NASA’s Curiosity rover touched down on Mars in 2012, but it’s still chugging along. Recently, it climbed Mount Sharp, a 5-mile-tall mountain within the 96-mile-wide basin of Mars’ Gale Crater, and used its Mast Camera to capture an amazing panoramic view of the changing Martian landscape. The layers you see in the mountain could indicate how the ancient environment within Gale Crater dried up over time.
To further study whether different Martian environments could have supported microbial life in the planet’s ancient past, the rover uses a drill on its robotic arm to pulverize rock before sprinkling the powder into its chassis, where a pair of instruments determines which chemicals and minerals are present. It successfully drilled its 32nd rock sample from a target nicknamed “Pontours” that will help detail the transition from the region of clay minerals to the one dominated primarily by sulfates.
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The rocks here will begin to tell us how this once-wet planet changed into the dry Mars of today, and how long habitable environments persisted even after that happened,” said Abigail Fraeman, Curiosity’s deputy project scientist, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
