While NASA's Curiosity rover may be approaching two Earth years since landing on Mars, it has just completed one Martian year on the surface of the Red Planet.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Curiosity is heading southwest from its landing site toward the Murray Buttes and its ultimate destination of Mount Sharp. The buttes are believed to be an ideal entry point to Mount Sharp, a 3.4-mile high mountain that scientists believe to be rich with Mars' environmental elements.
Thanks to Curiosity, scientists should be able to study layers of rock in Mount Sharp that dates back billions of years, detailing the Red Planet's environmental history. Curiosity achieved its primary science goal of determining whether or not Mars could have supported life when it drilled its first rock at Yellowknife Bay.
Early this spring, Curiosity stopped at a site to drill a sandstone sample called "Windjana" and the rover is carrying around some of the rock powder for further analysis.
"Windjana has more magnetite than previous samples we've analyzed," David Blake, principal investigator for Curiosity's Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, said in a press release. "A key question is whether this magnetite is a component of the original basalt or resulted from later processes, such as would happen in water-soaked basaltic sediments. The answer is important to our understanding of habitability and the nature of the early-Mars environment."
By Earth's calendar, Curiosity will complete its two-year anniversary on Mars Aug. 6 this year, but a Martian year lasts 687 days due to its longer orbit of the sun.
"We are getting in some long drives using what we have learned," Jim Erickson, Curiosity project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., said in the release. "When you're exploring another planet, you expect surprises. The sharp, embedded rocks were a bad surprise. Yellowknife Bay was a good surprise."
