Curiosity Lands on Mars; UNM Researchers Go to Work

Fol­low­ing an eight-month, 354-million mile jour­ney, and a gen­tle land­ing in an area known as Gale Crater, researchers asso­ci­ated with the Mars Rover Curios­ity were all smiles on Sun­day night when con­fir­ma­tion the Rover had touched down safely reached the NASA Jet Propul­sion Lab­o­ra­tory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.

Researchers, includ­ing Uni­ver­sity of New Mexico’s Hor­ton New­som, are now at work check­ing out the sys­tems on Curios­ity, which is the most ambi­tious research mis­sion ever under­taken to Mars. At a cost of $2.5 bil­lion, it’s also the most expen­sive. New­som was in Pasadena along with other New Mex­i­cans from Los Alamos National Lab­o­ra­tory watch­ing a tele­vi­sion feed of the land­ing late-Sunday night like many others.

New­som, a senior researcher at UNM’s Insti­tute of Mete­orit­ics, is one of the co-investigators lead­ing a faculty-student team and col­lab­o­rat­ing on the Chem­Cam laser which has New Mex­ico writ­ten all over it with the involve­ment of researchers at Los Alamos National Lab­o­ra­tory and the Uni­ver­sity of New Mexico.

Sev­eral new tools will give researchers the abil­ity to bet­ter deter­mine and dis­cover the dif­fer­ences among geo­logic com­po­si­tion with greater accu­racy than pre­vi­ous Rovers. Researchers col­lab­o­rated to cre­ate an instru­ment called Chem­Cam, which is designed to oblit­er­ate rock into tiny pieces to enable researchers to ana­lyze the chem­i­cal makeup of the rock.

The instru­ments will be able to tell if hydro­gen and oxy­gen, the com­po­nents in water, are in the rocks. The laser, which can vapor­ize rock at a dis­tance of 20 paces, can eval­u­ate the remains and assess whether or not there are any signs of life in the form of water. It can also study the geo­logic chem­istry of nearby, sur­round­ing areas to help researchers deter­mine what direc­tion to send the rover.

After approx­i­mately three months, New­som and the researchers from Los Alamos National Lab­o­ra­to­ries will return to New Mex­ico to coor­di­nate Chem­Cam activities.

Media Con­tact: Steve Carr (505) 277‑1821; e-mail: scarr@unm.edu