Curiosity gives Martian rock its first scrub down NASA's Curiosity rover has been bringing a little spit and polish to the Martian surface by using its Dust Removal Tool for the first time to scrub a nearby rock. The spot NASA chose to clean up is a rock in the Yellowknife Bay area of Mars' Gale Crater dubbed "Ekwir_1." The rock needs to be clear of debris so that the Alpha …
At 3.6 cm in, the drill bit jams and snaps off, leaving a broken piece 1.2 cm long in the hole.
Curiosity then pauses for a week while the mission crew decide whether to:
It has the large hammer and some bent screws in one pocket.
There are some circular structures visible which have only a few mm in diameter. These remind me of burrows in a sand bed created by some marine creatures. If the concrete like material was pelted with small meteorites then there would not have been a significant atmosphere. I am curious about the kind of material seen here and some explanation. Hopefully NASA gives us soon a follow-up.
Your answer may sound witty but lacks substance. The picture shows the size of a cm. The circular wire brush marks are easily discernible. They are an order of magnitude larger than the circular structures I was referring to.
NASA took an additional close-up image of the area. Most certainly they do not want to check if it is really clean now.
Those among the readers (not those who downvoted me) might be interested to see if the structures match the impact of tiny meteorites (images of the space shuttle window available). Others could be tiny gas bubbles.
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