It’s been digging for a while, but NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover is finally running its first analysis on Martian soil samples, NASA announced Thursday afternoon.
The latest sample, the third taken by the rover after the first two were used to clean its instruments, went into Curiosity’s Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument last night
“We’re receiving downlink sample now,” said Curiosity project scientists John Grotzinger in a NASA teleconference held Thursday afternoon. “We expect to be getting data out of it soon.”
NASA isn’t sampling an area of Martian soil with shiny material of unknown origin in it, though scientists said that they may attempt to analyze this material soon using other instruments. The shiny material is thought to be natural to Mars and not the same as the unidentified shiny object NASA determined was a piece of fallen rover plastic.
