NASA’s Curiosity Rover Lands on Mars: What’s next?

NASA’s latest interplanetary rover, Curiosity, has landed successfully on Mars.

Anchor Lisa Mullins talks to Bruce Barraclough, one of the scientists on the mission, about what comes next.

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Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World.

[RECORDING: Touchdown confirmed. We're safe on Mars.]

Mullins: NASA engineers in Pasadena, California, erupted in cheers late last night because of what was happening up on Mars. The safe landing of the mechanical rover called Curiosity. The spacecraft had to go from 13,000 miles an hour to a soft landing in what scientists called seven minutes of terror. Well, everything seemed to go off without a hitch. After it landed Curiosity even sent a couple of pictures from one of its wheels and of its shadow to confirm that it was actually on Mars ground. So, what’s Curiosity going to do next? Bruce Barraclough is project manager for one of the ten scientific instruments on rover. Bruce, thank you by the way for staying awake for us. You’ve been awake for like how long now?

Bruce Barraclough: Oh, it’s been a day and a half or so but we’re so excited it’s no problem at all.

Mullins: Yeah, I’m guessing you’re one of those people who was whooping it up in Pasadena that we heard in the top there. But you oversee an instrument that is called ChemCam. I gather it shoots lasers. What for?

Barraclough: That’s correct. ChemCam is a new type of technology that’s been the first time it’s ever been flown. The ChemCam stands for chemistry and camera and as you might gather from that it does two things – it tries to get the chemistry of samples out of the soils or rocks on the surface of Mars and it also takes pictures of these targets that we’ve been shooting. The chemistry part is enabled by a technology called Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy which is a fancy way of saying that we shoot a very high energy density laser at a target, it gets so hot that we turn it into a vapor or a plasma. As that plasma cools in the martian atmosphere it gives off photons, light, and based on the color of that light we can tell what that target is composed of. So, our instrument is supposed to reach out up to say seven or eight yards and be able to identify the composition of soils, rocks, things like that.

Mullins: So, just to be clear, ChemCam has kind of like an arm and it reaches out to grab a bunch of rock and then basically vaporizes it?

Barraclough: No, that’s the arm on the rover and that does exist but if you’ve seen a picture of the rover you’ll notice that there’s a tall mast that sticks straight up and there’s a white box on the top of that mast. That’s where the laser emanates from so it shoots a laser much like your laser pointer that you use to give presentations and then we can interrogate the samples remotely. So we don’t even have to get near them to be able to tell what’s going on at a distance.

Mullins: So, when you look at the vaporized rock, what do you find out?

Barraclough: We find out the elemental composition, what elements there are and what the abundance is and from that we can deduce what the rock type is. So we can actually tell you what rock type it is based on the chemical composition that we get from the returned light from the target.

Mullins: Now this is important because the place that Curiosity landed is this crater, the Gale Crater, which supposedly has like the contents of the geologic history of the entire planet of Mars. When you find out what kind of rock it is that the spectrometer has identified, what do you do with that information? What does it mean?

Barraclough: Well, we’re hoping to examine the history of this crater and use that an analog for the past history of Mars. If you look at the mound of rocks, Mount Sharp, or Aeolus Mons, that’s the large mountain in the center of the crater, it’s layered and as you drive up through these layers you’re going through the history of Mars into the deep past. So we hope to tell something about past history of the planet and also to be able to identify any potential strata or habitats that might have been places where life could have survived or might have grown in the past or even in the present.

Mullins: That’s a good point right there. Yeah, NASA is emphasizing that Curiosity, the vehicle, is not looking for life on Mars but it’s looking for signs that life may have been possible or may have existed. What’s the difference?

Barraclough: Well, for life to exist, at least life as we know it, you need energy, you need water, and you need certain chemicals – carbon, oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen. So, we’re looking to see if there is are these trace elements available. We know that there’s energy, there could have been. We know that there was water. So we’re not set up analytically, our instruments are not designed to find microbes or fossils or things like that. But we’re equipped to find the elements that life could have evolved from and specific environments that may have been hospitable to those microbes or other organisms.

Mullins: And will your ChemCam help do that?

Barraclough: Yes. We can detect hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur – all the building blocks of life. And what we hope to do is find areas of interest at some distance from the rover and if we do find very interesting things we’ll drive the rover over and then as you spoke about earlier there’s an arm that can actually get samples and deposit them into other scientific instruments inside the rover that will do a very detailed analysis of gases and other things that will help us decipher whether these environments might have been hospitable to life in the past or at present.

Mullins: By the way, Bruce, ChemCam is not purely an American invention.

Barraclough: Oh, that’s true. We have a very strong team of French and American participants in this. Our French colleagues provided the laser that sits on the top as well as the camera and the American team provided the computer that runs things as well as the spectrometers that analyze the light that comes back from the targets. A very close collaboration and hope to carry that forward into future missions.

Mullins: What’s the interest of the French and of Americans or versus Americans in something like this?

Barraclough: Well, science is a universal undertaking and we have colleagues all over the world that are dying to participate in these very, very interesting missions. We’re all interested in the same sorts of things – what’s the history of the planet, the history of the solar system, how did life evolve, is there life elsewhere? The MSL Project has a number of foreign countries that have participated in this – Canada, France, Spain, Russia, US. So, it’s a very international project and it goes to speak to the universality of scientific interests around the world in these type of problems.

Mullins: Bruce, when do you go off and have well earned sweet dreams?

Barraclough: I’m hoping in about six hours and I hope I’ve been coherent talking to you.

Mullins: Yes, indeed you have. And congratulations on the successes.

Barraclough: Well, we’re very excited. We hope that your listeners will want to follow some of the exciting developments that come up in the next few weeks.

Mullins: Great. Bruce, thank you very much.

Barraclough: Thank you and have a nice day.

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