For the first time, the Curiosity rover is scooping sand and sorting it by size using two different sieves, including a never-before-used coarser sieve that will change how treated samples are put inside the rover for analysis, NASA officials announced in a statement Thursday.
According to NASA, Curiosity is searching for an active sand dune at a site called Gobabeb in the Namib Dune area of Mars. This will be the second site where rover will scoop up sand samples since landing on the Red Planet back in 2012, having previously done so at a drift site called Rocknest shortly after its arrival.
Reaching the site proved to be no easy task, according to Michael McHenry, mission campaign rover planner for sample collection at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “It was pretty challenging to drive into the sloping sand and then turn on the sand into the position that was the best to study the dunes,” he said.
The new scooping technique is being used as part of a first-of-its-kind study of active sand dunes on extraterrestrial planets. Namib is one of several dark sand mounds located in the northwestern part of a layered mountain the rover is currently examining. Known as the “Bagnold Dune Field” this region should provide information about how the wind moves on Mars and how it sorts sand particles in an environment with less gravity and atmosphere than there is on Earth.
So how does the rover collect sand samples, anyway?
Since sand grains come in a wide range of different sizes and compositions, sorting it will allow scientists to discern its density and the wind activity it has been exposed to. NASA said that the Gobabeb site was selected to include recently-formed ripples, which should provide new insight into the modern-day conditions on Mars as well as those from the ancient past.
This false-color engineering drawing shows the Collection and Handling for In-Situ Martian Rock Analysis (CHIMRA) device, attached to the turret at the end of the robotic arm on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover. This device processes samples acquired from the built-in scoop (red) and the drill, which is not shown but is also part of the turret. CHIMRA also delivers samples to the analytical lab instruments inside the rover. Two paths to get material into CHIMRA are shown (the scoop delivers material to the location marked at the bottom, and the drill deposits material to the sample transfer tube shown at top). Also marked are the location of the vibration mechanism used to shake the turret and cause the sample to move inside CHIMRA, and the portion box (yellow) from which the material processed through a sieve is delivered to the analytical lab instruments. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
The first sample was collected on January 14 and processed it using a multi-chambered device on Curiosity’s arm, which passed the material through a sieve that filtered out any particle larger than 150 microns (0.006 inch), the US space agency said. In addition, some of the material that passed through the sieve was placed into laboratory inlet ports using a “portioner.”
This “portioner,” is positioned directly above an open inlet port on the rover’s deck and was used to direct samples into said port. In addition to its built-in laboratory tools, the rover also uses a suite of other instruments to examine materials that are released back onto the ground.
The second sand sample was collected on January 19, and this was the first use of Curiosity’s coarser sieve. This sieve allowed particles up to 1 millimeter (1,000 microns or 0.04 inch) to pass through. The collected sand was first fed into the 150-micron sieve, and any material that did not make it through that sieve was then passed through the larger one. The team hopes this new point of analysis will provide insight on how sand dunes form on Mars.
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Feature Image: Pictured is Curiosity’s current location on Mars in the Bagnold Dunes. (Credit: NASA/JPL)
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