NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Picks Up the Pace

Photo Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

By Holly Gonzalez 



NASA’s Curiosity rover is wrapping up the first part if its mission and getting ready to move onto another location.



Curiosity remains located in Glenelg area with three more targets to investigate before a several month travel to the base of Mount Sharp, where the rover will observe layers to provide understanding of the evolution of the ancient Martian environment. The targets to investigate are the boundary between bedrock and areas of mudstone and sandstone and both the Shaler and Point Lake outcrops. From the investigation of those targets, NASA will gain knowledge on how the rocks sampled with the drill pit relate to the history of the environment. 



The rover has already achieved its main science objective, which was to analyze the rock powder from the first drilled rock target, named “John Klein,” that revealed the presence of an ancient environment in Gale Crater that has microbial life. At Cumberland, the second drilling site, NASA leveraged its initial work to perform a faster and more efficient mission analysis. 



Joe Melko, Jet Propulsion Lab sampling activity lead, said that during the second drill, “We increased use of the rover’s autonomous self protection. This allowed more activities to be strung together before the ground team had to check in on the rover."



"We're hitting full stride," says Mars Science Laboratory Project Manager Jim Erickson of JPL. "We needed a more deliberate pace for all the first-time activities by Curiosity since landing, but we won't have many more of those."