NASA MARS Curiosity Rover Image: Curiosity bores into Windjana rock

NASA's Rover Curiosity snaps selfie at Kimberley waypoint with towering Mount Sharp backdrop on April 27, 2014 (Sol 613). 

Inset shows MAHLI camera image of rovers mini-drill test operation on April 29, 2014 (Sol 615) into “Windjama” rock target at Mount Remarkable butte. 

MAHLI Mastcam color photo mosaic assembled from raw images snapped on Sol 613, April 27, 2014. 

Credit: NASA /JPL /MSSS /Marco Di Lorenzo /Ken Kremer

Three days ago, the burning question was "To Drill or not to Drill?"

The answer has come fast and furious – "Drill, Baby, Drill !"

After spending the weekend inspecting an enticing slab of sandstone rock at "Kimberley", the team directed NASA's Curiosity rover to bore a test hole into a Martian rock target called "Windjama" on Tuesday, April 29, Sol 615, that exhibited interesting bumpy textures.

"A decision about full drilling is planned in coming days," NASA press officer Guy Webster told me today.

Engineers commanded Curiosity to perform the so called "mini-drill" operation at "Windjama"- as the site of the robots third drilling operation since touching down on the Red Planet back in August 2012.

The 1 ton robot drilled a test hole 0.63 inch (1.6 centimeters) in diameter and to a depth of about 0.8 inch (2 centimeters) using the hammering drill at the terminus of the robotic arm.

Windjama is an outcrop of sandstone located at the base of a Martian butte named Mount Remarkable at "The "Kimberley" waypoint, a science stopping point reached by the rover in early April 2014 along its epic trek to towering Mount Sharp, the primary destination of the mission.

Hazcam fisheye camera image shows Curioisty drilling into “Windjama” rock target on April 29, 2014 (Sol 615). Flattened and colorised image shows Mount Remarkable butte backdrop. 

Credit: NASA /JPL /Marco Di Lorenzo /Ken Kremer

The team is evaluating the resulting hole and powdery, gray colored tailings with the arm's high resolution MAHLI camera and other instruments to determine whether to follow up with a deep drilling operation to a depth of 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters).

To prepare for the "mini drill" operation, Curiosity first brushed the candidate drill site off with the wire-bristle Dust Removal Tool (DRT) this past weekend, to clear away obscuring Red Planet dirt and dust hindering observations with the cameras and spectrometers.

"In the brushed spot, we can see that the rock is fine-grained, its true color is much grayer than the surface dust, and some portions of the rock are harder than others, creating the interesting bumpy textures," said Curiosity science team member Melissa Rice of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena., in a NASA statement

NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Inspects new Drill Site - Windjana

The team operating NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is telling the rover to use several tools this weekend to inspect a sandstone slab being evaluated as a possible drilling target.

If this target meets criteria set by engineers and scientists, it could become the mission's third drilled rock, and the first that is not mudstone.

The team calls it "Windjana," after a gorge in Western Australia.

The planned inspection, designed to aid a decision on whether to drill at Windjana, includes observations with the camera and X-ray spectrometer at the end of the rover's arm, use of a brush to remove dust from a patch on the rock, and readings of composition at various points on the rock with an instrument that fires laser shots from the rover's mast.

Curiosity's hammering drill collects powdered sample material from the interior of a rock, and then the rover prepares and delivers portions of the sample to onboard laboratory instruments.

The first two Martian rocks drilled and analyzed this way were mudstone slabs neighboring each other in Yellowknife Bay, about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) northeast of the rover's current location at a waypoint called "the Kimberley."

Those two rocks yielded evidence of an ancient lakebed environment with key chemical elements and a chemical energy source that provided conditions billions of years ago favourable for microbial life.

From planned drilling at Windjana or some nearby location on sandstone at the Kimberley, Curiosity's science team hopes to analyze the cement that holds together the sand-size grains in the rock.

"We want to learn more about the wet process that turned sand deposits into sandstone here," said Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

"What was the composition of the fluids that bound the grains together?

That aqueous chemistry is part of the habitability story we're investigating."

The view is an excerpt from an April 11, 2014, observation by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. 

A larger scene from the same observation can be found here.

In the image's enhanced colour, Curiosity itself appears as the bright blue object at the two-o'clock position relative to the butte in the lower center of the scene.

That butte is called "Mount Remarkable" and stands about 16 feet (5 meters) high.

The rover subsequently drove to within its robotic arm's reach of Windjana. For scale, the distance between the parallel wheel tracks visible in the image is about 9 feet (2.7 meters).

NASA Mars Curiosity rover finds sandstone variations

Sandstone layers with varying resistance to erosion are evident in this Martian scene recorded by the Mast Camera on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover on Feb. 25, 2014, about one-quarter mile (about 400 meters) from a planned waypoint called "the Kimberley." 

Credit: NASA /JPL-Caltech /MSSS

Variations in the stuff that cements grains together in sandstone have shaped the landscape surrounding NASA's Curiosity Mars rover and could be a study topic at the mission's next science waypoint.

On a journey with many months yet to go toward prime destinations on the lower slope of Mount Sharp, Curiosity is approaching a site called "the Kimberley."

Scientists on the team picked this location last year as a likely place to pause for investigation.

Its informal name comes from a northwestern Australia region known as the Kimberley. The Martian site's geological appeal, based on images taken from orbit, is that four types of terrain with different rock textures intersect there.

Ashwin Vasavada

"The orbital images didn't tell us what those rocks are, but now that Curiosity is getting closer, we're seeing a preview," said Curiosity Deputy Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

"The contrasting textures and durabilities of sandstones in this area are fascinating.

While superficially similar, the rocks likely formed and evolved quite differently from each other."

The rocks that the Curiosity mission has studied most intensively so far are finer-grain mudstone, rather than sandstone.

The rover found evidence for an ancient lakebed environment favorable for microbial life when it analyzed sample powder drilled from mudstone last year in an area called "Yellowknife Bay."

The rover team is eager to inspect sandstone at the planned waypoint, now just 282 feet (86 meters) south of the rover.

The pause for investigations at this site might include time for collecting rock-sample material with the rover's drill, for delivery to the laboratory instruments inside the vehicle.