High-Resolution Self-Portrait by Curiosity
Rover Arm Camera. It shows the rover at
"Rocknest," the spot in Gale Crater where its first scoop
sampling took place. Four scoop scars can be seen in the regolith in front of
the rover. The base of Gale Crater's 3-mile-high sedimentary mountain, Mount Sharp, rises on the right side of the
photograph.
A pinch of fine sand and dust became the
first solid Martian sample deposited into the biggest instrument on NASA's Mars
rover Curiosity: the Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM.
Located inside the rover, SAM examines the
chemistry of samples it ingests, checking particularly for chemistry relevant
to whether an environment can support life. Curiosity's robotic arm delivered
SAM's first taste of Martian soil to an inlet port on the rover deck on November 9, 2012.
During the following two days, SAM used mass spectrometry, gas chromatography
and laser spectrometry to analyze the sample.
Inlet Covers for Sample Analysis at Mars. This image from the left Mast Camera (Mastcam) on Curiosity shows the covers in place over two sample inlet funnels of the rover's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite.
The sample came from the patch of windblown
material called "Rocknest," which had provided a sample previously
for mineralogical analysis by Curiosity's Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin)
instrument. CheMin also received a new sample from the same Rocknest scoop that
fed SAM. SAM has previously analyzed samples of the Martian atmosphere.
"We received good data from this first
solid sample," said SAM Principal Investigator Paul Mahaffy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre. "We have a lot of data
analysis to do, and we are planning to get additional samples of Rocknest
material to add confidence about what we learn."
More information about Curiosity is online at
http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ . You can follow the
mission on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter
at: http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity
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