Curiosity continues to make tracks on Mars

More than 16 months after landing on the Red Planet, the Mars rover Curiosity is trekking to its ultimate destination—climbing 3-mile-high Mount Sharp, a relatively small mountain on the Martian terrain. The most recent news from NASA is that the rover has measured a tenfold spike in methane, an organic chemical in the atmosphere, and detected other organic molecules in a rock-powder sample, raising scientist’s speculations that conditions were once favorable for life on ancient Mars.

The Rover’s first task was to collect information to assist scientists in determining whether there was substantial water on Mars in the distant past that would have made the environment more hospitable for microbial life. So far, information collected by Curiosity leads scientists to believe Mars was once warmer, wetter, and had a thicker atmosphere, making it quite similar to Earth. The rover has given scientists new evidence that Gale Crater, where it landed, once had rivers, deltas, and large lakes, most likely freshwater. It appears substantial underground water remained even after the surface water dried up.

Now scientists are hopeful Curiosity will shed more light on the puzzling formation of Mount Sharp. Mountains on Earth are caused by volcanic eruptions or by plate tectonics, when pieces of Earth’s crust collide with each other. But Mars does not have plate tectonics and Martian volcanoes do not spew out sedimentary rock, so the formation of the mountain remains a mystery. Scientists believe it may have been formed when strong winds excavated the sediment that filled Gale Crater, leaving behind a mountain as tall as Mount McKinley.

The rover has traveled more than 6 miles, snapped more than 104,000 pictures, and has allowed us to see a picture of Earth from a Martian perspective, as a tiny dot of light, indistinguishable from the stars that speckle the night sky. It has fired more than 188,000 shots from a laser instrument that vaporizes rock and dirt to identify their contents. As the rover slogs along the Martian terrain, it leaves in the red soil an imprint of the initials JPL, which the Jet Propulsion Lab engineers mischievously disguised in Morse Code after being told stamping the initials in the tire treads would be inappropriate because NASA sponsored the mission, JPL systems engineer, Bobak Ferdowsi, better known as “The Mohawk Guy,” said recently during a presentation at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.

While Curiosity climbs Mount Sharp, NASA’s newest orbiter, which arrived in the planet’s orbit in September, will tie together the information to assist scientists in understanding why and how the Martian atmosphere became so thin. According to Ferdowsi, a person could stand on the Mars equator with 60 degree Fahrenheit temperatures at their feet and below freezing temperatures at their head because of the thinness of the atmosphere.

NASA hopes within 20 years or so, it will be human footprints leaving tracks in the Martian dust. Scientists will not get the answers they seek regarding the mystery of Mount Sharp merely from the slow and limited work of Curiosity, Kenneth Edgett of Space Science Systems told The New York Times.

“We’re not going to solve this one with the rover,” Edgett said. “We’re going to be scratching our heads a hundred years from now unless we could send some people there.”