Curiosity to Drill in on Martian Rock

By Danielle Lucey

This view shows the patch of veined, flat-lying rock selected as the first drilling site for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. Photo courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.

NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover is set to drill into its first rock, a flat stone with pale veins running through it the robot found in Gale Crater. If the rock meets the engineers’ approval, it will be bored through in the next few days.



"Drilling into a rock to collect a sample will be this mission's most challenging activity since the landing. It has never been done on Mars," says Mars Science Laboratory project manager Richard Cook of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The drill hardware interacts energetically with Martian material we don't control. We won't be surprised if some steps in the process don't go exactly as planned the first time through."



The rock has unexpected features, spotted using Curiosity’s Mast Camera. The terrain in the rock’s area is a dry streambed, different from Curiosity’s initial landing site. 



"The orbital signal drew us here, but what we found when we arrived has been a great surprise," says Mars Science Laboratory project scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "This area had a different type of wet environment than the streambed where we landed, maybe a few different types of wet environments."



Curiosity’s Chemistry and Camera instrument has already determined that there are elevated levels of calcium, sulfur and hydrogen in the rock’s veins.



"These veins are likely composed of hydrated calcium sulfate, such as bassinite or gypsum," says ChemCam team member Nicolas Mangold of the Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géodynamique de Nantes in France. "On Earth, forming veins like these requires water circulating in fractures."