed layers have a lot of historic potential. The layers may even be old enough to portray Mars during a more interesting period, perhaps when it still had a respectable magnetic field and atmosphere.

          • Re:Erosion (Score:4, Informative)

            by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Saturday February 09, 2013 @08:49PM (#42847067) Homepage

            Granted the top layer, which is all we have studied up until now will be nothing exciting (likely layers of dust deposited over millennia), but unexposed layers have a lot of historic potential.

            The stuff they're looking at is rock that's (very) slowly being further exposed through erosion by the wind - the rocks formed early in the history of Mars, then newer, upper layers have eroded away, exposing this particularly old stuff dating from around the time life began on Earth. If Mars had similar conditions, then it's a good place to look for remnants of organic molecules...

            The aim of the drill is to get to rock that's not been significantly irradiated by cosmic rays. From this paper on The Sample Analysis at Mars Investigation and Instrument Suite [springer.com]:

            Ancient indigenous organic molecules could be also destroyed or transformed by the ionizing radiation in the shallow subsurface of Mars. Due to a thin martian atmosphere and lack of magnetic field, the surface of Mars has been bombarded continuously by the energetic particles of the galactic and solar cosmic rays (GCRs and SCRs) for much of its history. Unlike UV radiation which is absorbed in the first mm of soil (Mancinelli and Klovstad 2000; Cockell et al. 2005), GCRs can penetrate down to 1 meter below the surface (Dartnell et al. 2007). Over the long period of exposure, cosmic rays particles have the capacity to transform complex organic compounds into macromolecules having different, more refractory chemistry and/or into smaller molecules broken from a parent molecule. The latter case may occur either by direct impacts or by secondary reaction with oxidative radicals produced by radiation in the immediate vicinity of the organic molecules (Dartnell et al. 2008). It is not clear how such long-term degradation would affect SAM’s measurements of organic compounds at the ancient geologic outcrops because the rates of erosion are highly variable on Mars (Golombek et al. 2006). Erosion of the ancient rock would naturally expose “fresh” (less irradiated) material to the surface with potentially “unbroken” organic molecules. Furthermore, SCRs, which are less energetic than GCRs, cannot penetrate and destroy organic matter deeper than 2 cm below the surface (Pavlov 2011). Therefore, MSL’s drilling and sampling of outcrops from 5 cm below the surface will exclude the effects of degradation of organic matter by solar cosmic rays. Finally, using the radiolysis constants of amino acids Kminek and Bada (2006) and Pavlov (2011) demonstrated that simple organic compounds with masses below 100 amu, should have a good chance to survive long-term exposure to GCRs in the shallow subsurface even extremely low surface erosion rates. Results from Curiosity’s Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) will provide modern radiation characteristics that will help improve long-term modeling of the surface radiation on Mars and possibly constrain its affects on near surface organic chemistry.

        • The article states that "The rock is believed to hold evidence about long-gone wet environments." Surely NASA didn't go through all the trouble of making a drill if they didn't expect to get something from it.

    • Re:Erosion (Score:4, Informative)

      by FatLittleMonkey ( 1341387 ) on Sunday February 10, 2013 @12:00AM (#42847899)

      However, the surface is covered in cruft, baked in the sun, exposed to the atmosphere. Note the colour difference between the drill-hole and the rest of the surface.

      By drilling down even a little, you are ensuring that you really are seeing raw bedrock. A pure sample, which you can compare with the surface of the same rock, subtract one from the other and be left with just the cruft. Now you can check whether you have been correctly... errr... correcting for cruft in your samples of rocks which are too far out of Curiosities path to reach with anything other than the laser-and-spectrograph.

  • Yabba Dabba DOOOO!

  • First robot to drill into a rock? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Sesostris III ( 730910 ) on Saturday February 09, 2013 @04:05PM (#42845285)

    This is the first time any robot has drilled into a rock to collect a sample on Mars.

    Given the millions of robots we have sent to Mars over the past millennia, this is the first to drill into a rock? I find that hard to believe!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 )

      Only recently NASA was able to license the "drilling" function from Amazon.com

    • Your planet may have sent millions of robots over the last thousand of our earth years, but this is the first one humans have sent that has drilled into rock.

      • Your planet may have sent millions of robots over the last thousand of our earth years, but this is the first one humans have sent that has drilled into rock.

        He left his tinfoil hat at the door.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      It's the first to collect and remove samples from the hole, not the first to drill outright. Spirit and Opportunity both ground into rocks with a wide drill bit (almost like a sander), but put the analyzer on the hole directly rather than extracted material from it.

      Spirit and Opportunity were essentially sniffers, but Curiosity is an eater.

  • Not the first occurrence of drilling in Bedrock (Score:5, Funny)

    by GodfatherofSoul ( 174979 ) on Saturday February 09, 2013 @04:10PM (#42845313)

    I find that hard to believe, seeing as both the Flintstones and Rubbles have young children with young, attractive wives.

  • Well, whaddya know! A nerd finally got to drill something.

  • Spirit and Opportunity had the Rock Abrasion Tool [wikipedia.org] back in 2004. That grinded the surface of rocks to expose the interior.

  • Wow, a situation where you can say "Drill, baby drill" ,and not feel embarased about it! :-)

  • Curiosity eats Mars.

  • Forgive my ignorence, but:
    Why would the interiour of a rock differ from its surface?
    I would expect rocks to be pretty homogenous.

  • Are they going to clean up that mess?

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