[Official] Curiosity, or the Mars Science Lab Landing August 5/6

Grotzinger closed by saying the process is not going to be sudden discovery, but gradual, careful, systematic collection and analysis of data.

Now moving to questions.

Q: How do we find out if the organics are Martian or not?

A: Grotzinger - Paul will answer, but for starters, there's some uncertainty we tried to eliminate by making sure the instrument is working right, and eliminate contamination. Brought up possibility of also being from meteors, not just from MSL. If confirmed Martian, next question is abiotic or biotic.
A: Paul Mahaffy - Can use the organic check sample if serious concern to compare for residuals that don't show up in the blank (if something shows up in the blank that should not be there, it's contamination). Before that, though, they do several empty runs.


Q (Emily L - Planetary Society) - Can determine if the compounds, especially chlorinated compounds, were in the soil, or formed as a result of sample handling, heating, etc?

A: Paul - Possible, or likely the heating formed the compounds detected
(My addition - would imply they know the elements present, but need to figure out what they came from)


Q: What does the high deuterium ratio and the presence of perchlorates mean?

A: Paul - Seeing not just heavy hydrogen, but also carbon, oxygen, and expecting to find heavy nitrogen, elevated too. Lighter isotopes are lost to space more easily, so this is expected. Biological processes would concentrate lighter isotopes, however, so precise ratio is interesting.

Perchlorates still unconfirmed. Oxygen and chlorine evolved, possible from calcium perchlorate.

Q (Joe Palka, NPR) - Do we think the chlorine came from perchlorate salts when heated?

A (Paul) - Unconfirmed, but likely. Came out at the right time in the heating process.


Q (Rob Reynolds, Al Jazeera) - In laymans terms, what is the most important or unexpected finding so far, and 2nd what does the recent hype say about the level of interest from laymen?

A (Grotzinger) - I guess I'll take that one (audience laughs). For the second part of the Q, I guess we have to be careful what we say. Things that we think are great discoveries, but they aren't that interesting publicly. Interest comes after we have a clear understanding what we found (very, very poor paraphrase on my part)

A (Michael Meyer) - Spectacular that we found we landed on an ancient riverbed.


Q (I missed the exact question)

A (Grotzinger) - Spectacular data return. When you get your first sample, and it's working, you get really excited. When you get second sample, and consistent results, then we're really doing science.


Q - If the organics are from Mars, how do you tell if biotic?

A (Paul) - Carbon isotopes especially. Filter out geologic and meteor ratios (meteors bring material to Mars should show same ratios as meteors studied on earth).

Q - (missed the question)

A (Grotzinger) - Lots of popular focus on water, not a lot on other necessities of life. Chemistry-wise, organics are being found common. Now seeing hints of energy bearing compounds

Q (Kelly Beedy, Sky and Telescope) - Are the methane compounds indigenous. What are implications of 5x D-H ratio compared to earth.

A (Paul) - Probably the methane compounds (methyl chlorine) formed in SAM. Probably not, for example, from UV reactions.

Lighter hydrogen more rapidly escapes to space than deuterium. What will be interesting is looking for REALLY old trapped water (hydrates), if that water has lower D-H ratio, good reference to determine escape rate.
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and
NASA-JPL

PASADENA, Calif. - NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has used its full array of instruments to analyze Martian soil for the first time, and found a complex chemistry within the Martian soil. Water and sulfur and chlorine-containing substances, among other ingredients, showed up in samples Curiosity's arm delivered to an analytical laboratory inside the rover.

Detection of the substances during this early phase of the mission demonstrates the laboratory's capability to analyze diverse soil and rock samples over the next two years. Scientists also have been verifying the capabilities of the rover's instruments.

Curiosity is the first Mars rover able to scoop soil into analytical instruments. The specific soil sample came from a drift of windblown dust and sand called "Rocknest." The site lies in a relatively flat part of Gale Crater still miles away from the rover's main destination on the slope of a mountain called Mount Sharp. The rover's laboratory includes the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) suite and the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument. SAM used three methods to analyze gases given off from the dusty sand when it was heated in a tiny oven. One class of substances SAM checks for is organic compounds -- carbon-containing chemicals that can be ingredients for life.

"We have no definitive detection of Martian organics at this point, but we will keep looking in the diverse environments of Gale Crater," said SAM Principal Investigator Paul Mahaffy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Curiosity's APXS instrument and the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on the rover's arm confirmed Rocknest has chemical-element composition and textural appearance similar to sites visited by earlier NASA Mars rovers Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity.

Curiosity's team selected Rocknest as the first scooping site because it has fine sand particles suited for scrubbing interior surfaces of the arm's sample-handling chambers. Sand was vibrated inside the chambers to remove residue from Earth. MAHLI close-up images of Rocknest show a dust-coated crust one or two sand grains thick, covering dark, finer sand.

"Active drifts on Mars look darker on the surface," said MAHLI Principal Investigator Ken Edgett, of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego. "This is an older drift that has had time to be inactive, letting the crust form and dust accumulate on it."

CheMin's examination of Rocknest samples found the composition is about half common volcanic minerals and half non-crystalline materials such as glass. SAM added information about ingredients present in much lower concentrations and about ratios of isotopes. Isotopes are different forms of the same element and can provide clues about environmental changes. The water seen by SAM does not mean the drift was wet. Water molecules bound to grains of sand or dust are not unusual, but the quantity seen was higher than anticipated.

SAM tentatively identified the oxygen and chlorine compound perchlorate. This is a reactive chemical previously found in arctic Martian soil by NASA's Phoenix Lander. Reactions with other chemicals heated in SAM formed chlorinated methane compounds -- one-carbon organics that were detected by the instrument. The chlorine is of Martian origin, but it is possible the carbon may be of Earth origin, carried by Curiosity and detected by SAM's high sensitivity design.

"We used almost every part of our science payload examining this drift," said Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "The synergies of the instruments and richness of the data sets give us great promise for using them at the mission's main science destination on Mount Sharp."

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project is using Curiosity to assess whether areas inside Gale Crater ever offered a habitable environment for microbes. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, a division of Caltech, manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, and built Curiosity
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What they need to do is bring samples of it back to earf, maybe we'll get super lucky and unleash some sort of global Andromeda Strain.
 
Mars Science Laboratory: What's New

Mars Science Laboratory: NASA Rover Confirms Mars Origin of Some Meteorites - some meteoroids that hit earth came from fucking mars man

Mars Science Laboratory: Science Gains From Diverse Landing Area of Curiosity
Examination of loose rocks, sand and dust has provided new understanding of the local and global processes on Mars. Analysis of observations and measurements by the rover's science instruments during the first four months after the August 2012 landing are detailed in five reports in the Sept. 27 edition of the journal Science.
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Mars Science Laboratory: NASA Curiosity Rover Detects No Methane On Mars
no methane found on mars
The roving laboratory performed extensive tests to search for traces of Martian methane. Whether the Martian atmosphere contains traces of the gas has been a question of high interest for years because methane could be a potential sign of life, although it also can be produced without biology.

"This important result will help direct our efforts to examine the possibility of life on Mars," said Michael Meyer, NASA's lead scientist for Mars exploration. "It reduces the probability of current methane-producing Martian microbes, but this addresses only one type of microbial metabolism. As we know, there are many types of terrestrial microbes that don't generate methane."
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so :(
 
couple things: yellowknife bay apparently a huge boon to mission
The Curiosity rover discovered fine-grained sedimentary rocks, which are inferred to represent an ancient lake and preserve evidence of an environment that would have been suited to support a Martian biosphere founded on chemolithoautotrophy. This aqueous environment was characterized by neutral pH, low salinity, and variable redox states of both iron and sulfur species. C, H, O, S, N, and P were measured directly as key biogenic elements, and by inference P is assumed to have been available. The environment likely had a minimum duration of hundreds to tens of thousands of years. These results highlight the biological viability of fluvial-lacustrine environments in the post-Noachian history of Mars.

A lot of people think that starting around 3.5 billion years ago Mars was already drying out and becoming the cold, arid environment it is today. It's been argued that you need to go to the most ancient rock record on Mars—4 billion years ago or more—to find these habitable environments on the surface in what may have been a warmer and wetter Mars. However, if the rocks we examined in Yellowknife Bay really are at the "younger" end, say 2 billion years old, then what we've found extends the window of possible habitable surface conditions on Mars by quite a bit.
What's next for Curiosity?
It just so happens that we've already made a huge step forward and achieved one of the primary mission goals by finding evidence of a habitable environment. But we're on our way to Mount Sharp now, and I have hopes that what we find there will be even more spectacular. We know from orbital data that the rocks at the bottom of the mountain have water-bearing minerals, but as you go higher they start to disappear. So the idea of going to Mount Sharp is that maybe these three miles of rock are capturing what we think was a global change on Mars. By going layer by layer we might be able to piece together what happened—why Mars dried out.


Read more at: Q&A: Curiosity's spectacular Yellowknife Bay side-trip
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pia17595-figa-unannotated1.jpg



and: the wheels are showing higher wear and tear which is a little concerning. The largest hole damage is not as big as the ones designed into the wheel (JPL Morse tracks). Using an abundance of caution the engineering team has uplinked new navigation software that will take Curiosity over smoother terrain.
 
Nasa says 'doughnut rock' on Mars is ‘like nothing we’ve ever seen before’

A mysterious 'jelly doughnut rock' which appeared in front of the Opportunity rover is “like nothing we’ve ever seen before”, according to Mars exploration scientists at Nasa.

Experts said they were “completely confused” by both the origins and makeup of the object, which is currently being investigated by Opportunity’s various measuring instruments.

Astronomers noticed the new rock had “appeared” without any explanation on an outcrop which had been empty just days earlier.
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mars-mystery.jpg
 
some light rock blown by the wind?

Normal winds there range from 72-108 km/hr (44-67 mi/hr). Strong enough to move a little pebble.
 
they think it may either be something the rover flung over there (it passed by 1-2 meters from that spot not too long ago) or an asteroid bit
 
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