4 ms·
How big a deal is it, scientifically speaking, that the rover has access to the freshly-exposed underside of the rock?
by scrumper 13y ago
How big a deal is it, scientifically speaking, that the rover has access to the freshly-exposed underside of the rock?
- dredmorbius 13y agoThe original Viking landers had scoops capable of penetrating a few cm down: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/object_page/vl1_11d128.html http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/object_page/vl1_11d12...
- tunap 13y agoIt has the potential to be huge. You never know what's just under the surface until you look. The NatGeo special, "Ten Years On Mars"[1] made a point to include how when a bad tire on Spirit dug a trench in the soft crust, an unexpected surprise revealed itself. http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/episodes/ten-years-on-mars/ http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/episodes/ten-y... Edit: Add pertinent link: http://www.sciencebuzz.org/blog/accidental_tourist_bad_wheel_on_mars_rover_leads_to_big_dis http://www.sciencebuzz.org/blog/accidental_tourist_bad_wheel...
- scrumper 13y agoThanks for the links. Maybe quite a lucky skid then.
- ck2 13y agoYou'd think they would start to put a plow or til on these rovers.
- clubhi 13y agoOr a digging laser. Dig out a small area with a laser and wait for the other side to cave in. We have digging lasers, right???
- forktheif 13y agoPretty big. I've often wondered why they don't send a dragline digger to Mars, so they can dig a decent trench. When Spirit's wheel broke and they started dragging it along, digging a little trench, they made a nice discovery and that was with something not designed to dig at all. If they could get a few feet down, who knows what they could find?!
- The_Double 13y agoIt may have been big, but curiosity has a scoop to scoop up dirt, a drill, and a laser that can vaporize rock to look inside of them. It's not like the rovers can only look at the surface.
- hahainternet 13y agoThe Exomars project will land a 2 metre vertical drill on the surface, sampling much deeper than anything done so far. It's just a question of priorities. Drilling 4cm into a rock with a specific surface abrasion tool is a long way from plunging a 2 metre metal shaft into unknown terrain. Engineering this so it has no chance of jamming, breaking, overheating etc is not gonna be a trivial task. How do you lubricate a drill without contaminating the environment and with such a wide temperature variation?
- thaumasiotes 13y agoWhat exactly is the downside of contaminating the environment?
- Ma8ee 13y agoMakes it harder to what compunds are indigenous and what you just brought yourself. No use shouting Eureka over some organic compound in a hole you just spilled oil in.
- careersuicide 13y agoIn general great effort is made to ensure that probes don't contain any biological contaminates so if we do discover signs of life we're very certain it wasn't a microbe that hitched a ride. As far as contamination from drilling (due to lubricants or something else entirely) I imagine that the desire for general cleanliness is for much the same reason. If we're going to spend hundreds of millions of billions of dollars on a probe to another world we want to be really confident anything interesting we find is actually from that world and not Earth.