Feb. 9, 2013: NASA's Curiosity rover has 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.
This is the biggest milestone accomplishment for the Curiosity team since the sky-crane landing last August, another proud day for America," says John Grunsfeld, NASA associate administrator for the agency's Science Mission Directorate. "The most advanced planetary robot ever designed is now a fully operating analytical laboratory on Mars."
At the center of this image from NASA's Curiosity rover is the
hole in a rock called "John Klein" where the rover conducted its first
sample drilling on Mars. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS more
For the next several days, ground controllers will command the rover's arm to carry out a series of steps to process the sample, ultimately delivering portions to the instruments inside.
Rock powder generated during drilling travels up flutes on the bit. The bit assembly has chambers to hold the powder until it can be transferred to the sample-handling mechanisms of the rover's Collection and Handling for In-Situ Martian Rock Analysis (CHIMRA) device.
Before the rock powder is analyzed, some will be used to scour traces of material that may have been deposited onto the hardware while the rover was still on Earth, despite thorough cleaning before launch.
An animated set of three images from NASA's Curiosity rover
shows the rover's drill in action on Feb. 8, 2013. Image credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
"Building a tool to interact forcefully with unpredictable rocks on Mars required an ambitious development and testing program," said JPL's Louise Jandura, chief engineer for Curiosity's sample system. "To get to the point of making this hole in a rock on Mars, we made eight drills and bored more than 1,200 holes in 20 types of rock on Earth."
Inside the sample-handling device, the powder will be vibrated once or twice over a sieve that screens out any particles larger than six-thousandths of an inch (150 microns) across. Small portions of the sieved sample will fall through ports on the rover deck into the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument and the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument. These instruments then will begin the much-anticipated detailed analysis.
The rock Curiosity drilled is called "John Klein" in memory of a Mars Science Laboratory deputy project manager who died in 2011.
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