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Course: NASA > Unit 3
Lesson 4: Curiosity rover: discoveries- Curiosity has landed
- Curiosity descent
- Systems check
- Curiosity's first drive
- Navigation update
- Observations
- Discovery: Streambed
- First CheMin results
- Preparation for holidays
- Calcium-rich deposits found
- Results of first drilling
- Mars' bygone atmosphere
- 'Spring Break' over: commanding resumes
- Rover ready to switch gears
- Trek to Mt. Sharp begins
- Dating younger rocks
- Curiosity completes its first martian year
- A softer trek to mount sharp
- A taste of mount sharp
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Dating younger rocks
NASA's Curiosity has determined the age of a Martian rock and provided first readings of radiation on the surface of Mars.
Want to join the conversation?
- does Mars receive any radiations from other stars(6 votes)
- No,because the other stars are far away but maybe your correct because of the creation of the star's extra material collided with Mars's creation.(5 votes)
- Do things weigh heavier or lighter on Mars than Earth?(3 votes)
- Yes. You do weigh less, but the amount of mass in your body doesn't change.(1 vote)
- how does curiosity know how old the rock is(4 votes)
- The instruments in curiosity detect how old a rock is, it uses carbon dating(1 vote)
- When he said "younger than expected when we first arrived in Gale Crater..." what does "young" mean, roughly?(2 votes)
- Why is radiation bad for organics?(2 votes)
- First, radiation emit gamma rays and cause cancer and genetic mutations, it kills most living organisms and do you now what happened on 1945, the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it killed around a million people, most from its deadly radiation(1 vote)
- mar have more than earth.(2 votes)
- How is the Curiosity able to drill on the land on Mars? Isn't the rock on Mars hard and tough?(2 votes)
- Well, not every rock is hard and tough, some are fragile and the drill is made from hard materials and it is designed to penetrate hard rock(1 vote)
- How long does it take Curiosity to move one mile?(1 vote)
- it takes about 10 hours! Because it moves about 0.1 mph!(1 vote)
- it is probably about as old as earth (4.6 billion years)(0 votes)
- Maybe it was just made by the sun melting the dust? Could be anything because some thing made it.(1 vote)
- Have humans touched actual rock from Mars yet?(0 votes)
- Are you saying that the martians are chucking rocks at us :)? Not that I believe in martians.(1 vote)
Video transcript
(Music) Hi I'm John Grotzinger. I'm the project scientist for Mars Science Laboratory mission and this is your Curiosity Rover Report. Curiosity's got some great new findings. We've been able to find a place on Mars where we can actually date a rock. That means we don't have to have astronauts to bring them back to Earth like we did back in the 1960's. We simply drill the rock, put it into the instrument and its able to give us the age at which time the rock formed. One of the big things that Curiosity is trying to do is explore and find organic carbon on Mars. It turns out this carbon depends on how old the rock is that's its inside of and so some rocks have been exposed recently to the Martian atmosphere and others have been exposed for a long time. And the ones that have been exposed for a long time have received more radiation damage, which is bad for the preservation of organics. So the good thing about this is that we can now put this knowledge to use and as we explore in the future we're going to be able to find the younger surfaces where we think they might preserve better signs of organic carbon. As we learned how to explore with Curiosity, we discovered that the rocks that we have drilled are actually part of much thicker packages, much longer-lived intervals of geologic time. And so we have a long-lived habitable environment that's actually younger than what we may have expected when we first came to Gale Crater. And this means that other similar places on Mars, that are also relatively young, that have such clay bearing rocks, could've also been habitable. So in addition to this, Curiosity is now been making measurements for over a year on the surface of Mars of the amount of radiation an astronaut would feel if they were walking around on the surface of Mars. And what we find right now is that the levels are not too high. On the other hand, we haven't had any big solar storms yet, so most of the radiation comes from the background cosmic radiation. The measurements are important because they will allow NASA scientists to understand how much radiation an astronaut on Mars would have to withstand. This has been your Curiosity Rover Report and be sure to check back for more updates.