Lisa Grossman, physical sciences reporter
(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
On its mad dash across the Martian plains to reach the base of Aeolis Mons, NASA's Curiosity rover is taking a breather to reach out and touch something.?
The targeted rock, shaped like a pyramid and standing 25 centimetres tall, will be the first thing Curiosity makes physical contact with using any of its onboard geology tools.
The team has named the rock "Jake Matijevic" after a mission engineer who passed away on 20 August, and who was the lead engineer for all previous NASA Mars rovers.
As of 19 September, the rock sits just 2.5 metres in front of the rover, which means it'll soon be close enough to touch with the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS).
(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
This device, seen above at centre mounted on the rover's arm, will sit against the rock face and use radioactive curium to bombard its target with energetic alpha particles and X-rays. This will induce each element in the rock to emit its own characteristic X-rays, which APXS can detect.
The team also plans to probe the rock remotely with the rover's ChemCam instrument, which will zap it with a laser and measure the spectra of the resulting vapour.
The benefit of closeness is better resolution. ChemCam can tell from a distance if the rock is mainly silicon, for instance, while APXS can determine the precise abundance of silicon down to 100 parts per million.
"We want to get compositional information on things that we can't see with our eyes," project scientist John Grotzinger said in a news conference today.
He thinks Jake Matijevic might be a piece of basalt kicked into Gale Crater by a separate meteorite impact.
"These rocks are what we saw with Viking and Pathfinder, [and] all over the place at Spirit's landing site," Grotzinger said. He added that they don't expect to find anything surprising in the first measurements of the rock. In fact, they hope not.
"We wanted a rock type that looks familiar, that looks like we've done something like this before," he says. The exercise will help them calibrate APXS by comparing its finely detailed view with the broader picture ChemCam delivers.
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