NASA's Curiosity rover has
now been exploring the Red Planet for a full Martian year.
Curiosity wraps up its
687th day on Mars today (June 24), NASA officials said, meaning the 1-ton robot
has completed one lap around the sun on the Red Planet. (While Earth orbits the
sun once every 365 days, Mars is farther away and thus takes considerably
longer to do so.)
Curiosity touched down on
the night of Aug. 5, 2012, kicking off a mission to determine if Mars has ever
been capable of supporting microbial life.
The six-wheeled rover quickly delivered, finding that an area near its landing
site called Yellowknife Bay was indeed habitable billions of years ago.
The $2.5-billion mission,
known officially as the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), has made other important
discoveries during its time on the Martian surface, too. For example,
Curiosity's measurements of radiation levels — made during its eight-month
cruise through space and while on the planet's surface — suggest that the risk
of radiation exposure is not a
"showstopper" for manned Mars missions. The rover's data should
should help researchers design the shielding astronauts will require on such
missions, NASA officials said.
Curiosity has also scanned
Mars' air for methane, a gas that here on Earth is predominantly produced by
living organisms. The rover's instruments have found no traces of the gas, in
contrast to some previous observations made by Red Planet orbiters.
Curiosity left Yellowknife
Bay last July and is now on the way to the base of Mount Sharp, which rises
more than 3 miles (5 kilometers) into the sky from the center of Mars' Gale
Crater. The huge mountain has long been Curiosity's ultimate science
destination; mission scientists want the rover to climb up Mount Sharp's foothills,
reading a history of the planet's changing environmental conditions along the
way.
Unexpected damage to
Curiosity's metal wheels has slowed progress toward Mount Sharp a bit, forcing
the mission team to rethink and revise its driving plans. The rover has made it
about halfway to the mountain's base, with about 2.4 miles (3.9 km) left to
cover, NASA officials said.
"Over the next few
months, the science team is really excited to get to Mount Sharp, where we
think the layered rocks there have captured the major climate changes in Mars'
history," Curiosity deputy project scientist Ashwin Vasavada said in a new
NASA video marking the rover's first Martian year. "We can't wait to get
there and figure it all out, but it's going to take a lot of driving."
No comments:
Post a Comment