Mars Rover Ready to Scoop Sand

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity is parked in a proverbial and literal sand box, ready to test out its soil scoop, sifter and chemistry lab -- all key instruments for assessing if the planet most like Earth in the solar system has or ever had the ingredients for life.

The plan is for Curiosity, which touched down inside the ancient Gale Crater impact basin two months ago, to use its soil scooper for the first time on Saturday. That sample, as well as the next two, will be dumped out, rather than processed, in two onboard laboratory instruments, to make sure lingering contaminants from Earth are cleared away..

“On Earth, even though we make this hardware super squeaky clean when it's delivered and assembled ... by virtue of its just being on Earth, you get a kind of residual oily film that is impossible to avoid," said Curiosity engineer Daniel Limonadi, with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

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"The Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument is so sensitive we really have to scrub away this layer of oils that accumulates on Earth,” he said..Curiosity is about a quarter mile, or 400 meters, from its landing spot in Gale Crater, located near the planet’s equator. The rover is en route to its first science target, a region called Glenelg, about another 100 meters to the east, where three types of rock intersect. Curiosity already has found strong evidence of an ancient running stream.

Before reaching Glenelg, scientists want to make sure Curiosity’s science instruments will be ready to work, hence the stop at a place named Rocknest that features dunes of fine-grained sand, as well as exposed rocks.

“We take the sand sample, this fine-grained material, and we effectively use it to rinse our mouth three times and then kind of spit out," Limonadi told reporters during a conference call Thursday.

Shaking the sand over all the surfaces of the scoop should blast away any lingering Earth particles. The cleaning is expected to take about a week or two. If all goes as planned, sand samples will then pass into the rover’s Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument and SAM instrument for analysis.

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The last instrument to be tested, the rover’s rock drill, will have a practice run at Glenelg.
Ultimately, Curiosity will head up a three-mile high (5 kilometer) mound of layered rock rising from the floor of Gale Crater.

The $2.5 billion mission is expected to run for two years.

-- By Irene Klotz Image: Curiosity’s sand box -- Rocknest. Credit: NASA