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NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Still Going 10 Years After Landing

posted by janrinok on Monday August 08 2022, @09:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the like-the-energizer-bunny dept.
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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Curiosity set out to answer the question: Did Mars ever have the right environmental conditions to support small life forms called microbes? Early in its mission, Curiosity's scientific tools found chemical and mineral evidence of past habitable environments on Mars. It continues to explore the rock record from a time when Mars could have been home to microbial life. Credit: NASA

Ten years ago, on August 5, 2012, a jetpack lowered NASA’s Curiosity rover onto the Red Planet. This was the beginning of the SUV-size explorer’s pursuit of evidence that Mars had the conditions needed to support microscopic life billions of years ago.

Over the past 10 years, Curiosity has driven nearly 18 miles (29 kilometers) and ascended 2,050 feet (625 meters) as it explores Gale Crater and the foothills of Mount Sharp within it. The Mars rover has analyzed 41 rock and soil samples, relying on a suite of science instruments to learn what they reveal about Earth’s rocky sibling. It’s success has pushed a team of engineers to devise ways to minimize wear and tear and keep the rover rolling. In fact, Curiosity’s mission was recently extended for another three years, allowing it to continue among NASA’s fleet of important astrobiological missions.

It’s been a busy decade for Curiosity. The roving explorer has studied the Red Planet’s skies, capturing images of shining clouds and drifting moons. It radiation sensor is helping 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.

But most significantly, Curiosity has found 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. The crater once held a lake, the size of which waxed and waned over time. This means that each layer higher up on Mount Sharp serves as a record of a more recent era of Mars’ environment.

Now, the intrepid rover is driving through 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.

[...] “We’re seeing evidence of dramatic changes in the ancient Martian climate,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. “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?”

Curiosity has made striking progress up the mountain. Back in 2015, the team captured a “postcard” image (see below) of distant buttes. A mere speck within that image is a Curiosity-size boulder nicknamed “Ilha Novo Destino” – and, nearly seven years later, the rover trundled by it last month on the way to the sulfate-bearing region.

[...] To minimize damage to the wheels, engineers keep an eye out for treacherous spots like the knife-edged “gator-back” terrain they discovered recently. They developed a traction-control algorithm to help as well.

The team has taken a similar approach to managing the rover’s slowly diminishing power. Curiosity relies on a long-lived nuclear-powered battery rather than solar panels to keep on rolling. As the plutonium pellets in the battery decay, they generate heat that the rover converts into power. Because of the pellets’ gradual decay, the rover can’t do quite as much in a day as it did during its first year.

Mishkin said the team is continuing to budget how much energy the rover uses each day, and has figured out which activities can be done in parallel to optimize the energy available to the rover. “Curiosity is definitely doing more multitasking where it’s safe to do so,” Mishkin added.

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