Inside The Planet MARS
NASA’s rover recently dug a hole in its surface revealing that below its surface is a blue interior. This shows how the environment changed over time, going from a planet that held vast oceans to a dry and barren landscape. On February 24 at Telegraph Peak, the third drill sit in the rover’s five-month-long mission at Pahrump Hills.
“This was our first use of low-percussion drilling on Mars, designed to reduce the energy we impart to the rock,” John Michael Morookian of Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a February press release at the beginning of the Pahrump Hills mission. “Curiosity’s drill is essentially a hammer and chisel, and this gives us a way not to hammer as hard.”