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Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesùs.
NASA rover to land on Mars in August.
LOS ANGELES (AP) Two months before NASA
is set to land its most sophisticated rover on Mars, engineers on Earth
are busy troubleshooting a nagging concern with the rover's drill that
could contaminate rock samples gathered for study.
Project managers said Monday they were confident the rover nicknamed Curiosity will still be able to achieve its goals despite the hurdle.
For
the past month, a team has been studying ways to get around the
contamination problem, in which flakes of Teflon from the drill can
break off and get mixed in with the rock samples. The effort so far has drained $2 million from the mission's reserve budget.
"It's not a serious problem because we see so many potential ways to work around this," said chief scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology.
Curiosity
is on target to land at Gale Crater near the Martian equator in early
August. Instead of relying on airbags to land like previous Mars surface
missions, Curiosity will be lowered to the surface on a tether and fire
its thrusters to touch down. This never-before-tried landing technique
has allowed scientists to zero in on the landing site.
Curiosity
is now slated to land closer to a mountain in the center of the crater,
which will cut down on the amount of driving it will initially need to
do.
Project manager Pete Theisinger of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory estimated this will save about four months of driving, allowing more time to study Martian rocks and soil.
The
two-year, $2.5 billion mission seeks to determine whether the
environment could have been suitable for microbial life. One of the main
goals is to search for the organic building blocks of life using the
most advanced toolkit sent to Mars.
Curiosity is a mobile science
lab. The drill is located at the end of its robotic arm along with a
scoop. It's designed to bore into bedrock and scoop up powdered grains
that are then transferred to Curiosity's deck to analyze.
Tests
before launch revealed Teflon from the drill can rub off and taint the
samples. Some workarounds being considered include baking the samples so
that the contaminant is separated out. The team is also pondering
switching to a different, gentler drilling mode in certain cases.
In
the worst case scenario, scientists may have to rely on the scoop to
collect soil and Curiosity's wheels to crush rocks into bits.
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Follow Alicia Chang's coverage at http://www.twitter.com/SciWriAlicia .
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Online:
http://www.nasa.gov/msl
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