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After a full decade roaming the lonely landscape of Mars, NASA’s Curiosity rover is having a celebration. The team says it’s showing signs of wear but still going strong. Curiosity’s next mission is a Martian mountain climbing adventure.
Mars rover took great snapshots
On August 5, 2012 the Curiosity rover was lowered onto the Red Planet Mars by jetpack. Ever since, the “SUV-size explorer” has been wandering around looking for something to talk to. The NASA team calls it looking for evidence of the “conditions needed to support microscopic life billions of years ago.”
They don’t expect Barsoomians and Banths but the eggheads generally agree our closest neighbor may have once been inhabited by something. Even if that something was no higher up the evolution ladder than pond scum.
As everyone in the universe aged a full ten years Curiosity has clocked nearly 18 miles on the odometer. It struggled up to a full 2,050 feet to explore the Gale Crater.
As an added bonus, the robot Mars explorer has gazed upon the “foothills of Mount Sharp within it.” So far, it used onboard instruments to analyze “41 rock and soil samples.” It’s well equipped for the job. Tucked away under it’s skin are “a suite of science instruments.”
Spare parts are only a dream and the shipping cost what the industry likes to call “prohibitive.” That means the Mars rover is on his own in an emergency. Because it managed to do such a great job of protecting itself, the team on Earth is trying their best to give it a hand.
“It’s success has pushed a team of engineers to devise ways to minimize wear and tear and keep the rover rolling.” They expect it to stay on the job and Curiosity got it’s contract renewed for another three years.
A busy decade
The experts are all calling it a “busy decade for Curiosity.” It studied everything from the soil of Mars to the sky. It captured “images of shining clouds and drifting moons” while at the same time, built-in sensors help “NASA figure out how to keep future astronauts safe by measuring the amount of high-energy radiation they would be exposed to on the Martian surface.”
The most important thing Curiosity found, so far, was “that liquid water, as well as the chemical building blocks and nutrients needed for supporting life, were present for at least tens of millions of years in Gale Crater.”
A long, long time ago but in the exact same galaxy, there was once a lake in the crater, “the size of which waxed and waned over time.” They can use the bathtub ring as “a record of a more recent era of Mars’ environment.”
Currently, Curiosity is trekking trough “a canyon that marks the transition to a new region, one thought to have formed as water was drying out, leaving behind salty minerals called sulfates.”
Mars, it seems, was the victim of climate change. “We’re seeing evidence of dramatic changes in the ancient Martian climate.”
Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory points out that the “question now is whether the habitable conditions that Curiosity has found up to now persisted through these changes. Did they disappear, never to return, or did they come and go over millions of years?“
