NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover to Drill 'Bonanza King' Rock

Aug 20, 2014 08:20 AM EDT | Matt Mercuro

The team controlling NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has picked a rock that looks like a pale paving stone as the mission's next and fourth drilling target, as long as it passes engineers' evaluation, according to a NASA press release.

The "Bonanza King" rock isn't at the Pahrump Hills location the team anticipated the rover might reach by mid-August of this year.

Unexpected issues while driving in sand caused the mission to reverse course last week after entering a valley where ripples of sand fill the floor and extend onto sloping margins. The new target outcrops' brightness and its position where the area's geological layers resemble the Pahrump Hills, according to the release.

"Geologically speaking, we can tie the Bonanza King rocks to those at Pahrump Hills. Studying them here will give us a head start in understanding how they fit into the bigger picture of Gale Crater and Mount Sharp," said Curiosity Deputy Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, according to NASA.

Mount Sharp is the team's long-term science destination, offering a stack of layers holding evidence about environmental changes on ancient Mars. The mountain rises from inside Gale Crater, where Curiosity landed back in August 2012.

The three rocks Curiosity has drilled so far all have been geologically associated with the crater floor, instead of the mountain. Material pulled from the first two and delivered to Curiosity's onboard analytical laboratories in 2013 provided evidence for ancient environmental conditions favorable for microbial life, according to NASA.

A sample from Bonanza King could allow researchers to better understand how environments varied and evolved.

"This rock has an appearance quite different from the sandstones we've been driving through for several months," Vasavada said. "The landscape is changing, and that's worth checking out."

Curiosity passed over several patches of slabs, up to about the size of dinner plates, last week on the ramp at the northeastern end of sandy-floored "Hidden Valley."

Curiosity's wheels slipped more in Hidden Valley than the team had expected based on experience with one of the mission's test rovers driven on sand dunes in California.

"We need to gain a better understanding of the interaction between the wheels and Martian sand ripples, and Hidden Valley is not a good location for experimenting," said Curiosity Project Manager Jim Erickson of JPL, according to the release.

There is no way out of the valley except the exits at its northeastern and southwestern ends. The mission team is now trying to figure out other ways that would take the rover north of the valley.

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