but don´t forget that the Russians did so on Venus in the late seventies
Nasa considers it the most complex operation since the landing on Mars so only after a lot of preparation and practice, the Rover drilled the first hole in Marrian rock.
Jandura, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada-Flintridge, said, “To get to the point of making this hole in a rock on Mars, we made eight drills and bored more than 1,200 holes in 20 types of rock on Earth.”
A measly 6,4 cm deep but it´s sufficient to obtain a small amount of rock powder for analysis in Rover´s mobile lab. The location was carefully chosen as this particular rock showed numerous signs of past water flow.
Inside the sample-handling device, the powder is vibrated across a sieve that screens out the all but particles six-thousandths of an inch or smaller. The main problem is that small pieces of Teflon, the coating of the actual drill used, need to be excluded from analysis.
The resulting powder will be heated to vaporize it and the resulting gases will be analyzed for traces of carbon-based organics so see if life has been possible in Mars past. The analysis can take days or possibly weeks.
Overall an impressive achievement but do remember that the Russians drilled little holes in Venus to analyze on the spot back in the late seventies and early eighties
For more information about the Russian program see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera
http://www.mentallandscape.com/V_Venera11.htm with details about the drills, the mass-spectrometer, gas chromatograph etc. in ´78! #EveryDayScience
😛 NASA is doing a good job on keeping us updated on the tiniest things.
(When drilling into painted grey cement walls, it would look the same)
Of course the Venus probes never lasted more than 2 hours on the hot surface. Opportunity has been going strong for over 8 years (initially planned for 90 days).
=^.^=
Sure +Joost Schuur Venus is not exactly a friendly environment so these landers didn´t last long. However as a technological achievement at a fraction of the $2,5bn cost of the Rover program and thirty years earlier the Russian achievement is worth mentioning.
updated the post with a more detailed link to the Russian program
+Max Huijgen it's worth bringing up the Lunokhod rovers, which drove further on the Moon in the 70s than NASA has to date.
True +Joost Schuur but Rover will get moving again.