The rover has been investigating the YellowKnife bay area as part of an effort to pick the
exact location of our first drill activity on Mars.
The images being returned by Curiosity show a diverse collection of interesting features,
including sedimentary rocks, pebbles, cracks, nodules, and veins.
The vein features are seen as a bright white material, and we see them just about everywhere
we look in Yellowknife bay.
The Chemcam instrument has found that these veins contain elevated levels of calcium sulfate,
likely in the form of bassanite or gypsum.
Gypsum veins are also seen here on Earth and associated with water percolating through
cracks and fractured rocks.
The exciting news from all of this analysis is the candidate site where Curiosity will
conduct its first drilling activity.
This site is located only a few meters away from the rover's current location, and lies
in a flat area, suitable for drilling.
The team hopes to drill directly into one of the veins and place the powder into the
SAM and ChemMin analytical instruments.
These instruments will give us detailed information about the composition of the material.
We'll be driving over there in the next few days.
We began our first drilling campaign at the site we named John Klein.
John Klein has an area that has a set of flat "plate-y" rocks that are perfect for the first
use of the drill.
We were able to place the arm safely and drill vertically down into the rock to collect as
much sample as possible.
We started by making a very small divot to test the hammering mechanism in the drill.
This worked perfectly, so we proceeded on to make a mini hole.
Our mini drill test drilled 2 centimeters down into the rock
We compared the tailings created by the mini drill to the extensive set of test rocks that
we drilled here on Earth here at JPL and determine that what we see on Mars are safe to ingest
in the system.
After these preparations we were all very excited to move on to ready to move on to
the big event.
We drilled 6-and-a-half centimeters down into the rock.
We used the camera at the end of the arm to take pictures.
Here we see two holes, first on the right is the mini drill hole and in the center of
the picture, we have the full hole.
The gray tailing tells us that there's something different about the inside of this rock than
the surface of the rock.
In the coming weeks, one of the things we're trying to do with this first hole is to use
this gray powder that we collect to clean the internal surfaces of the drill.
We do that by moving the arm and swishing the powder around.
This was a great week for Curiosity.
We got to see something we've all been waiting for quite some time: sample in the scoop confirming
that our first drill on Mars collected as we had expected.
This was an important event as this is the first time the drill has been used on Mars
to collect sample for analysis by instruments on the rover.
We use these computer-generated images to help us visually identify how much we've collected.
We were able to estimate that we collected about 14 cubic centimeters of sample, or about
a tablespoon, and this matched our expectations of what we would see in the scoop when we
got to this point.
Our drilling capability gives us the ability to get inside this rock.
The first thing you notice about the material is that it's a different color.
Gray not the reddish orange color on the surface all around us.
That reddish orange color is a sign of an iron oxidation.
A kind of rusting process that's occurred all around on Mars.
The next steps for the team are to finish processing the sample with Chimera and then
put small portions into the SAM and Chemin instruments for analysis of chemistry and
mineralogy.
This week the Curiosity science team released its initial findings from its first ever drilled
sample on Mars.
This sample was collected from the "John Klein" drill site, which is located about 500 meters
east of where we landed about 7 months ago.
Curiosity obtained her first drill sample and passed that sample on to her onboard analytical
lab instruments, called CheMin and SAM.
These powerful instruments tell us about what minerals are present in these rocks and whether
they contain the ingredients necessary to sustain life as we know it.
What the Curiosity team has found is incredibly exciting.
When we combine what we have learned from our remote sensing and contact science instruments
with the data that's coming in from CheMin and SAM, we get a picture of an ancient watery
environment, which would have been habitable had life been present in it.
As an example, the information that we're getting from the CheMin instrument, tells
us that the minerals that are present in this lakebed sedimentary rock at John Klein are
very different from just about anything we've ever analyzed before on Mars.
And they tell us that the John Klein rock was deposited in a fresh water environment.
This is an important contrast with other sedimentary environments that we've visited on Mars, like
the Meridiani Planum landing site where the Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity, has been
operating since 2004.
At that site, the sedimentary rocks record evidence of an environment that was only wet
on a very intermittent basis, and when it was, the waters that were there were highly
acidic, very salty, and not favorable for the survival of organic compounds.
This is in direct contrast to the fresh water environment we're seeing here at the John
Klein Site.
The SAM instrument is telling us that these rocks contained all of the ingredients necessary
for a habitable environment.
We found carbon, sulfur and oxygen, all present and a number of other elements in states that
life could have taken advantage of.
All in all, these few tablespoons of powder from a Martian rock have provided the Curiosity
science team with an exciting new dataset that tells us that Gale Crater, and perhaps
all of Mars, contained habitable environments.
This is an incredible success for the Curiosity mission to Gale, and the science team is looking
forward to digging deeper into Mars' ancient watery past in the weeks, months, and years
ahead.