We're going to talk about Curiosity's first year of exploration on Mars.
The mission was built to explore for ancient inhabitable environments.
And here you see Curiosity on the right.
And on the left you've got Pathfinder.
Which is about the size of a microwave oven.
It was built to launch the future of mobile robotic exploration on Mars.
It's a little rover with six wheel rocker bogey suspension, which is designed for
the rover to drive over rocks about the size of the diameters of the wheels,
which relative to the size of the vehicle is actually pretty large.
And that suspension system allows the rover,
deck to not be tilted very much, which is important, because it's solar powered.
That mission analyzed a couple of rocks, drove around a few tens of meters, and
then, in 2004, we've got Opportunity that landed on the surface of Mars.
And you see the Heritage there.
Six wheel rock or bogey suspension, much larger panel of,
of solar and that mission was designed to look for
evidence of water on the surface of Mars and it was successful.
And because it was successful, we then got the green light for Curiosity.
Again, you can see the Heritage six wheel rock or bogey suspension.
But now this rover consumes so
much energy, we had to move to a nuclear power source.
So it's got a plutonium 238 source, which decays.
And it generates heat, and we capture that heat in a thermal couple, and
generate electricity, about 100 watts every hour is what that rover produces.
And based on that small amount of energy, we have ten scientific instruments,
and 17 cameras that allow us to study the geology and geochemistry.
And in addition to that, inside the belly of the rover, we've got an X-ray
diffraction unit, which takes powders of rock that we, that we create by drilling,
and tells us, quantitatively, what the mineral abundances are.
And then we have another instrument called sample analysis of Mars
that has something called a quadrupole mass spectrometer,
which tells us what the masses of all the elements are that are present.
And then in addition to that,
it's got a gas chromatograph, that if we see any organic compounds,
it can tell us the molecular structure of what those compounds are.
And it also has something called a tunable laser spectrometer that allows
us to measure the abundance and composition of gases in the atmosphere.
Gases that we generate by heating them up inside an oven of, of rock samples.
And it also gives us the isotope ratio of important elements like hydrogen,
and carbon, and oxygen, and, and we're working on sulfur now.
And now let's take a step back in the history of exploration of Mars.
And this is old vintage data with Mariner 9 data on the top, and
Viking data on the bottom.
And at the time, when scientists first looked at this, they imagined that some
kind of a fluid was flowing across Mars and caused the rocks to be eroded.
And, and there was a debate that lasted for
decades about what the composition of this fluid was.
And to sort of fast forward,
we now feel very confident that the, the fluid that was present was water.
Wasn't something like CO2, or liquid nitrogen, or something exotic like that.
The important thing is, is that if you're a geomorphologist,
you look at these patterns and you think these are the sign of dissection of rocks
by flowing water, over solid material.
And the flowing fluid exerts a shear stress and
it moves particles along that causes abrasion of the bedrock.
And so, for decades, that was our view of,
the presence of water on Mars, if you look just at, at geomorphic evidence.
If, if you ask in places like Nirgal Vallis, where we saw
those beautiful drainage networks, where we know that rocks were being eroded.
Where we know that sediment was being transported,
it took several decades of orbiters to eventually make a big discovery [COUGH]
that that material's actually conserved.
It doesn't, for example, fly out of orbit and, and, and is lost to space.
It comes duressed in a place where the flowing fluid enters a low point,
maybe even ponding to form a lake or maybe a small ocean.
And there's a divergence in the flux of the water,
which decreases the capacity of that water to transport sediment, and it drops out.
It does it just like it does on Earth.
So you're looking at a delta.
I think the most spectacular delta on Mars is called Eberswalde Delta, and,
and what you see here is a trunk stream that comes in on the left and
then it branches and bifurcates into dozens of tributaries
that must have entered a body of standing water.
And so, from orbit, we have a really good feeling that there was a lake here.
But we just can't prove it until you get on the ground.
So that was one of the reasons to send Curiosity to
a place on Mars where we believed that there was strong evidence,
not just geomorphologically but also spectroscopically in,
in terms of minerals that we think have water in their structure.
And, and so we pick El Crater, which is real interesting.
A big old crater, about 140 kilometers in diameter,
about the size of the LA Basin, and in the middle of this crater we've got a mountain
that goes up five kilometers high.
So the peak of that mountain has more elevation on it
than you've got in the lower 48 states here in the US.
So it's even higher than Mount Whitney is above sea level.
So we believe that there was water that once flowed into this crater and
we see the geomorphologic evidence for it.
And so we chose our landing ellipse, what you see there in blue
