Rome, 21/05/2013
Into Curiosity has done it again the center: the rover NASA has in fact drilled his second Martian rock, called ‘Cumberland’, and has collected a new sample of dust that will be analyzed in the next few days thanks to the on-board instruments.
The objective is’ to seek further confirmation of the results obtained with the first drilling of rock ‘John Klein’, which had revealed that in the past the red planet had had environmental conditions suitable to host life.
The images published by NASA show the new ‘bite’ that Curiosity has imprinted in the rock on May 19: This is a deep hole 6.6 cm and 1.6 cm wide, dug not far from the site of before drilling carried out three months ago.
The rock Cumberland, in fact, ‘positioned a little more’ in the West compared to John Klein, which is less than three meters.
The two rocks are embedded on the bottom of a low depression in the ground called ‘Yellowknife Bay’: both are flat, with pale streaks and an uneven surface. Despite these similarities, the Cumberland seems to have more ‘granules resistant to erosion that determine irregularities’ surface.
These protrusions are concretions or clusters of minerals that may have formed in the past when the water bathed the rock .
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