More than half the way to its first major scientific destination, the Curiosity Mars rover will pause a few days to perform the mission's first hands-on geology, using instruments on the vehicle's robot arm to photograph and chemically assess an intriguing pyramid-shaped rock, project managers said Wednesday.
Data from the arm-mounted Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer, or APXS, will be compared with remote sensing data from another instrument known as Chemcam that uses a powerful laser to vaporize tiny sections of a target's surface. Debris from the laser strike is measured remotely to help determine chemical composition.
The Curiosity rover has traveled about 950 feet from its landing site and is about 650 feet from its near-term target, an area known as Glenelg where three different terrains come together.
(Credit: NASA)
"The science team has had an interest for some time now as we're driving across the plains to find a rock that looks like it's relatively uniform in composition to do some experiments between ChemCam, which we've been acquiring a lot of data with, and APXS, which we haven't used yet on a rock," said John Grotzinger, the Mars Science Laboratory project scientist.
"Both of those instruments could make a measurement and there could be differences between the measurements because one is measuring at a small scale (ChemCam) and one is measuring at a larger scale (APXS... [Read more]
via CNET http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cnet/NnTv/~3/azf-3TnwdSs/
No comments:
Post a Comment