Curiosity Rover Prepares for Internal Sandblasting
NASA’s Curiosity rover has an unwanted film lining its mouth. But instead of swishing around some water or mouthwash as a human might, the Mars-cruising robot plans to use a bit of Red Planet sand ...
... “By virtue of just being on Earth you get a residual oily film that is impossible to avoid,” Daniel Limonadi, the lead systems engineer for the rover’s surface sampling and science system at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said during an October 4 teleconference with reporters.
Limonadi later explained in an e-mail that the film is technically known as adventitious carbon. “It turns out we don’t really have a good handle of where this film comes from,” he wrote. “We just know that when surfaces are exposed to air environments on Earth they quickly accumulate this very thin film.”
To scrub away that film, he said in the teleconference, the rover will scoop up sand from Rocknest with its robotic arm, then use a vibration device to shake the sand around inside the sample-collecting hardware at a “tooth-rattling” 8 g’s. “We take the sand sample, this fine-grained material on this dune ripple, and we effectively use it to rinse our mouth three times and then spit out,” Limonadi said ...
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