The Curiosity rover on Mars is being used to examine a rock called Mojave in order to determine if the feature could be suitable for drilling.
Curiosity is testing the rock using a mini-drill, to determine if Mojave could be a reasonable target for testing by the automated craft.
Mojave is marked by small features resembling grains of rice, attracting the attention of mission engineers. Some researchers believe these patterns may be the result of salt crystals, left over from the retreat of an ancient lake bed in Gale Crater, where the rover is located.
The mini-drill test will collect enough information on the rock to determine if a full drilling sample should be taken and analyzed.
"The crystal shapes are apparent in the earlier images of Mojave, but we don't know what they represent. We're hoping that mineral identifications we get from the rover's laboratory will shed more light than we got from just the images and bulk chemistry," Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project manager at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said.
Curiosity's Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument (CheMin) will be utilized to identify constituent materials in the Martian rock. Investigators believe analysis of those results could show whether the crystals are just located on the outside of the rock, or penetrate further into the structure. If they are made of salt, and run through the stone, the crystals may have been formed as water ran through the rock billions of years ago. A drying lake could have resulted in salt crystals present on the outside of the stone.
Mission engineers will soon install new operating software in the spacecraft, the fourth time the operating instructions have been updated on the vehicle since landing. These new instructions will make traveling between targets on Mars more efficient, allowing the vehicle to identify "easy terrain" on Mars and cover the stretch without further instructions from Earth. An "inertial measurement unit" on-board the craft will also be able to operate simultaneously with the drill, providing controllers the ability to rapidly sense slippage of the craft during sampling operations. The upgrade will provide protections against hazards identified in tests conducted here on Earth.
"The files have already been uplinked and are sitting in the rover's file system to be ready for the installation," Danny Lam, deputy engineering operations chief leading the upgrade process at JPL, said.
Pahrump Hills at the base of Mount Sharp is the last stop for Curiosity before it starts heading further up the incline.
Curiosity landed on Mars in August 2012, and has found significant new evidence of ancient water on the Red Planet since that time.
