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Mineralogy is what it sounds like: The study of minerals, such as their physical properties, distribution, and identification. A mineral is a naturally occurring crystal of a chemical compound or an element that has a set (unchanging and predictable) chemical composition.
Last August, mineralogy expanded to a new planet--Mars. The Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument, also known as CheMin, onboard the Curiosity Rover, has already detected several different minerals including jarosite, a mineral formed when water evaporates. CheMin works by drilling a hole in a rock in question, collecting the dust produced by the drilling, and firing a beam of X-rays through the dust. X-rays cause specific atoms to either absorb or emit light--these patterns indicate exactly which elements are present in the sample.
Tonight (or tomorrow morning, depending on how you look at it and where you are geographically) Curiosity will be landing on Mars. Its payload has ten times the mass of other rovers sent to the planet, and the goal for the rover is to check if life could or did exist there.
Curiosity, unlike other craft sent up, is capable of testing rock and dirt samples onboard itself; the plutonium power supply is predicted to last for 687 Earth days/one Mars year. Scientific instruments carried by the rover include spectrometers, the Mars Hand Lens Imager (designed to take highly magnified images), the Mast Camera (for taking pictures of the landscape), and the Radiation Assessment Detector.
The news, as you might expect, is causing quite the buzz. The only problem? EDL, or "Entry, Descent, and Landing". It takes several stages for the rover to descend from the atmosphere to the ground and for seven minutes there will be nothing from Curiosity. It may even be longer than that until we on Earth know if it successfully landed (due to the position of two satellites around Mars and the rover's position relative to Earth); if it doesn't reach the planet all in one piece, there will never be a signal at all.
This span of time between entry and landing is (rather aptly) called the 7 Minutes of Terror.
In the words of NASA scientists:
Or if you'd rather not watch a video, this graphic sums up the process:
Detailed animation of what the landing should look like:
If you'd like to find out when the rover will be landing in YOUR timezone, go HERE. You can bet I'll be up in the middle of the night checking the feeds; and speaking of feeds, BoingBoing has a handy list of resources, and I believe that SciShow, MarsCuriosity, and NASA TV will be streaming live about the landing.
Spirit made a successful landing on January 4th, 2004, and Opportunity landed January 25th. So far, Opportunity has been functioning 25 times longer than originally planned. It is currently heading for the Endeavor crater.
Spirit on the other hand stopped communicating with Earth March 22nd 2010, although NASA is now trying other ways of communication in hopes the rover will wake from hibernation as its batteries charge from the Martian summer.
Both rovers discovered evidence that could indicate water used to be on Mars. Spirit found crystallized minerals in magma, possibly dissolved by water, along with a high concentration of salt in the soil. Opportunity found bedrock formations that form because of a current, along with hydroxide ions in jarosite, which could mean the mineral formed in the presence of water.
Hopefully, Spirit will communicate again with Earth and begin exploring Mars again. But even if it doesn't--it went far beyond its expected time--the rover made some important discoveries, as did its twin.
