Slashdot Mirror
Mars Curiosity Rover's First Road Trip Planned
littlesparkvt writes "NASA has announced the first destination for the Curiosity Rover. They're sending it to 'Glenelg,' a natural intersection of three kinds of terrain. 'The trek to Glenelg will send the rover 1,300 feet (400 meters) east-southeast of its landing site. One of the three types of terrain intersecting at Glenelg is layered bedrock, which is attractive as the first drilling target. "We're about ready to load our new destination into our GPS and head out onto the open road," Grotzinger said. "Our challenge is there is no GPS on Mars, so we have a roomful of rover-driver engineers providing our turn-by-turn navigation for us." Prior to the rover's trip to Glenelg, the team in charge of Curiosity's Chemistry and Camera instrument, or ChemCam, is planning to give their mast-mounted, rock-zapping laser and telescope combination a thorough checkout. On Saturday night, Aug. 18, ChemCam is expected to "zap" its first rock in the name of planetary science. It will be the first time such a powerful laser has been used on the surface of another world.'"
People have been talking about doing Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy in space for decades, so I hope it works well with Chemcam. It has a lot of promise, both to speed up exploration, and in places like asteroids and comets, where it may not be feasible or safe to actually touch the target.
They have picked a boring nearby rock for the first target. There has been a discussion of whether or not Mars rocks have a "desert patina" (or varnish), and, if so, what is its nature, and even if it has a biological component. The Chemcam samples the top layer of the target, so may help to answer that.
Road: You keep using that word, but I don't think it means what you think it means?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oVUwG0qC9c
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
> ChemCam is expected to "zap" its first rock in the name of planetary science.
Take the quotes off that zap and smile when you say it, pal.
If a freakin' robot on Mars shooting a murderous, rock-vaporizing laser doesn't deserve the unquoted use of the verb "zap", nothing does.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It's very very unlikely that we're going to find any kind of functional ecosystem over there. The best we can hope for is a surviving remnant - a few scraps of past life that still manage to live. Fossil evidence of past life would be second best. Curiosity is fossil hunting, among other things, and that includes chemical traces of long dead single celled life.
If it doesn't find evidence of past life, it'll also be studying the geological history of mars to give us a much better idea of whether to give up on the fossil hunting entirely.
Being sure that mars is dead, and has always been dead, would actually be a good thing. It would mean we have no worries about contaminating the place with human missions. We could be as messy as we like whenver humans finally arrive, safe in the knowledge that we're not destroying irreplaceable unique evidence.
Did they remember to attach a shark to it? It can't possibly function without one!
If something is living there, then by definition there's an ecosystem - it may not be a diverse one, but it would be there.
It would also be hugely significant. Mars is probably not the greatest target for finding interesting life in the solar system, but if Martian-evolved life of any type were discovered it would pretty drastically alter at least 1 of the variables of the Drake equation.
There is a pretty good reason to think that geological material (potentially harboring microbes) has been exchanged several times over the past few billion years, with the K-T event (that killed off the dinosaurs) being one of those events that sent material back to Mars again and likely seeded at least some sort of life almost everywhere in the Solar System where liquid water can be found.
If fact, a strong hypothesis suggests that life as we know it may have even originated on Mars and then came to the Earth many millions of years ago to see the Earth.
This isn't galactic scale panspermia but rather just something happening on a stellar system scale and certainly sounds reasonable with current scientific thought on the subject. When Apollo 12 landed next to the Surveyor lander and then found microbes which lived on the surface of the Moon for several years (from the Surveyor spacecraft), it seems reasonable that at least some microbes could cope with a multi-year journey through the solar system.
In other words, the Drake equation would not be altered here as it still is just a sample size of one, just on a larger scale.
On the other hand, if you could find some type of life on Mars that uses something other than DNA to pass genetic information, that would be incredible in so many ways. I would expect that any sort of life on Mars must have found ways to cope with the environment there that would make it quite different from life on the Earth, even different from the extremophiles that are often used by comparison, but there may still be common genes that indicate a shared ancestor. Curiosity is not going to be examining potential life forms to that level of detail, so that would need to be a follow-up experiment if anything resembling a life form is even found at all.
Interplanetary panspermia might give hints to interstellar panspermia though, or at least not rule it out as a mechanism for spreading life throughout the universe. It may even be hypothesized that after a planet, any planet at all in a galaxy, has been able to develop life forms that over a comparatively short period of time (when measured in billions of years) the entire galaxy is eventually "infected" with life to some degree at least where it might be remotely possible. Even though it is still just a sample size of one in terms of having life self-generate, in terms of calculating the number of planets in the Milky Way that could have life it might make that part of the Drake equation much closer to one than zero.
"We're about ready to load our new destination into our GPS and head out onto the open road."
It seems Mars has GPS aswell. Time to start Geocaching on Mars...
Privacy is terrorism.