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Before Curiosity Can Get Down and Dirty on Mars, It Has to Get Clean

Things are getting pretty serious for the Curiosity rover on Mars. Now that the $2.5 billion machine has made a perfect landing on Mars, found the first confirmable evidence of flowing water on the planet’s surface and rolled around a bit, Curiosity is...

Things are getting pretty serious for the Curiosity rover on Mars. Now that the $2.5 billion machine has made a perfect landing on Mars, found the first confirmable evidence of flowing water on the planet’s surface and rolled around a bit, Curiosity is ready to get its robotic little hands dirty.

On October 3rd, the rover moved into place 484 meters from its landing site at a new spot called the Rocksnest. Michael Watkins, the Curiosity Mission Manager, says that this is a good “sandbox” for the Curiosity to take its first scoop of Martian soil and — if all goes as NASA hopes — the first evidence of life on Mars. This is all more complicated than it sounds.

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Like a surgeon preparing himself to plunge his hands into a patient’s guts, the Curiosity has to clean itself off first. Well, to make that analogy actually work, you’d have to imagine a surgeon washing up with the patient’s blood. Last Thursday, the rover extended its arm to get a closer look at the Rocksnest’s windblown sand drifts using the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) and Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS). More specifically, it checked out its own foot print. And now, whenever Mission Control says go, the rover will open up its little 2.8 inch-long scoop and dig in. Then comes the fun part.

For eight straight hours, the Curiosity’s entire 220-pound arm will shake “at a nice tooth-rattling vibration level,” mission sampling chief Daniel Limonadi explained to reporters at a press conference last week, in order to sift the grains of Martian soil through the roving laboratory’s chemical testing system to get rid of the stray bits of Earth grease. “It kind of looks and feels like if you open the hood of your car with the engine running,” said Limonadi.

This is just the first rinse. The Curiosity will go through the scoop and rattle technique one more time, and on the third scoop, it’ll deliver the dirt to the rover’s “chemistry and mineralogy” (CheMin) instrument to identify the minerals in the mix. A fourth scoop will “sample analysis at Mars” (SAM) instruments for chemical analysis. The whole process will take as long as three weeks. NASA scientists aren’t expecting to find anything special in this first batch of soil samples, but that’s kind of the point. Limonadi insists, “It’s good to start with a boring, safe Martian sand dune.”

That’s not where it ends, though. Once the Curiosity is all finished scooping and shaking, out comes the drill. After rolling about a hundred yards to a new site, the rover will use its hammering drill to chip away at some surface rocks and carry out what Limonadi calls “scratch and sniff science.” Like everything on the Curiosity mission, though, this will take a little time, as long as a month. Understandably, there is no livestream of this phase of the mission.

Image via Wikimedia