Space and astronomy news
We’ve been telling you about this the past few days, but here’s this week’s ‘official’ rover update video from JPL. For more information and images see our previous articles about the scooping and the shiny things in the soil.
A bright particle found inside a scoop hole created by the Curiosity rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Last weekend, the Mars Curiosity rover scooped out a few “bites” in the small, sandy dune known as Rocknest and inside the second scoop hole was a small, shiny particle, as we reported earlier. This speck – and others like it in the pit — is different than the previous object that looked like plastic and may have come from the rover itself. After some analysis, the MSL science team thinks the shiny particle is just part of the soil on Mars.
“As the science team thought about it more and more, the bright object is about the same size as the granules that it’s in and it is not uniformly bright,” said John Grotziner, MSL project scientist. “We went back and forth, and the majority of the science team thinks this is indigenous to Mars.”
And so, Grotziner said, these shiny objects likely represent a science opportunity rather than an engineering hazard.
One hypothesis that the specks are natural geologic material that might have a broken-off, flat surface called a cleavage that could be reflecting sunlight, making it appear bright.
The size of the bright fleck is about 1 mm, so it is “pretty representative of other objects there,” Grotzinger said, which range from half a millimeter to 2 millimeters.
Grotzinger said they will use the ChemCam instrument to take a closer look at the shiny specks. “We are going to shoot it with ChemCam, a remote sensing tool that has spectacular spatial resolution,” he said, “and aim it right on that fleck. Then we’ll aim it on another darker grain and try to decide if it is a different class of mineral.”
Three ‘bite marks’ left in the Martian ground by the scoop on the robotic arm the Curiosity rover are visible in this image taken by the rover’s right Navigation Camera during the mission’s 69th Martian day, or sol (Oct. 15, 2012). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
One way the team tested if the shiny flecks were something that may have come from the rover was that after pictures were taken of the area, they vibrated the rover for about an hour and then took more images. Nothing had changed in the surrounding area, with no additional flecks visible on the ground.
After the shiny fleck was initially seen, the team dumped out the scoop they had taken over concerns it was another foreign object, perhaps from the rover or from the Entry Descent and Landing of the rover, as was determined for previous, plastic-looking object found on Mars. But now they are planning to look closer at both the dumped-out scoop of soil and the pit to analyze the shiny flecks.
The big news that Grotzinger reported today during a press briefing was that they just received confirmation that the rover successfully placed a small sample of soil inside Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument and soon will be analyzing the sample to determine what minerals it contains.
“Our mobile laboratory eats dirt,” Grotzinger said, “whether we scoop it up or drill a hole in rock, that’s what keeps us going, that’s what we live on.”
They also placed a portion of the third scoop of soil taken onto the observation tray and took an image of it with the Mastcam.
“We see two components in the soil,” Grotzinger said. “One is a thin layer of lighter colored, finer grained material. Then there are some darker grains, which represent the courser fraction that is available.”
A closeup look at the sample of Martian regolith that was dumped on an observation tray on the rover. The tray is 7.8 centimeters (3 inches) in diameter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Grotzinger said he hopes to be able to report within the week of the results of the first analysis of Martian soil from CheMin. Also, the SAM laboratory (Sample Analysis at Mars) is scheduled to take its first sample next week. SAM is a suite of instruments that investigate the past and present ability of Mars to support life.
They were slowed in slightly in getting the first sample inside ChemMin not only by the discovery of the bright flecks, but also by a safing event that took place on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which relays the data from the rover to Earth. The orbiter is now back to full functionality.
NASA’s latest report about the rover can be read here.
This beautiful new panorama of the Curiosity rover’s view in Gale Crater of the distant hazy hills beyond that seem to call out, begging for exploration. “FINALLY, a spaceprobe takes a picture that shows Mars as it has burned in my mind all these years,” said Stuart Atkinson via Twitter, who created this mosaic from four separate raw color images taken by the rover. The images, just uploaded today to Earth, were taken on Sol 50 (Sept. 26, 2012) by the right MastCam on Curiosity. This provides a glimpse at the depth and distances the rover’s cameras can see, with those beckoning hills and the rim of Gale Crater off in the distance. The rover is looking towards the northeast.
Click the image to see the full, large view of the panorama. Almost enough to make you get those hiking boots out from the back of the closet!
Stu not only stitched together this image but also wrote a new poem about “The Watching Hills.”
An excerpt:
If you’d stood here a billion years ago,
Perhaps two, waves would have lapped gently
Around your feet – maybe higher,
Maybe rolled in slow martian motion past your knees,And looking down you’d have seen stream-
Polished stones swimming past your boots,
Tumbling over and over and over……… all gone now.
Curiosity sol 62 ChemCam image detail. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Image processing courtesy 2di7 & titanio44 on Flickr.
Lost earring? Cigarette butt? Those were just a couple of ideas tossed around loosely by the public about what this unusual object could be, found laying near the Mars Curiosity rover. The rover team is still looking closely at the shiny object, seen in images of the sandy regolith near the rover, and they issued a report today saying their initial assessment is that the bright object is something from the rover, and not Martian material. It appears to be a shred of plastic material, “likely benign,” they said, but it has not been definitively identified.
A loose piece of plastic or insulating tape may have jarred free during the rover’s shaking of the sample of Martian regolith it recently scooped up.
The team will proceed cautiously and will spend another day investigating new images before deciding whether to resume processing of the sample in the scoop. Plans include imaging of surroundings with the Mastcam, and perhaps looking at the rover itself, too, for any chips or loose parts.
One of the rover drivers, Scott Maxwell said on Twitter that the entire team was working hard to figure that out what could have possibly come loose from the rover and they are “crawling over rover model, tracking down testing records, etc. We simply don’t know yet.”
A sample of sand and dust scooped up on Sol 61 remains in the scoop, and plan to transfer it from the scoop into other chambers of the sample-processing device were postponed as a precaution during planning for Sol 62 after the small, bright object was detected.
Curiosity sol 62 ChemCam view of the bright object on the ground. Image: NASA/JPL -Caltech. Anaglyph processing courtesy 2di7 & titanio44 on Flickr.
The shaking being done by the rover is to clean it of any residual oils that may be left inside, which could skew any results from the two onboard chemical labs, known as Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), and the Chemical and Mineralogy experiment (CheMin.)
Daniel Limonadi, the Lead Systems Engineer for Curiosity’s Surface Sampling and science systems told reporters last week that the cleansing was required even though the hardware is “super-squeaky-clean when it’s delivered and assembled. By virtue of its just being on Earth, you get a kind of residual oily film that is impossible to avoid,” he said.
Once the soil has been shaken and stirred through the chambers, it’ll be ejected from the mechanism and ‘poop’ it back onto the Martian surface. “We effectively use it to rinse out our mouth three times and then kind of spit out,” Limonadi said.
The images here were sent in by Universe Today reader Elisabetta Bonora who zoomed in and created 3-D views of the images of the shiny piece. See more here.
Interesting to note, closeup views reveal more spherical “blueberries” similar to what the Opportunity rover found at its landing site in Meridiani Planum and at its current location near Endeavour Crater, too.
Today, Mars is a barren desert. But millions of years ago could our planetary neighbor have been much more Earth-like – covered with rivers, oceans, and even life? A new video series called EPIPHANY, Dr. Ashwin Vasavada, NASA’s Deputy Project Scientist of the Mars Science Laboratory shares how the Mars Curiosity rover is going to shed new light on the ancient history of Mars and whether life could have ever existed there. While Curiosity is not equipped to look for life itself, it will look for “the ingredients of life,” the essential molecules and elements that go into living things. Already, at just 50 sols into the mission, the rover has found an ancient streambed and as Project Scientist John Grotzinger said, “We have already found our first potentially habitable environment.”
Looking very similar to the iconic first footprint on the Moon from the Apollo 11 landing, this new raw image from the Curiosity rover on Mars shows one of the first “scuff” marks from the rover’s wheels on a small sandy ridge. This image was taken today by Curiosity’s right Navcam on Sol 57 (2012-10-03 19:08:27 UTC). Rover driver Matt Heverly described a scuff as spinning one wheel to move the soil below it out of the way.
Besides being on different worlds, the two prints likely have a very different future. NASA says the first footprints on the Moon will be there for a million years, since there is no wind to blow them away. Research on the tracks left by Spirit and Opportunity revealed the time scale for track erasure by wind is typically only one Martian year or two Earth years.
Here’s one of Buzz Aldrin’s bootprint, to compare:
The GRIN website (Great Images in NASA) says this is an image of Buzz Aldrin’s bootprint from the Apollo 11 mission. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon on July 20, 1969. Credit: NASA
Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger compared earlier images of some of the first tracks left on Mars by Curiosity to images of the footprints left by Aldrin and Armstrong on the Moon. “I think instead of a human, it’s a robot pretty much doing the same thing,” he said.
Lead Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Image Caption: Curiosity at work on Mars inside Gale Crater. Panoramic mosaic showing Curiosity in action with her wheel tracks and the surrounding terrain snapped from the location the rover drove to on Sol 29 (Sept 4). The time lapse imagery highlights post drive wheel tracks at left, movement of the robotic arm from the stowed to deployed position with pointing instrument turret at right with Mt Sharp and a self portrait of Curiosity’s instrument packed deck top at center. This colorized mosaic was assembled from navigation camera (Navcam) images taken over multiple Martian days while stationary beginning on Sol 29. Click to Enlarge. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo
NASA’s Mega Martian Rover Curiosity is swiftly trekking across the Red Planet’s science rich terrain inside Gale Crater as she approaches the two month anniversary since the daring atmospheric plunge and pinpoint touchdown on Aug. 5/6 beside her eventual destination of the richly layered mountainside of Mount Sharp.
In this ultra short span of time, Curiosity has already fulfilled on her stated goal of seeking the signs of life and potentially habitable environments by discovering evidence for an ancient Martian stream bed at three different locations – at the landing site and stops along her traverse route – where hip deep liquid water once vigorously flowed billions of years ago. Liquid water is a prerequisite for the origin of life.
Curiosity discovered a trio of outcrops of stones cemented into a layer of conglomerate rock – initially at “Goulburn” scour as exposed by the landing thrusters and later at the “Link” and “Hottah” outcrops during the first 40 sols of the mission.
If they find another water related outcrop, Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Project Manager John Grotzinger told me that the robotic arm will be deployed to examine it.
“We would do all the arm-based contact science first, and then make the decision on whether to drill. If we’re still uncertain, then we still have time to deliberate,” Grotzinger told me.
Image caption: Remnants of Ancient Streambed on Mars. NASA’s Curiosity rover found evidence for an ancient, flowing stream on Mars at a few sites, including the rock outcrop pictured here, which the science team has named “Hottah” after Hottah Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories. It may look like a broken sidewalk, but this geological feature on Mars is actually exposed bedrock made up of smaller fragments cemented together, or what geologists call a sedimentary conglomerate. Scientists theorize that the bedrock was disrupted in the past, giving it the titled angle, most likely via impacts from meteorites. This image mosaic was taken by the 100-millimeter Mastcam telephoto lens on Sol 39 (Sept. 14, 2012). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
“This is the first time we’re actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it,” said Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley.
Image Caption: Curiosity conducts 1st contact science experiment at “Jake” rock on Mars. This 360 degree panoramic mosaic of images from Sols 44 to 47 (Sept 20-23) shows Curiosity arriving near Jake rock on Sol 44. The robot then drove closer. Inset image from Sol 47 shows the robotic arm extended to place the science instruments on the rock and carry out the first detailed contact science examination of a Martian rock with the equipment positioned on the turret at the arms terminus. Jake rock is named in honor of recently deceased team member Jake Matijevic. This mosaic was created in tribute to Jake and his outstanding contributions. Click to Enlarge. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo
The one-ton robot soon departed from her touchdown vicinity at “Bradbury Landing” and set off on a multi-week eastwards traverse to her first science target which the team has dubbed “Glenelg”.
See our panoramic Curiosity mosaics herein showing the rovers movements on various Sols as created by Ken Kremer and Marco Di Lorenzo from NASA raw images.
Curiosity is also now closing in on the spot from which she will reach out with the advanced 7 foot long (2.1 meter) robotic arm to scoop up her very first Martian soil material and deliver samples to the on board chemistry labs.
At a Sept. 27 briefing for reporters, Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., said the team hopes to find a suitable location to collect loose, gravelly Martian soil within the next few sols that can be easily sifted into the analytical labs. Curiosity will then spend about 2 or 3 weeks investigating the precious material and her surroundings, before continuing on to Glenelg.
The science team chose Glenelg as the first target for detailed investigation because it sits at the intersection of three distinct types of geologic terrain, affording the researchers the opportunity to comprehensively explore the diverse geology inside the Gale Crater landing site long before arriving at the base of Mount Sharp. That’s important because the rover team estimates it will take a year or more before Curiosity reaches Mount Sharp, which lies some 10 kilometers (6 miles) away as the Martian crow flies.
As of today, Sol 53, Curiosity has driven a total distance of 0.28 mile (0.45 kilometer) or more than ¾ of the way towards Glenelg. Yestersol (Sol 52), the six wheeled robot drove about 122 feet (37.3 meters) toward the Glenelg area and is using visual odometry to assess her progress and adjust for any wheel slippage that could hint at sand traps or other dangerous obstacles.
The longest drive to date just occurred on Sol 50 with the robot rolling about 160 feet (48.9 meters).
Curiosity recently conducted her first detailed rock contact science investigation with the robotic arm at a rock named “Jake”, in honor of Jake Matijevic, a recently deceased MSL team member who played a key and leading role on all 3 generations of NASA’s Mars rovers. See our 360 degree panoramic “Jake rock” mosaic created in tribute to Jake Matijevic.
Curiosity is searching for hydrated minerals, organic molecules and signs of habitats favorable for past or present microbial life on Mars.
Image Caption: “Hottah” water related outcrop. Context mosaic shows location of Hottah” outcrop (bottom right) sticking out from the floor of Gale Crater as imaged by Curiosity Navcam on Sol 38 with Mount Sharp in the background. The Glenelg science target lies in the terrain towards Mt Sharp. This is what an astronaut geologist would see on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ken Kremer/Marco Di Lorenzo
Alluvial Fan Where Water Flowed Downslope. This image shows the topography, with shading added, around the area where NASA’s Curiosity rover landed on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT). The black oval indicates the targeted landing area for the rover known as the “landing ellipse,” and the cross shows where the rover actually landed.An alluvial fan, or fan-shaped deposit where debris spreads out downslope, has been highlighted in lighter colors for better viewing. On Earth, alluvial fans often are formed by water flowing downslope. New observations from Curiosity of rounded pebbles embedded with rocky outcrops provide concrete evidence that water did flow in this region on Mars, creating the alluvial fan. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UofA
NASA’s Curiosity rover found evidence for an ancient, flowing stream on Mars at a few sites, including the rock outcrop pictured here, which the science team has named “Hottah” after Hottah Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech
The Curiosity rover has come across a place in Gale Crater where ankle-to-hip-deep water once vigorously flowed: an ancient streambed containing evidence of gravel that has been worn by water. At a press briefing today, members of the Mars Science Laboratory team said the rover has found “surprising” outcrops and gravel near the rover landing site that indicate water once flowed in this region, and likely flowed for a long time.
“Too many things that point away from a single burst event,” said Curiosity science co-investigator William Dietrich of the University of California, Berkeley. “I’m comfortable to argue that it is beyond the 1,000 year timescales, even though this is very early on in our findings.”
This set of images compares the Link outcrop of rocks on Mars (left) with similar rocks seen on Earth (right). Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech
From the size of gravel found by the rover, the science team can interpret the water was moving about 1 meter (3 feet) per second, with a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep.
“Plenty of papers have been written about channels on Mars with many different hypotheses about the flows in them,” said Dietrich. “This is the first time we’re actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it.”
What Curiosity found on Mars was described as conglomerate rock made up of water-transported gravels, meaning the gravel is now cemented into a layers of rock, and the sizes and shapes of stones offer clues to the speed and distance of a long-ago stream’s flow.
“The shapes tell you they were transported and the sizes tell you they couldn’t be transported by wind. They were transported by water flow,” said Curiosity science co-investigator Rebecca Williams of the Planetary Science Institute.
The discovery comes from examining two outcrops, called “Hottah” and “Link,” with the telephoto capability of Curiosity’s mast camera during the first 40 days after landing. Those observations followed up on earlier hints from another outcrop, named Goulburn, which was exposed by thruster exhaust as Curiosity touched down.
“Hottah looks like someone jack-hammered up a slab of city sidewalk, but it’s really a tilted block of an ancient streambed,” said Mars Science Laboratory Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology.
An alluvial fan, or fan-shaped deposit where debris spreads out downslope are usually formed by water, and new observations from Curiosity of rounded pebbles embedded with rocky outcrops provide concrete evidence that water did flow in this region on Mars. Elevation data were obtained from stereo processing of images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UofA
Even though the team classified the finding as “surprising,” they later said they actually weren’t too surprised at what they found so early in the mission – just 51 sols, or Martian days, in.
“We are getting better about integrating the orbital data,” said Grotzinger. “We see an alluvial fan and debris flow from orbit, and then see these water-transported pebbles from the ground. This is not rocket science, but shows exactly the reason we chose this landing site, and you build on those foundations you think you are mostly likely to establish. Now we’ll look at more rocks and get more context to recreate the environment in greater detail along with understanding the chemistry of the time to see if this is a place that could be habitable.”
Asked if it was hard to come to consensus on this long-term, quickly flowing water statement, given the large number of scientists involved with the mission, Grotziner said, “Given the evidence we have from orbit that has been analyzed, when we arrive with a robot we can test the hypothesis pretty quickly. If the geological signal for this process is large enough, it is easy to achieve a consensus pretty quickly.”
The finding site lies between the north rim of Gale Crater and the base of Aeolis Mons, or Mount Sharp, a mountain inside the crater. To the north of the crater, a channel named Peace Vallis feeds into the alluvial fan. The abundance of channels in the fan between the rim and conglomerate suggests flows continued or repeated over a long time, not just once or for a few years, the science team said.
But interestingly, the rover has already moved on from this spot, and yesterday took the longest drive yet, of between 52-53 meters, heading towards the Glenelg region where they want to do their first scooping and tests soil samples in Curiosity’s two instruments, SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) and ChemMin (Chemistry & Mineralogy X-Ray Diffraction/X-Ray Fluorescence Instrument). These two experiments will study powdered rock and soil samples scooped up by the robotic arm.
The Glenelg area marks the intersection of three kinds of terrain: bedrock for drilling, several small craters that may represent an older or harder surface, and also terrain similar to where Curiosity landed, so the science team can do comparisons.
“A long-flowing stream can be a habitable environment,” said Grotzinger. “But it is not our top choice as there might be other places that have preserved organic carbon better than this, and we need to assess the potential for preservation of organics. We’re still going to Mount Sharp, but this is insurance that we have already found our first potentially habitable environment.”
The slope of Aeolis Mons contains clay and sulfate minerals, which have been detected from orbit. This can be good preservers of carbon-based organic chemicals that are potential ingredients for life.
As for what’s next for Curiosity, Grotzinger said they have a couple of targets in the next 2-4 sols, and then they will park for a long period of time, about 2-3 weeks to prepare for reaching Glenelg. “This is such a complex set of processes that have never been done on Mars before, so we are going to be conservative and go slowly to make sure everything is working as it should. Then we’ll go to Glenelg and choose first candidate for drilling.”
This map shows the path on Mars of NASA’s Curiosity rover toward Glenelg. Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech/University of Arizona
Sources: Press briefing, NASA press release
The rock chosen for the first contact science investigations for the Curiosity rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The Mars Science Laboratory team has identified their target for the first full-up contact science investigations using all the instruments attached to the Curiosity rover’s robotic arm. And ‘target’ is the operative word here, as this rock will be shot with Curiosity’s laser to help determine it chemical makeup. Interestingly, it has an unusual pyramid shape, and it was described as a “cool-looking rock sitting out on the plains of Mars,” by MSL project scientist John Grotzinger. But the rock now has a name, and while we don’t know everything about it yet, like its namesake, this rock likely has a very interesting back story.
The rock has been dubbed “Jake Matijevic,” named for the surface operations systems engineer for all the Mars rover missions so far. But unfortunately, Matijevic passed away at age 64 just days after Curiosity touched down on Mars last month. Matijevic was one of the original technology developers for rovers on Mars — figuring out how to link the mechanics, avionics and all the systems together. He led the surface operations for the Sojourner rover in 1996, worked for years with the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, and was instrumental in getting the Curiosity rover ready for its mission.
Matijevic originally was a mathematician and he developed the Matijevic Theorem, which MSL’s John Cook described as “an obscure mathematical theorem” but others have said it was “one of the most beautiful results of recent years in commutative algebra.”
“To honor Jake and his contributions we’ve named the first rock where we’re going to do contact science after him,” said Grotzinger.
The rock named Jake is about 25 centimeters (10 inches) tall and 40 cm (16 in) wide at the base, so it’s not a very large rock, nor is it very eccentric. It likely is a shapely lump of basic basalt ejecta. It is uniform in color and is actually similar in size, shape and composition to the first rock studied by the Spirit rover over eight years ago. But being a rather ordinary rock is a good thing, said Grotzinger.
“The science team has had interest for some time to find a rock that is relatively uniform in composition to do comparisons,” between the ChemCam (the laser-zapper tool) and the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS), Grotziner said, to calibrate both instruments, especially the ChemCam, which is a new version of an instrument that is on the MER rovers.
“Here we get to really test a comparison between something that is tried and true with the latest and greatest technology,” he said.
Grotziner noted that most of the terrain they are seeing so far in Gale Crater has a rather uniform surface soil with some bedrock peeking out occasionally. But darker rocks like Jake, just sitting on the surface, are not quite so common. So how did Jake get there?
“Our general consensus is that it might be a piece of secondary of impact ejecta, maybe from an impact somewhere else, maybe outside of Gale Crater,” Grotziner said, “where a rock was thrown into Gale Crater and it has just sat there for a long time. It appears to have weathered more slowly than the stuff that’s around it, so that means it’s probably a harder rock.”
So a rock blasted from a huge impact on another location on Mars ends up sitting in Gale Crater where the Curiosity rover is going to zap it with a laser.
Oh, the stories this rock will be able to tell. And hopefully the instruments on Curiosity will allow the rock to divulge its secrets.
This map shows the route driven by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity through the 43rd Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s mission on Mars (Sept. 19, 2012). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
Curiosity’s underside as imaged by the MAHLI camera. Credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS; image editing by Astro0.
One of Curiosity’s amazing color cameras, the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) that is mounted on the turret at the end of the MSL robotic arm, is now officially in action, with its dust cover removed over the weekend. The first picture it sent back to Earth was of the soil in its field of view (see below). That’s great, as the camera’s purpose is to acquire close-up images of materials on the Martian surface—rocks, fine particles and even frost. But then engineers commanded the camera to take a look at Curiosity’s underbelly – the rover’s ‘tummy’ so to speak. And the views are awesome, especially when some of the image wizards at UnmannedSpaceflight stitched a few of the images together to put together a mosaic of the entire view of the rover’s underside. This image was put together by Astro0 at UMSF. Click the image to see a larger version on his website.
The first image to come from Curiosity’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) with the dust cap off. Credit: NASA/MSL-Caltech
MAHLI, built by Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) will be used to help characterize the geology of the site investigated by MSL, and it will be used to document the materials being examined by MSL’s geochemical and mineralogical experiments.
You can see the “raw images” at the MSL website, the images that are just being beamed back from the rover, and see more at UnmannedSpaceflight; Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Blog also has some images she has put together from MAHLI’s views of Curiosity’s underside.
Here’s a picture of the camera itself:
The Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera head. The knife is 88.9 mm (3.5 inches) long. Image credit: Malin Space Science Systems
MAHLI is the equivalent of a 2 Megapixel camera. Because MAHLI can focus at infinity, in addition to being able to get microscopic views of surface materials MAHLI can also be used for other purposes, including inspection of areas on the rover or imaging the local landscape — as the images here attest.
MAHLI can also acquire multiple images of the same feature at different focus positions; additionally look upcoming for 3-D views of selected targets from this camera, since it is located on the robotic arm, it will be relatively easy to move the camera to take two images of the same object from different positions.
Learn more about MAHLI at the Malin Space Science Systems website.