NASA's Curiosity rover has successfully completed its third drill on in the rock target "Windjana" and collect samples of rock powder.
The announcement was made by NASA earlier Tuesday, providing detailed information about the freshly drilled hole on the Martian rock. According to the announcement, the hole measures 0.63 inch in diameter and is about 2.6 inches deep . This hole was drilled very close to a shallower hole that was created by the unmanned rover last week which gave researchers an insight of the interior materials of the rock.
"The drill tailings from this rock are darker-toned and less red than we saw at the two previous drill sites," said Jim Bell of Arizona State University, Tempe, deputy principal investigator for Curiosity's Mast Camera (Mastcam) in a statement. "This suggests that the detailed chemical and mineral analysis that will be coming from Curiosity's other instruments could reveal different materials than we've seen before. We can't wait to find out!"
Currently, the rover is stationed at a waypoint called "The Kimberley," about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) southwest of Yellowknife Bay. This new drill is different from the previous two because it was conducted on sandstone while the other two were drilled on mudstone.
The rock powder collected will first be sieved and scientists and engineers will decide whether the samples should be processed by the CheMin and SAM instruments inside the vehicle's belly. If the decision is positive, just a little bit of the powder will be transported to the labs' analytical bays.
Researchers are hopeful that the sandstone collected will give them useful information on the geochemical processes that have helped shape the landscape at the bottom of Mars' Gale Crater. They also hope that they can get a better insight into the role of water in sediment fixation that led to the formation of many rocks on the crater's surface.
"We're most interested to find clues as to the aqueous geochemistry which resulted in cementation of the sedimentary rocks," Project scientist John Grotzinger told BBC. "These have all turned out to be much harder than we expected, and if we could get a sense of their mineralogy and chemistry, we might better understand the composition and history of groundwater in the region - also an important type of potentially habitable environment."
