5 amazing finds from NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover

With NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover less than three weeks away from landing on the red planet, it seems appropriate to look back on its preview – – the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) curiosity strategy.

Perseverance’s income does not mark the end of the science that Curiosity continues to generate. But the Perseverance entrance on the scene marks the opening of a more ambitious time of complementary Mars surface exploration.

Here are five interesting tidbits that Curiosity has discovered during its eight years at the Mars’ Gale crack.

—- Gale Crater was able to survive 3.5 billion years ago.

Curiosity’s scientific mission is to study Gale’s crater and find out if Mars was ever able to support life, Ashwin Vasavada, NASA’s MSL-Curiosity rover Project Scientist, told me. We are looking at a site where the rocks were formed about 3.5 billion years ago, because we think that if Mars ever had life, it would have been more likely in ancient times when the feeling thicker and more melt water in it, he said.

Curiosity was not designed to find life, but to determine whether Mars had the necessary conditions, such as melt water, a chemical building block of life such as carbon, and energy sources that could use life, Vasavada said. In the first year of his mission, Curiosity discovered a site called Yellowknife Bay that once held an old lake, he says.

From the minerals left behind, we can tell that the water of the lake was not too acidic and not too salty, says Vasavada. We also found carbon, nitrogen, sulfa, phosphorus, and other elements that need life, he says. And perhaps more importantly, curiosity found potential sources for energy for microbial life there.

“Of course it was possible to live in this place on Mars, if there was ever life,” said Vasavada.

—- Lakes have been present for millions of years in the ancient Gale fault.

Curiosity landed beside a three-mile-high mountain of sedimentary rock, Vasavada said. Like the Grand Canyon on Earth, the oldest rocks are at the base, the youngest ones are on top of them, and each cover is a record of the settings from a particular time, he says.

Curiosity has now climbed over 1300 feet on the mountain and has found an almost unbroken record of ancient lakes in the Gale fissure that lasted like millions, if not tens of millions of years.

Even though the lakes are long gone, Curiosity sees bands in the remaining rock of a thick layer of millimeters of mud that settled out in the lakes, perhaps at the rate of one a year, Vasavada said. And he says there is little evidence that the lakes dried up from time to time, but then they returned.

—- Organic matter was present on ancient Mars and is still alive to this day.

Curiosity has discovered that ancient Mars had enough carbon in the rocks and soils to become the raw material for life, if it ever existed, says Vasavada. Curiosity has discovered that the bed rocks in Gale’s crater contained a mixture of organic molecules, he says.

Most are simple, only a few carbon atoms in length.

But these carbon-based molecules could potentially be fragments of more complex organic molecules that have decayed over billions of years, Vasavada says. And he is aware that it is surprising that even these simple molecules survived.

It is possible that they were buried long ago and only appeared on the surface through natural processes of erosion.

“[But] the presence of such molecules makes the old environment even more suitable for life, ”says Vasavada.

—- Methane gas occasionally contains spikes not yet defined.

Telescopic observers on Earth said they saw methane gas (similar to natural gas on Earth) in Mars’ atmosphere in the years before the rover arrived, Vasavada said. It seemed to come and go in big plugs, he says. This surprised us because methane is thought to have been rapidly destroyed by other chemicals, and it was not thought to be present, he says.

Curiosity, however, is equipped with a special sensor for methane and the rover has detected a small amount of methane, receiving an average of about 1 part methane for every 2 billion parts of Mars ’air, Vasavada said. And a few times over the past eight years, he says, the rover has found spikes between ten and twenty times as many.

But Vasavada warns that while the discovery of methane on Mars is encouraging because it can be extracted by biology on Earth, there are non-biological explanations as well. So far, the source of Mars methane remains a mystery.

“Either way, it’s very interesting because it means it’s been implemented in some way, and it seems to be changing a lot for reasons we don’t yet understand, ”Said Vasavada.

—- Curiosity was observed and measured through a dust storm across the planet.

As in deserts on Earth, wind is always blowing and blowing away at the geology, Vasavada says. This leaves a lot of dust behind, which sometimes gets whipped up into big clouds, he notes. Clouds absorb sunlight and heat up, making the winds even more intense, he says.

With no water or oceans on Mars, every few years the storms grow dust until they orbit the entire planet, Vasavada said. In 2018, such a storm occurred, and Curiosity was able to see from the ground, he says.

Although Mars has an atmosphere of less than one percent of Earth’s terrain, the most striking effect of the storm was that sunlight in Gale Crater decreased by 97 percent.

Even with a thin feel, the wind is able to move sand around, says Vasavada. Sand dunes were discovered on Mars in the 1970s, but Curiosity is, in fact, the first landed mission to watch sand move in the wind, he says.

What’s next for Curiosity?

In the next year, Curiosity will study a major transition from clay-filled rock layers to sulfate-filled rock layers, which may result in a planet-wide shift from wet to dry weather, Vasavada said. We came to see if old Mars was fit for life and what surprised me was just how fit it was, he says.

“Everything was a place to use life, we found no evidence that life was useful,” Vasavada said.

Curiosity’s array of 10 science instruments includes 17 cameras, a laser to vaporize and study small sharp points of rock at a distance, and a drill to collect powdered rock samples, NASA says. By measuring the chemical fingerprints present in different rocks and soils, the rover can determine the past history and their possible interactions with water, the group said. noting.

Will the Curiosity rover last another ten years?

Curiosity is doing very well considering it has been on Mars eight years, four times the lowest goal, Vasavada said. Something big could happen that shortens the mission ‘s life at any time, but to prevent that, the mission’ s life is limited by its plutonium power source, he says.

Over the next decade, NASA will have to gradually cut back on rover activity.

“At some point there will not be enough energy to keep the movement going,” Vasavada said.