After travelling 8.5 kilometers on Mars, NASA’s Curiosity rover is now facing some of the most dangerous terrain it has ever encountered…. Winds at Gale Crater, Curiosity’s landing site, have whittled and sharpened rocks into piercing points unlike that seen by NASA’s three earlier Mars rovers. Curiosity needs to travel about 200 metres of this sharp ‘caprock’ before it can descend into a sandy, more wheel-friendly depression dubbed Hidden Valley.
“This is awful stuff,” says John Grotzinger, the mission’s chief scientist and a geologist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena…. [More at link]