Parachute has deployed.
We are decelerating.
Heat shield has separated; we are locked on the ground.
We're down to 90 meters per second at an altitude of 6.5 kilometers and descending.
Standing by for back shell separation.
We are in powered flight.
We are at altitude of1 kilometer and descending.
Standing by for sky crane.
Sky crane has started.
Touchdown confirmed!
We're safe on Mars!
Cheering, applause
We had a major success when we deployed the arm for the first time on Mars.
This is critical to ensuring that we can get sample into our instruments and use the arm
for its scientific purposes.
The ChemCam unit, or chemistry and camera instrument, fired the laser for the first
time on Mars, using the beam from the science instrument to interrogate a fist-sized rock
called coronation.
Before we could drive curiosity, we wanted to wiggle our toes a bit and test the steering
actuators.
This is the first time we moved the wheels on Mars.
We hit a major milestone on Mars.
We completed our first drive of the curiosity rover.
We drove approximately 3 meters forward and performed 2 60-degree rotations in a clockwise
direction with imaging in between.
We then drove backwards just under 3 meters in order to test the wheels in the opposite
direction.
This put us in a great configuration to make observations of the scours left by the descent
stage engines.
We’ve got a very interesting science experiment coming up here on Mars.
We are turning on the sample analysis at Mars instrument for the first time to do an atmospheric
experiment.
This is where we let in atmosphere into the instrument and perform various science experiments
that determine the composition of the atmosphere.
This is the first time that this is happening.
Within days, we will start our journey to our first chosen destination on Mars, Glenelg.
We hope to obtain our first drilled rock sample on Mars at this location.
The team named the landing site this week after the famous science fiction author, Ray
Bradbury, on his birthday, august 22nd, and he would have been 92.
Curiosity is still is heading to Glenelg.
We've just stopped at the Bathurst rock formation to check it out with the robotic arm mounted
instruments: a hand lens imager and a spectrometer.
Got some great science data there for the science team and now we're moving to a new
rover location called Rocknest.
And we've come to Rocknest because it has nice windblown sand drifts.
At the Rocknest location we really are entering a new phase in Mars exploration with Curiosity.
We're starting the surface sampling part of the mission.
The reason this is a one-ton rover with a 200-pound robotic arm, is because we have
these tools to acquire bits of Mars, you know, either with a scoop or with a drill; process
those samples for our very sensitive analytical lab instruments.
So our scoop - this is not a giant backhoe on Mars - we basically have more like an oversized
tablespoon attached to the end of the arm and we grab on the order of 20 grams of material
and we position the arm over the soil target and then we just actuate the scoop, do a little
bit of vibration to kind of level out the sample and then raise the arm up, close the
scoop and carry on with our sampling activity.
When we first arrived at Rocknest, we performed a wheel scuff maneuver.
This is our rover's version of kicking up the dirt with your hiking boot to determine
if the Rocknest area was indeed a good first scoop target.
The first scoop was successfully performed on Sol 61 and the entire team was excited
to see the MastCam images showing the scoop full of dirt, as well as the video of the
vibration activities performed with the turret-mounted tools.
This vibration allows the team to level out and remove any excess sample before closing
the scoop, and it also provides some insight into the makeup of the soil.
Any large particles would tend to float up to the top as the entire sample is vibrated,
much the same way you would shake out the marshmallows in your box of Lucky Charms.
Curiosity processed the scoop sample through CHIMRA, our labyrinth of passageways at the
end of the arm that we use to sieve and portion the soil sample.
We did some internal sandblasting by vibrating the sample at different orientations on the
turret in order to remove any internal contamination.
A soil sample was dropped off to the rover’s observation tray for assessment by the science
team.
This sample was determined to be suitable for drop off to the CheMin instrument.
The CheMin instrument uses X-rays in order to image the sample and determine what minerals
make it up.
This helps geologists understand how the rock formed and how it's related to other rocks
we've studied so far on Mars.
Scientists identified numerous bright grains in the soil.
Because of the small piece of plastic from the landing event that had been found earlier
in the week, the team proceeded cautiously, dumping the second scoop collected and imaging
the bright grains.
These bright grains were later determined to be components of the Martian soil, and
therefore, the sample was deemed to be suitable for delivery to the CheMin instrument for
analysis.
The science team requested MastCam and NavCam mosaics of the outcrops in the direction of
Glenelg, to plan Curiosity's journey to this next science destination.
In its spare time, Curiosity has also been making measurements with other instruments,
including the ChemCam instrument, which is what I work on.
ChemCam is actually two instruments in one.
It includes a camera with a telephoto lens and it also has a laser that vaporizes a very
small amount of rock so we can tell what its chemical composition is.
We've been analyzing rocks in an area called Rocknest, and I'll tell you in particular
about one called Zephyr.
This one is interesting because it appears to be made of 2 different types of materials.
It's got this harder, more resistant material on the top, capping it, and then beneath it
has a lighter colored softer material that appears to erode more easily.
It's actually eroded into a set of natural arches, so some of our team members have taken
to calling it "Stonehenge."
This feature is really only an inch long.
We're shooting this from about 8 feet away, making the pointing very difficult.
So that's why we decided to do 9 points instead of just 2, just to make sure we would hit
the material of interest.
Coming up, we'll be able to use this information that we've learned from ChemCam in order to
decide which targets we should hit next with other instruments.
CheMin performs what we call X-ray diffraction measurements on powdered rocks and soil samples.
An X-ray diffraction is the best method for telling us what minerals are present in a
rock or soil because it is sensitive to the arrangements of atoms in minerals.
As the X-rays strike the soil sample, CheMin shows us how mineral crystals distinctively
interact with X-rays, and this image shows our first X-ray diffraction results.
The diffraction signals appear on the detector as rings that represent the fingerprint of
the individual minerals.
The rings tell us not only what minerals are present in the soil but also how abundant
they are.
The CheMin data provide us with distinctive signatures of the minerals: plagioclase feldspar,
pyroxenes, and olivines.
Peridot is a variety of olivine; just keep in mind that the olivine in the soil sample
is much smaller than these crystals.
Roughly half of the soil consists of poorly crystalline material, such as volcanic glass.
Thus, this Martian soil appears very similar to some weathered basaltic soils that we see
on Earth, in places like the flanks of Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
You can appreciate how revolutionary CheMin is when you consider that instruments of this
type on Earth are typically about the size of a doublewide refrigerator and the CheMin
instrument on the Mars Science Laboratory is about the size of a shoebox.
CheMin has been modified for use on Earth in places such as Antarctica and the Arctic.
It's also been applied for the detection of counterfeit pharmaceuticals around the worlds
and a modification of the instrument has been used in archeological studies to help us understand
the nature of the surfaces and how we might protect them.
In the coming weeks and months, we're excited to measure more X-ray diffraction data on
soils and rocks to tell us much more about the geology of Gale Crater.
While our robotic explorer has been busy characterizing the surface of Mars, the SAM team has also
been busy, but we've been looking at something invisible, the Martian atmosphere.
SAM, or Sample Analysis at Mars, is not one instrument, but three, all of which are designed
to work together to chemically characterize Mars.
SAM measures chemical elements and molecules, in a mass or size range between 2 and 535
mass units and we do this by looking at gases.
We can bake solid samples until they give up their volatile components or their gases
or we can directly inhale the Martian atmosphere through our inlet ports.
With our QMS, SAM is able to detect the most dominant gas in the Martian atmosphere, carbon
dioxide.
We've not only measured its abundance and the ratio to other gases in the Martian atmosphere
but we've also measured its isotopic character.
The other instruments are a tunable laser spectrometer and a gas chromatograph, the
latter being used mostly to look for organic molecules in solids.
Now, the tunable laser spectrometer has a special role for SAM in that it can very sensitively
detect the organic molecule, methane, which has been observed from the Earth telescopically
and also by the Mars Express orbiter at very, very low limits in the Martian atmosphere.
We're trying to discover whether or not we can see this molecule from the Martian surface
and if it has any variation from season to season.
In the coming months, wherever Curiosity goes, SAM will continue to sniff the Martian atmosphere,
periodically looking for changes on a seasonal or maybe even diurnal basis and that will
tell us something about the dynamics of the exchange between the surface and the atmosphere.
A lot of what this mission is about is figuring out the possibility that ancient Mars was
a habitable environment.
But we're also studying the present environment.
Two instruments that help with that are the RAD instrument and the REMS instrument.
The RAD instrument is a radiation assessment detector.
It measures the high-energy radiation coming up from the cosmic rays and the sun.
That radiation is changed as it goes through Mars' atmosphere to where we detect it on
the surface.
These measurements are helping to understand what the environment is like on the surface
so that future astronauts will know how to protect themselves from this radiation.
Another instrument that Curiosity has that measures the modern environment is called
the rover environmental monitoring station.
It's basically our weather station.
We measure a lot of things including pressure and humidity, temperature and wind.
It's been seeing little dips in pressure around noon that seemed like the signature of dust
devils.
Only thing is our pictures haven't turned up any dust devils.
Spirit and Opportunity saw lots of dust devils moving across the horizon.
Our best guess at what's going on is that Curiosity is seeing dust devils go right over
it.
So what we think is happening is the same sorts of vortexes, driven by convection are
occurring on Mars at the Curiosity's site but just not picking up dust.
Another thing that REMS has been measuring is winds.
Turns out we're in a pretty interesting place inside of Gale Crater.
We're right at the base of a 5-kilometer high mountain to the south of us and then there's
a pretty tall crater rim to the north of us and we're sitting in kind of a flat depression
between the two.
The winds blow up and down the mountain as the temperature changes during the day and
up and down the crater slopes and then along the depression where we're at.
So right now we're trying to figure out from the REMS data exactly which parts of that
wind field we're measuring.
After several weeks of being stationary at the Rocknest site, we began driving again
on Saw 100.
This marked a significant milestone on the mission as we reached about a half-kilometer
of total driving distance on the surface of Mars.
The left front wheel is sitting on a rock that we’ve dubbed “Bell Island”.
We plan to back up off that rock to bring the rock into the arm’s workspace and we’re
going to do some contact science on it with APXS and MAHLI.
After completing our science campaign at our current location, we’re going to be moving
to the east to a place called Point Lake.
From here, we’re going to be looking for a target to perform our first ever drill on
Mars.
We've wrapped up our scientific study of Rocknest, which also means that we've completed the
checkout and first scientific use of all our instruments on the rover and it truly is working
great.
We began the Rocknest campaign by searching for a suitable drift of sandy soil using our
MastCam color cameras.
We used out ChemCam laser and our APXS chemical sensor to do an initial chemical analysis
of the soil, determining whether it was similar to soils that we understand from Spirit and
Opportunity and therefore safe for scooping and sending to our laboratories.
We use MAHLI, our hand lens imager to take close up views of the soil to look at different
particle sizes, shapes and colors and how they change with depth.
We then scooped up the soil and analyzed it with our X-ray diffraction instrument that
can identify minerals in the soil based on their unique crystal structure.
But it turned out that a good amount of the material in the soil was not crystalline but
that's no problem for our other laboratory, SAM.
SAM heated up the soil in an oven, measured various gases released as the soil components
broke down, such as water, carbon dioxide, oxygen and sulfur.
Not surprisingly, the results show a composition that is typical of Mars soils studied at other
sites with perhaps some very simple carbon containing molecules and perchlorate salts.
We haven't yet seen any complex organic molecules but sand isn't the best place to look.
Finally, it's worth remembering that the big questions in science, whether Copernicus finding
that the Earth goes around the sun or Darwin showing that natural selection drives biological
evolution, were answered only after many measurements were taken compared against one another and
hypotheses were proposed and tested against data.
Only then can the big picture emerge and the theory get accepted.
It'll be no different for Curiosity in its mission to understand the habitability of
ancient Mars at Gale Crater.
There won't be any single image or measurement that'll answer everything.
We're in it for the long haul.
But now we know that we have a fantastic rover, a great set of tools, and a fully functional
scientific payload, so let's get on exploring.