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Hi, I'm Joel Hurowitz, a scientist with the surface sampling system team and this is your
Curiosity rover report.
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.
This has been your Curiosity rover report. Please check back for more updates.