29th October 2015 Sol 1148

We have completed another drill so that we now have the Big Sky and Greenhorn drill holes. As the team becomes more experienced we are getting quicker at producing drillholes and so we can get more analyses.

The sample wheel on CheMin allows a planned 27 samples from drilling (or scooping) for X-ray diffraction analysis though in practice if we dump samples we could do more.  The X-ray source is cobalt-57.  Cobalt-57 (anotherwords the isotope of cobalt with a mass of 57) decays with a half life of 271 days, to produce iron-57 by gamma emission.  This means that we can expect to get a strong enough X-ray flux for effective X-ray diffraction for a few years to come.

Here is a great you tube video clip about drilling on Curiosity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa2sc6-u59I