Overview
On August 5, 2012, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) captivated the world’s imagination by landing Curiosity, the most sophisticated robotic geologist ever developed, on Mars. Since landing in Gale Crater over 370 Martian days (sols) ago, Curiosity has already completed its primary objective of determining whether conditions on Mars could have been a suitable home for life.
Project Details
Curiosity is equipped with a payload of instruments and cameras that is ten times more massive than any previous Mars mission. The rover carries an entire geological laboratory that enables it to clean and drill rocks, blast rocks with a laser, and process rock samples in its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite.
Curiosity began its scientific mission by exploring its landing site, dubbed Bradbury Landing, and sending home images that showed an ancient riverbed. The rover then continued its journey into Gale Crater’s Glenelg Region and Yellowknife Bay, where four uniquely different rock layers were found. On July 4, 2013, Curiosity completed its exploration of the Glenelg Region and began the several-mile-long journey to Mount Sharp, a three-mile-high mountain inside the crater that features significant geological layers.
Results and Impact
In the first year of its planned 23-month mission, Curiosity has made five important discoveries. The rover has found that Mars has the necessary ingredients for life: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. Additionally, Curiosity has found an ancient streambed in Gale Crater that shows evidence of a knee-deep steady stream of water flowing over the surface. The rover also discovered that the journey from Earth to Mars poses a health risk to humans because of the radiation levels in space. Contrary to our belief that Mars has methane, Curiosity’s analysis of the Martian air did not show any traces of methane. One year into her journey, Curiosity has already changed our understanding of Mars by captivating us with her remarkable discoveries and breath-taking images of our neighboring Red Planet.
Role of High-End Computing Resources
Curiosity has two Rover Compute Elements (RCEs)—identical on-board computers that are the brains behind the rover. Each computer carries 256 kilobytes of electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM), 256 megabytes (MB) of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), and 2 gigabytes of flash memory. In comparison, the previous Mars Exploration Rovers had 3 MB of EEPROM, 128 MB of DRAM, and 256 MB of flash memory. Scientists at JPL use an arsenal of computers, servers, and supercomputers to process the data that Curiosity returns, enabling these remarkable discoveries and extending our understanding of Mars.Timofey Ovcharenko, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
timofey.ovcharenko@jpl.nasa.gov John Grotzinger, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
grotz@gps.caltech.edu
