NASA’s Curiosity rover is in good shape after 4,000 days battling dust, wind and age on the Red Planet. Curiosity has completed 4,000 Mars “sols,” or days, on the Red Planet since its landing on August 5, 2012. (One sol is slightly longer than one Earth day; about 24 hours and 40 minutes.) The rover is a key part of NASA’s search for life on Mars and continues to collect evidence of other parts of the environment made up of minerals, rocks and water.

Scientists say a recently drilled sample could add to the flood of evidence. The pile, collected on the 3-mile-high (5-kilometer) slope of Mount Sharp, nicknamed “Sequoia,” may show signs of sulfates. Scientists say these are minerals that formed in salt water that evaporated billions of years ago as Mars began to lose water, possibly as its atmosphere thinned.

Curiosity has already found abundant sulfates and continues to search for rare, elusive carbonate deposits on the Red Planet. (Carbonate refers to an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide, so if Mars previously had such a thick atmosphere, it’s not clear why this carbonate is so hard to find.)

“We’ve been waiting for these results for decades, and now Sequoia will tell us more,” Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles, said in a statement from the agency on Monday, Nov. 6.).

After covering 20 miles (32 kilometers) en route, Curiosity is still healthy, which is close to the 28 miles (45 km) that Opportunity has accumulated in its 14 years of operation. As of this writing, engineers are working on a minor issue with the camera on the Mastcam, which is believed to be one of Curiosity’s main “eyes” providing sharp color images. The filter under the lens is frozen between positions, but NASA engineers are trying to move it back into place.

“If it cannot be pushed back all the way, the mission will rely on the accurate, higher resolution, 100 mm focal length Mastcam as the primary color imaging system,” NASA officials said. said. “As a result, this will affect how the team observes scientific targets and rover routes: the right camera needs to capture nine times more images than the left camera to cover the same area. The teams will also have a reduced ability to observe detailed color spectra of rocks from a distance.”

In the long term, Curiosity’s nuclear power source, which uses energy from the radioactive decay of plutonium, continues to dwindle, but mission team members emphasize that the rover has many years of life left. Repeated use, dust, and wind also gradually wear out Curiosity’s drill bit and the joints of its robotic arm, but software updates are making Curiosity’s actuators more efficient. Engineers even slowed the alarming wear on the rover’s gear wheels.

For the next few weeks, Curiosity will operate on its own. NASA will freeze communications with the rover until November 28 during solar conjunction, when Mars passes behind the Sun from Earth’s perspective. The agency currently stops sending commands to Mars robots at all times because solar plasma can interfere with communication. But Curiosity is still working on a “to-do list” for the next few weeks until agency officials can talk to the long-running rover again. Source