Curiosity’s DAN Instrument Suggests Gale Crater Drier Than Expected

Preliminary data from the Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory, presented at the European Planetary Science Conference on 28 September, indicate that the Gale Crater landing site might be drier than expected.

The Curiosity rover is designed to carry out research into whether Mars was ever able to support life, and a key element of this search is the hunt for water. Although Mars has many features on its surface that suggest a distant past in which the planet had abundant liquid water in the form of rivers and lakes, the only water known to be abundant on Mars today is frozen, embedded in the soil, and in large ice caps at both poles.

The DAN instrument works by firing a pulse of neutrons at the ground beneath the rover and detecting the way it is reflected. The intensity of the reflection depends on the proportion of water in the ground, while the time the pulse takes to reach the detector is a function of the depth at which the water is located.

“The prediction based on previous measurements using the Mars Odyssey orbiter was that the soil in Gale Crater would be around 6% water. But the preliminary results from Curiosity show only a fraction of this,” said Maxim Mokrousov (Russian Space Research Institute), the lead designer of the instrument.

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