狈础厂础鈥檚 Curiosity rover bored into a Martian rock on 9 February and pulled out its first sample of the planet鈥檚 insides to ingest and analyse. The achievement could lay the groundwork for future Mars explorers to build structures or even to mine the Red Planet.
Unlike with previous soil samples, this time the drill has dug beneath the surface layers of rock that have been altered by wind and radiation.
鈥淭his is the only time anybody鈥檚 drilled into Mars,鈥� says Louise Jandura of 狈础厂础鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, chief engineer for Curiosity鈥檚 sampling system. 鈥淕etting deeper into the rock allows us to unlock a kind of time capsule into what Mars was like 3 or 4 billion years ago.鈥�
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However, it is not the first space drilling to take place. Astronauts drilled into rocks on the moon, and Soviet landers drilled on the moon and . Curiosity鈥檚 predecessors, the , each had a tool that scraped away the top layers of rocks to see what was beneath, but they were not equipped to extract anything for analysis.
Tiny miner
That means Curiosity is the first Mars rover to make a deep hole and collect what was inside to be analysed. 鈥淒rilling anywhere is hard, but drilling on a rover kicks it up a notch,鈥� says Jandura.
The rover used the drill bit at the end of its robotic arm to make a hole 1.6 centimetres wide and 6.4 centimetres deep in a flat, veined outcrop thought to have once been saturated with water. Using a combination of vibration and friction, the pulverised particles were sent up the screw-shaped drill bore and into a receptacle, where they were sifted and separated for delivery to the rover鈥檚 onboard chemistry lab.
Moving the samples up the drill for analysis was one of the newest and most difficult technologies to develop, says Jandura.
Although Curiosity鈥檚 digging into Mars has been extremely modest, its achievement could lay the groundwork for construction and mining on the Red Planet. 鈥淲e鈥檝e built up a good body of knowledge that can be leveraged in the future, in case that ability is needed,鈥� says JPL drill engineer .
