Curiosity and the science and engineering teams are getting back up to full activity after the Christmas and New Year break.
Preparing for drilling and choosing a suitable drill site will be the next major activity over the following few months and will involve the co-ordinated use of a lot of Curiosity’s instruments on the robotic arm and within the rover.
The drill rotates at up to 150 rpm, with a dual hammer, percusion action and the hole will be about 5 cm deep. The resultant powder travels up an auger in the drill and into a chamber with a connection to the CHIMRA sample processing unit from where we can do X-ray diffraction with CHEMIN and gas-chromatography mass spectrometry with SAM.
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