NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity, successfully deployed its robotic arm use and tested its functions recently.
The remaining stressors digging into the backs of those testing the craft were finally banished by this news. Curiosity’s seven foot robotic arm contains the equipment needed to extract, examine and relocate material to the proper testing equipment within the rover.
While the rest of the machine’s equipment underwent testing during the past two-week period, this was the robotic arm’s first test.
The arm successfully completed the complicated procedure that involves the use of all the machine’s arm-like joints.
With this complete, the final worry has been erased from the Curiosity’s post-landing examination: now the Curiosity rover will finally be able to truly pursue its mission goal of extracting and examining various Martian rock and soil samples and their molecular compositions.
The final landing zone, the Gale Crater, was selected after the vast multitude of pros and cons of over 30 potential landing sites were carefully weighed and compared.
Each site was examined by than 100 scientists over the course of three years.
The Gale Crater was finally selected because of its likelihood as a suspected underwater depression that would contain mineral and rock samples formed elsewhere on Mars during its wet ages.
By examining the compositions of a multitude of Martian soil compositions, the next Mars project to follow Curiosity will have a far more specific and targeted goal to aim for in its own mission.
Curiosity is viewed by NASA as the prospecting stage of a program that would also require an exploratory vessel and occupation system in its wake.
However, Curiosity’s science exploratory tools will offer key information in the selection next ideal Martian landing site by providing the data that will point to areas that once supported potential life.
The impressive ten instrument payload was developed by cooperative international design and filtered through NASA.
Curiosity doesn’t only have a camera that can send pretty pictures.
It has the automated laboratory equipment to analyze any samples on a molecular basis and then is capable of transmitting the data back to scientists on Earth.
It also carriers tools used to test the composition of the isotopes in the atmosphere and top layers of soil.
A scientific process done in order to help verify our understanding of Mars’s transformation from a wet planet to the dangerous environment it now has become.
It is hoped that by understanding the causes of Mars’ death, scientists will be able to understand the dangers the Earth faces from cosmic sources.
Furthermore, there are hopes that the rover may discover evidence of petroleum like substances in its geological exploration, possibly providing access to an as of yet untapped source of fuel for our planet.
Curiosity may only be a prospecting rover, but it is already making the biggest advancements in the space exploration field today and has a nearly incomprehensible potential to change our understanding of life in universe as a whole.
