gyanjyoti

The Universe, with its illimitable possibilities, has always imbued the mankind. NASA with other space agencies, round the world, have alomost redoubled their efforts in the past decade to find evidences of life in outer space. But the search seems to never ceasing.Since our first close-up picture of Mars in 1965, spacecraft voyages to the Red Planet have revealed a world strangely familiar, yet different enough to challenge our perceptions of what makes a planet work. With each day, Mars' new eccentricities are being discovered, courtesy to efforts made by the Mars Exploration Program. To discover the possibilities for life on the red planet-past, present or our own in the future-the Mars Program has developed an exploration strategy known as "Follow the Water." Under this strategy, dry riverbeds, ice in the polar caps and rock types that only form when water is present are being explored . Rigorous search for hot springs, hydrothermal vents or subsurface water reserves is being done by the erudite lot. As part of exploration program, a car sized robotic rover ,"CURIOSITY"-fraught with instruments consisting of MastCam, ChemCam, Navcams, spectrometer, REMS but the list goes on- was launched from Cape Canaveral on November 26, 2011. The rover's goals include: investigation of the Martian climate and geology; assessment of whether the Gale Crater has ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life, including investigation of the role of water; and planetary habitability studies for future human exploration. Since its landing on the Red Planet it has carried out some successful expeditions , major being-February's "mini drill test", April's plunge into an autonomous operation mode for approx. 25 days to monitor atmospheric and radiation data and May's Cumberland drill. It exercised the first drilling operation on the "John Klein rock" using a small drill bead by means of pulverizing rock upto 0.8 inches depth hence collecting samples of martian rock in powdered form. "Pre-drilling observations of this rock yielded indications of one or more episodes of wet environment conditions", explained mission manager. Aftre three months of the first drill, Curiosity drilled into yet another rock "the Cumberland" on May 19 . The hole is about 0.6 inch (1.6 centimeters) in diameter and about 2.6 inches (6.6 centimeters) deep. The science team expects to use analysis of material from Cumberland to check findings from John Klein. Preliminary findings from analysis of John Klein rock powder by Curiosity's onboard laboratory instruments indicate that the location long ago had environmental conditions favorable for microbial life. But still a lot has to be done .....

Certainly at some fortuitous day, our search would be over.