NASA Mars Rover Explores “Yellowknife Bay”

After imaging during the holidays, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity resumes driving on the red planet and pulls within arm's reach of a sinuous rock feature called “Snake River.”

After imaging during the holidays, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity resumed driving January 3 and pulled within arm's reach of a sinuous rock feature called Snake River, shown in the lower center of the mosaic of images above.

Snake River is a thin curving line of darker rock cutting through flatter rocks and jutting above sand. Curiosity's science team plans to get a closer look at it before proceeding to other nearby rocks.

“It's one piece of the puzzle,” said the mission's project scientist, John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. “It has a crosscutting relationship to the surrounding rock and appears to have formed after the deposition of the layer that it transects.”

The drive during the mission's 147th Martian day, or sol, on the Red Planet took Curiosity about 3 meters northwestward and brought the mission's total driving distance to 702 meters, NASA said. The rover is within a shallow depression called Yellowknife Bay, which is a flatter and lighter-toned type of terrain from what the mission crossed during its first four months inside Gale Crater.

During a holiday break for the rover team, Curiosity stayed at a location within Yellowknife Bay from which the rover took images of its surroundings. The team is evaluating possible first targets for use of Curiosity's hammering drill in coming weeks. The drill will collect powdered samples from the interior of rocks for analysis by instruments inside the rover.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project is using Curiosity to assess whether areas inside Gale Crater ever offered a habitable environment for microbes. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech, manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.