NASA is looking forward to drill into first Martian rock once the rover engineers approve, according to Science Daily.
NASA will explore the Martian soil and explore existence of environment that will support microbial life. Curiosity rover will begin its two year prime mission to explore the Red Planet and collect samples after drilling into the first rock.
"Drilling into a rock to collect a sample will be this mission's most challenging activity since the landing. It has never been done on Mars," said Mars Science Laboratory project manager Richard Cook of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, according to Science Daily. "The drill hardware interacts energetically with Martian material we don't control. We won't be surprised if some steps in the process don't go exactly as planned the first time through."
Owing to the undefined composition of the Martian rocks, Curiosity will first gather powdered samples from inner rock and scrub the drill after which it will collect samples from the first rock. The rock that has been chosen to be drilled first is "John Klein" named after John W. Klein, former Mars Science Laboratory deputy project manager, died in 2011, who played a major role in the development of Curiosity.
The rock is placed about 500 meters west to the landing site, as NASA revealed. A flat-lying bedrock inside a thin layer called "Yellowknife Bay." Since the orbital observations showed the drilling target was cracked ground which cools slowly compared to other grounds do, the Curiosity's science team has chosen its first drilling spot assuming it will be comparably a performable task on that ground, says the report from Science Daily.
"The orbital signal drew us here, but what we found when we arrived has been a great surprise," said Mars Science Laboratory project scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "This area had a different type of wet environment than the streambed where we landed, maybe a few different types of wet environments."
Nicolas Mangold, ChemCam team member of the Laboratoire de Planetologie et Geodynamique de Nantes in France says there are veins on Mars that are composed of "hydrated calcium sulfate, such as bassinite or gypsum" which requires "water circulating in fractures" if it has to be formed on earth.
Researchers with the help of rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) can examine the sedimentary of rocks which are of different physical appearances such as bigger sandstones like marble sized and some form a bud like shape which has been named as "Martian Flower" and other rocks are fine particles like powdered substances, the report said.
"All of these are sedimentary rocks, telling us Mars had environments actively depositing material here," said MAHLI deputy principal investigator Aileen Yingst of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz. "The different grain sizes tell us about different transport conditions."
