What Curiosity tells us about Mars
After five years on Mars, the Curiosity rover is an old pro at doing science on the Red Planet. Since sticking its landing on August 5, 2012, NASA’s Little Robot That Could has learned a lot about its environs.
Its charge was simple: Look for signs that Gale crater, a huge impact basin with a mountain at its center, might once have been habitable (for microbes, not Matt Damon).
NASA has extended the mission through October 2018. And there’s still plenty of interesting chemistry and geology to be done.
Does Mars harbor remnants of ancient life?
Curiosity’s Mars Hand Lens Imager can take microscopic images, but preserved cells or microfossils would still have to be pretty big for the camera to see them. What the rover can do is detect the building blocks for those cells with its portable chemistry lab, Sample Analysis at Mars.
“We’ve only found simple organic molecules so far,” says Ashwin Vasavada, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who leads Curiosity’s science team. Detective work in chemistry labs here on Earth could shed light on whether bigger organic molecules on Mars’ surface might degrade into smaller ones like chlorobenzene.
The rover carries two sets of cups to do chemistry experiments, one dry and one wet. The latter contains chemical agents designed to draw out hard-to-find organic compounds.