A group of researchers at Johns Hopkins University has found a new purpose for the Mars Curiosity rover, which has been ambling around the Gale Crater on Mars for nearly seven years. The team discovered a way to use the rover to gather the first surface gravity measurements on a planet other than Earth.
Details on the new measurements, based on reams of data the rover produces every day, are published today in Science.
“Curiosity, essentially, has a new science instrument six and a half years into its mission,” said the lead author Kevin Lewis, an assistant professor in Johns Hopkins University’s Earth and Planetary Sciences department. “This allows us to get new information about the subsurface of Mars in ways the rover was never designed to do.”
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