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LONDON: Nasas Opportunity rover appears to have reached another milestone in its amazing nine-year mission on Mars.
Scientists report the robot has been trundling over what they believe to be clay-bearing rocks on the edge of a wide bowl known as Endeavour Crater. Clays are water-altered minerals, but very different to the ones seen by the rover so far on its travels.
Those previous minerals were in contact with acidic water; clays are formed in the presence of neutral water.
What drives us to investigate the problem of water on Mars is the fact that water is a necessary condition for life; but theres water and theres water, said Prof Steve Squyres, Opportunitys principal investigator from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Weve been seeing sulphate minerals from day one with this rover. These sulphates form under very acid conditions. And even though water was present, if its that acid it would be very challenging as a place for life to take hold.
However, if its not acid, if its the kind of water you can drink, its the kind of water thats going to be more suitable for life; and thats what the clays point to, he said.
Prof Squyres was speaking here this week at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the largest annual gathering of Earth and planetary scientists. He was updating the meeting on the most recent work of the robot which landed on Mars in 2004 to investigate its potential for microbial habitability in the past.
Since August 2011, it has been driving across the western rim of the 22km-wide Endeavour depression. Opportunity is trying to understand the sequence of rocks at the crater which is likely to have been punched out of the ground by an asteroid more than three billion years ago.
As part of that study it has been surveying a mound the science team refers to as Matijevic Hill in honour of the late Jake Matijevic, a senior rover engineer.
Two outcrops, within 100m of each other, have caught the attention. The first, dubbed Whitewater Lake, is the one that appears to be clay-bearing. The nature of the rocks that we have found, that we think are the ones that contain the clays, are very soft, explained Prof Squyres.
Theyre light-toned; theyre very fine-grained - so all the things that you would expect if clay minerals were present. Theyre layered and their composition is consistent with clay minerals being present.
The second outcrop is called Kirkwood. This comprises small spheres caught in a matrix. At first, the team thought they had stumbled upon more of the famous haematite (an iron-rich mineral) blueberries seen earlier in Opportunitys mission. But Steve Squyres says these newberries seem to have a quite distinct composition.
The investigation of the two outcrops is still in its infancy. As well as using the rovers X-ray spectrometer on Whitewater Lake and Kirkwood to determine the chemical elements present, and thus get a better idea of their mineralogical composition, the team needs to work out the order and position of the rock layers to tell them something of their relative ages. At the moment, it is not clear whether the two outcrops relate to a period from before or after the creation of Endeavour.
Nasa
Scientists report the robot has been trundling over what they believe to be clay-bearing rocks on the edge of a wide bowl known as Endeavour Crater. Clays are water-altered minerals, but very different to the ones seen by the rover so far on its travels.
Those previous minerals were in contact with acidic water; clays are formed in the presence of neutral water.
What drives us to investigate the problem of water on Mars is the fact that water is a necessary condition for life; but theres water and theres water, said Prof Steve Squyres, Opportunitys principal investigator from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Weve been seeing sulphate minerals from day one with this rover. These sulphates form under very acid conditions. And even though water was present, if its that acid it would be very challenging as a place for life to take hold.
However, if its not acid, if its the kind of water you can drink, its the kind of water thats going to be more suitable for life; and thats what the clays point to, he said.
Prof Squyres was speaking here this week at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the largest annual gathering of Earth and planetary scientists. He was updating the meeting on the most recent work of the robot which landed on Mars in 2004 to investigate its potential for microbial habitability in the past.
Since August 2011, it has been driving across the western rim of the 22km-wide Endeavour depression. Opportunity is trying to understand the sequence of rocks at the crater which is likely to have been punched out of the ground by an asteroid more than three billion years ago.
As part of that study it has been surveying a mound the science team refers to as Matijevic Hill in honour of the late Jake Matijevic, a senior rover engineer.
Two outcrops, within 100m of each other, have caught the attention. The first, dubbed Whitewater Lake, is the one that appears to be clay-bearing. The nature of the rocks that we have found, that we think are the ones that contain the clays, are very soft, explained Prof Squyres.
Theyre light-toned; theyre very fine-grained - so all the things that you would expect if clay minerals were present. Theyre layered and their composition is consistent with clay minerals being present.
The second outcrop is called Kirkwood. This comprises small spheres caught in a matrix. At first, the team thought they had stumbled upon more of the famous haematite (an iron-rich mineral) blueberries seen earlier in Opportunitys mission. But Steve Squyres says these newberries seem to have a quite distinct composition.
The investigation of the two outcrops is still in its infancy. As well as using the rovers X-ray spectrometer on Whitewater Lake and Kirkwood to determine the chemical elements present, and thus get a better idea of their mineralogical composition, the team needs to work out the order and position of the rock layers to tell them something of their relative ages. At the moment, it is not clear whether the two outcrops relate to a period from before or after the creation of Endeavour.
Nasa
