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This 360-degree panorama was taken on August 9 by NASA's Curiosity rover at its location on Vera Rubin Ridge. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
After capturing a new rock sample on August 9, NASA's Curiosity robot examined its surroundings on Mars, producing a 360-degree panorama of its current location on Vera Rubin Ridge.
The panorama includes darker skies, darkened by a global dust storm in decline. It also includes a rare view of the Mast Camera of the mobile itself, revealing a thin layer of dust on the Curiosity Bridge. In the foreground, the most recent drill target of the rover, dubbed "Stoer" after a city in Scotland, near which important discoveries about life on Earth were made in the sediments of the bed of the lake.
The new drill sample delighted Curiosity's science team as the last two attempts to drill the rover were thwarted by rocks of unexpected hardness. Curiosity began using a new drilling method earlier this year to work around a mechanical problem. The tests showed that it was as effective at drilling rocks as the old method, suggesting that hard rocks would have been a problem, regardless of the method used.
There is no way for Curiosity to accurately determine the hardness of a rock before drilling it, so for this most recent drilling activity, the rover team made an educated guess. It was thought that a large ridge on the ridge included harder rocks, able to stand despite wind erosion; a place under the ledge was more likely to have softer erodible rocks. This strategy seems to have materialized, but many questions remain about Vera Rubin Ridge's raison d'être.
According to Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the rover has never encountered such a wide variety of colors and textures. JPL leads the Mars Science Laboratory mission, which includes Curiosity.
"The ridge is not that monolithic thing – it has two distinct sections, each with a variety of colors," Vasavada said. "Some are visible to the naked eye and even more so when we look in the near infrared, just beyond what our eyes can see, some seem to be related to the hardness of the rocks."
The best way to find out why these rocks are so difficult is to powder them for the robot's two internal labs. Analyzing them could reveal what serves as "cement" in the ridge, allowing it to resist despite wind erosion. According to Mr. Vasavada, the groundwater crossing the ridge in the past probably played a role in its strengthening, perhaps acting as a plumbing to distribute this "cement" anti-wind.
Much of the ridge contains hematite, a mineral that forms in the water. There is such a hematite signal that it attracts the attention of NASA's orbiters as a beacon. Could some variation in hematite result in harder rocks? Is there anything special about the red rocks of the ridge that makes them so inflexible?
Vera Rubin Ridge keeps its secrets for the moment.
Two more drilled samples are planned for the ridge in September. After that, Curiosity will head to its scientific end zone: areas enriched with clay and sulphate minerals higher than Mt. Tranchant. This climb is scheduled for early October.
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Successful drilling: Curiosity collects rocks from Mars
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