MEXICO: NASA’s Curiosity rover is soon going to get history’s first up-close look at Martian sand dunes. The space agency officials said that Curiosity is going towards the dark Bagnold Dunes, located in the northwestern foothills of the high Mount Sharp, and would probably start investigating the sandy feature in the coming few days.
The officials said that the Bagnold Dunes are large, and the rover will investigate one dune that’s has a size of a football field and is as tall as a two-story building. Besides, they are active, as observations done by Mars orbiters have shown that some of the dunes were moving by around 3 feet every year.
In a statement, Bethany Ehlmann of the California Institute of Technology and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, both present in Pasadena, California, said, “We’ve planned investigations that will not only tell us about modern dune activity on Mars but will also help us interpret the composition of sandstone layers made from dunes that turned into rock long ago”.
NASA officials added that Mars rovers have gone to sandy swales previously, but no active dunes have been ever investigated closely on a world outside Earth.
When Curiosity will reach the Bagnold Dunes, the rover will gather samples for scrutiny by its onboard instrument suite and scrape at the sand, using a wheel for studying differences between the surface and subsurface.
