My feeling is we must carry on with the rover with its world class complement of context instruments, including our PanCam, and sample analysis instruments.
Both sample analysis instruments were able to "sniff" the gases present near the surface.
Fred Goesmann, principal investigator for one of two sample analysis instruments at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System in Göttingen, Germany, says the drill appeared to move down and up correctly.
The other sample analysis instrument, called Ptolemy, used its last moments to analyze a sniff chamber that had been trapping and concentrating ambient gases.
This graph shows the percentage abundance of five gases in the atmosphere of Mars, as measured by the Quadrupole Mass Spectrometer instrument of the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument suite on NASA's Mars rover in October 2012.
A year after the Curiosity rover landed on Mars, and having travelled a kilometre over the Martian surface, its SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) instruments have returned their first measurements, confirming the identity of the gases in the Martian atmosphere, which include argon, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.
If the mineralogy examination looks promising, then the sample may also be fed to the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument suite, which will use a mass spectrometer (one of three instruments in its arsenal) to look at elemental abundances.
Differences between diagenesis on Earth and Mars may partly explain why the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument on the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover was able to detect only chlorinated benzenes in surface rocks48.
Using Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars instrument — which heats soil and rock samples to examine their contents — astrobiologist Jennifer Eigenbrode and her colleagues were able to identify an array of interesting organic molecules: ring structures known as aromatics, sulfur compounds and long carbon chains.
The next step was to deliver soil samples into another ground-breaking experiment within the rover – Sam, or the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument.
On completion of this cleaning process, it became possible to deliver a sample for test in the CheMin (Chemistry & Mineralogy) tool, and subsequently, in the coming days, to the other big lab in Curiosity's belly – Sam, or the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument.
