Curiosity's First Laser Test Was A Success, So What's Next?

It's been 15 Sols (Martian days) since Curiosity landed on Mars and more than one angry person on the internet has pointed out that it hasn't moved an inch. But it will, and soon. This week scientists as JPL uploaded surface software to the rover's computers and are readying it for science. And on Friday, project scientist John Grotzinger explained Curiosity's next moves in a press teleconference. The next few months are going to be awesome.

Curiosity is up and running. After the software update scientists checked out all the instruments on board. They turned on the neutron-generating Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) instrument and measured its output with the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD). The Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) is doing the first on site Martian weather reporting since the Viking landers stopped talking to Earth in the early 1980s – this morning it was a chilly 273º Kelvin in Gale Crater or about 5º Fahrenheit above freezing.

Since Curiosity's mission is all about the chemistry of Mars (and determining whether the planet ever had the right chemistry for life), the first order of business was to fire up the rover's ChemCam, aka laser. The laser doesn't actually blast things apart like a bad sci fi movie, it blasts a thin layer off the face of a rock and excited the particles released. The flashes of light produced by each blast will be imaged by the camera and fed through through fiber optics to spectrometers. Spectroscopic analysis will tell scientists the composition of the material excited by every zap of the laser.

The laser's first target is a tiny rock originally named N165 and now known as Coronation. It's a 3 inch wide rock sitting about 10 feet from the rover. The laser blasted the rock 30 times in ten seconds, which converted the outer layer of the rock into a glowing plasma that was then analysed by ChemCam's trio of spectrophotometers. The first test, which the ChemCam team has been waiting eight years to conduct, went off with out a hitch ChemCam's principal investigator Roger Wiens described the test as target practice as Coronation isn't expected to be a particularly interesting rock; he expects it to be typical of basalt rocks on Mars. Still, it's amazing to see things go smoothly.

Curiosity will also do superficial analysis of some bedrock exposed by the Sky Crane's retrorockets, a spot called Burnside Scour. It's not a good area for drilling or scooping, but it is a great spot for visual imaging.

The rover will embark on its first small journey, a roll to a site about a quarter of a mile east called Glenelg. The drive will take between one and two months, owing largely to the fact that Curiosity will likely stop from time to time to collect samples and do some analysis in one of its onboard chemical laboratories – either the Chemistry and Mineralogy called CheMin or the Surface Analysis at Mars laboratory called SAM.

Curiosity will likely spend at least a month working at Glenelg, studying the intriguing variations in the site's geology that could help explain the variations seen in Gale Crater. It's an exciting first stop; it's an area where three different types of geological formations exist at the same place. It's out of Curiosity's way, but the scientific return is thought to be well worth the trouble.

Glenelg is also, poetically, a palindrome. It's a fitting coincidence since Curiosity will pass through the same spots at Glenelg as it makes its way to its prime target, Mount Sharp.

It's unlikely Curiosity will really be on the way to Mount Sharp before the end of the year; Grotzinger has suggested tat it could take as much as a full (Earth) year to get Curiosity to its target point at the base of the mountain. But that doesn't mean the mission will half over before the rover reaches the mountain whose rock are thought to record billions of years' worth of geological history. If all Curiosity's pieces keep working, the rover could last up to 12 years. The radioisotope thermoelectric generator on board that provides power has two pounds of plutonium. That's well enough for the mission to last for more than a decade.