No, Mars Rover Curiosity didn't send flowers home, just a photo of a crystalline structure in the face of a rock. The rover also began photo documenting the area from which her Mt. Sharp trek will begin, a portion of Gala Crater called Yellowknife Bay.
On Sol 132, known to Terrans as December 19, 2012, Curiosity spent the day firing all shutters. Taking dozens of photos, she sent back a series of data strips that, when stitched together into a mosaic with interpolation of lost sky areas became a 360 degree panorama of the rover's most recent temporary abode, Yellowknife Bay. Data streaming ensued... lots of data streaming... from which the actual panorama was constructed.
Meanwhile, once the data streaming was finished, Curiosity fired up driving mode and moved closer to a couple of features that had attracted some attention during the panorama shoot. On Sol 147 (January 3, 2013), she drove to a feature dubbed "Snake River." The feature is a sinuous band of stone that separates a bed of sand from a layer of sedimentary rock. According to John Grotzinger, mission project scientist, "It's one piece of the puzzle. It has a crosscutting relationship to the surrounding rock and appears to have formed after the deposition of the layers that it transects." Translation: "It cuts across and separates different layers of surrounding rock, but seems to have been laid down after they were. That makes it important, because it's necessary to figure out how that happened."
Snake River and Mars "Flower Fossil" (Credit: NASA - JPL)
Another camera, the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MaHLI), took a close up of a layer of rock that was made up of a fine-grained matrix with many inclusions of small pebbles. One inclusion, however, stood out, both literally and visually. It was a translucent structure that to some people who viewed it looked like the fossilized parts of a flower. It became a sensation on YouTube, resulting in an NBC photo blogger asking Guy Webster, NASA spokesman for Mars missions, whether it was another piece of scrap from the lander. Webster's response was specific, "That appears to part of the rock, not debris from the spacecraft," but limited. It did not address the floral issue.
The question is whether flowering plants, the most highly evolved flora, would like be the first evidence of life discovered on Mars, and then only as a single exemplar of the least fossilizeable parts of the plant. It is most unlikely, since lower forms are far more numerous, and other parts of woody plants are more easily fossilized. It must also be remembered that Mars is a world in which no certainty of even the most primitive life has been established, and highly evolved life is therefore even less likely.
As Mars Rover Curiosity explores Yellowknife Bay, the mission scientists will select a rock for experimentation. A hammer drill will extract samples from deep within the selected rock for analysis, and the results will provide another baseline of ancient rock unaffected by atmosphere or light, since the samples come from below the depth at which such things can affect the stone's chemistry. Six weeks are planned for this exploration and sampling expedition, after which Curiosity will begin her trek up Mt. Sharp, a journey planned to take nine months to complete. But there are no longer limits on her mission. She may be still active when Mars' first Terran colonists arrive.
recommend
Facebook
Twitter
bookmark 
print
Comments: 3