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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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Discovery: Streambed
Created by NASA.
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- Would Mars be darker in general than on Earth? Also, If you were on Mars and looked up at night, would you still be able to see the stars through all of the dust?(3 votes)
- Also, Mars has a much smaller atmosphere than earth, so you don't have to worry about the atmosphere getting in the way.(1 vote)
- How could Mars have had water?(2 votes)
- Water is apparently abundant throughout the universe. It is becoming unusual to not find water in terrestrial bodies.(1 vote)
- if we terreformed mars would it be more like earth?(1 vote)
- It would take a very long time, but yes, if we were able to terraform mars it could look more like Earth. Terraforming literally means to change a planet to look more like Earth.(1 vote)
- how long can Curiosity operate(1 vote)
- Until it breaks down or when it has no more things to do.(1 vote)
- if mars had water like earth would earth soon end up like mars(1 vote)
- If earth somehow lost its atmosphere, yes it would end up like mars. It probably took thousands if of years if not more for mars to end up how it is now after losing its atmosphere, so in your question the word "soon" is thousands upon thousands of years. Nothing we need to worry about!(1 vote)
- were did curiosity landed(0 votes)
- Curiosity landed near Gale Crater on Mars.(3 votes)
- is this true that curiosity has been there on mars for 10(0 votes)
- i think he means that but if it was years no.(1 vote)
Video transcript
(music) Hello, my name is Sanjeev Gupta and I am a long term planner for the Mars Curiosity rover. This is your Curiosity rover update. We've now been on Mars for almost 2 months and we have been witnessing the amazing new vistas of the never-before-seen Gale landscape taken with our wonderful cameras. However, much of the science team have had their eyes and the rover's eyes firmly focused on the ground. On the drive from the Bradbury landing site to our current location we have been analyzing three really interesting outcrops that we have called Goulbourn, Link, and Hottah. If we look at the Hottah outcrop, we can see a distinct layer that has been tilted and eroded and this allows us to look at the cross-section through the layer. When we looked at the layer with our high-resolution Mastcam camera we found that it was comprised of sand grains and small pebbles that had become cemented to form a hard layer. Here you can see a pebble that is 3 cm in diameter; so smaller than a ping pong ball. This suggests that this layer is an ancient gravel deposit. The surprising thing is that when we looked at the pebbles closely, we discovered that many of them were quite well-rounded. This is very different to the many angular clasts that litter the surface. Here, you can see a rounded pebble from a riverbed on Earth. On Earth rounded pebbles are a common tell tale sign of rocks that have been transported by water. For example, in a river or a stream, as water flows over a riverbed, if the flow strength is great enough, the pebbles are lifted up into the flow or rolled along the riverbed and they become pounded and battered against each other and this causes them to become rounded through time. So what we think we might be seeing here on Mars is an ancient riverbed with the pebble beds representing old stream deposits. The size of the pebbles tells us that these rocks could not have been transported by wind, so it seems clear they must've been transported by water. So how does a pebble deposit get to be here? If we look more broadly in Gale Crater, we can see that there is a prominent feature that geologists call an alluvial fan. Alluvial fans are cone-shaped deposits of gravel and sand that accumulate where streams exit mountains. In Gale crater, there is a 10 km long fan formed at the mouth of 30 m deep canyon that is derived from the crater rim. On the fan itself we can see evidence for multiple channels suggesting that the streambed direction changed through time. When we look at the location of the Curiosity landing site with respect to the alluvial fan, we see that the rover landed down stream of the fan. The rounded pebbles likely represent long distance transport down the alluvial fan. So this is really exiting news for the science team because this is the first time we are seeing gravel transported by water on the surface of Mars. This has been another exhilarating week for Curiosity on Mars and for the scientist team here in Pasadena. This has been your Curiosity rover report. Check back for more updates.