A To Z Challenge: Mineralogy And Missions To Mars

Jarosite on quartz.
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

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.

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Sources:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/mineralogy
http://webmineral.com/Mineral_Definition.shtml
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/instruments/spectrometers/chemin/

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If you could send a machine like CheMin anywhere in the Solar System, what would you choose to explore? 


-----The Golden Eagle

The Successful Curiosity Landing!

Last night, the Curiosity rover (which I posted about in further detail yesterday) landed on Mars.

It was successful, with everything going to plan, and the first pictures of the red planet were posted just a few minutes after:

And then more pictures came:

Including one of the landing of the rover, via the HiRISE camera, which is orbiting Mars:

If you'd like to know more, this video sums up (some of) the most exciting things about the Curiosity rover:




-----The Golden Eagle

The Curiosity Rover: Will You Be Watching The Landing?

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.




Sources of information:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/fact_sheets/mars-science-laboratory.pdf


Images found via www.nasa.gov
(If you want more stunning images of Curiosity, check out this photo gallery. )

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So, will you be watching?


-----The Golden Eagle