Canadian device rolls out to scan rare rock
Curiosity, the Mars rover, reached out its robotic arm to hold a Canadianmade device over a dark grey rock sitting in a crater.
The tiny device, a cube just seven centimetres across, bombarded the rock with alpha particles and X- rays and then picked up the backscatter helping reveal a rock unlike any ever seen on Mars.
Jake_ M, as the scientists have dubbed the Martian rock, resembles a type of volcanic rock found on ocean islands and continental rift zones on Earth.
It raises the tantalizing possibility that there may be water beneath the Martian surface, say scientists, who describe the rock Thursday in a report published the journal Science.
“It was a good pick,” Ralf Gellert, at the University of Guelph, said of the Martian rock that was the first one analyzed using the Alpha Particle X- ray Spectrometer ( APXS).
Gellert leads the international team responsible for the powerful spectrometer, Canada’s $ 18- million contribution to the Martian rover that touched down on Mars just over a year ago.
Curiosity, which also carries an onboard geology lab, a rock- zapping laser and 17 cameras, is designed to get a better read on Martian geology and find out if the planet was ever habitable.
Curiosity has yet to find signs of life, which Gellert described as “the jackpot.”
But it has turned up plenty of evidence of water, which is essential to life on Earth and indicates life may have once had a foothold on Mars.
Curiosity found water in one of the first scoops of Martian soil it picked up, according to another of the five reports published Thursday.
They focus on Curiosity’s first three months of exploration in the Gale crater.
“About two per cent of the soil on the surface of Mars is made up of water,” said Laurie Leshin of New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, whose team has a suite of instruments in Curiosity’s belly that assesses chemicals and elements.
Her team fed a scoop of dust and dirt from a sandy patch in the crater known as Rocknest into instruments that heated the Martian soil to a temperature of 835 C.
Baking the sample at such high heat revealed Martian soil contains not only water but chlorine — which can be toxic — and oxygen. Other experiments revealed the soil contains plenty of hydrogen.
While future manned missions to Mars would have to contend with the toxins, Leshin said space travellers should have no trouble tapping into soil moisture.
“We now know there should be abundant, easily accessible water on Mars,” Leshin said in a release issued with the study. “When we send people, they could scoop up the soil anywhere on the surface, heat it just a bit, and obtain water.”
The ratio of isotopes in the soil sample indicates that Martian surface soil is mixed and blown around by frequent dust storms. “So a scoop of this stuff is basically a microscopic Mars rock collection,” said Leshin.
Simple organic compounds were detected in the experiments done at Rocknest, but the scientists said they likely “formed during the heating experiments, as the non- organic compounds in Rocknest samples reacted with terrestrial organics already present” in the instruments.
Curiosity is now making tracks for Mount Sharp, a massive five- kilometre high mound of sedimentary layers sitting on the centre of Gale Crater that could reveal much about how Mars has changed over the eons.
“The hope is that going uphill on Mount Sharp we’ll actually pass several epochs in Martian history where it went from possibly an Earth- like planet to the more acidic and the arid planet that it’s been for the last 3.5 billion years,” said Gellert.
He said it is possible Mars and Earth may have been similar when life first emerged billions of years ago. And the evidence may still be recorded in the Martian rocks, which have not been subject to the geological forces that transformed Earth and its rocks over the last 3.5 billion years.
It that respect Mars is like a “time capsule that is frozen in time,” says Gellert.