NEWS OF THE W EEK
NEW MARS ROVER LANDS SAFELY SPACE SCIENCE: NASA’s Curiosity touches down on the Red Planet after a daring, cliffhanger approach
Nancy W. Hinman, a geochemist at the University of Montana, says the crater is a “perfect site” because it has both clay and evaporite deposits, both of which on Earth preserve evidence of organic matter. Mission staff will spend the next month testing Curiosity’s array of instruments and taking the rover for its first spin, project scientist John P. Grotzinger said. The rover includes two laboratories for analyzing rock, soil, and gas samples via mass spectrometry,
One of Curiosity’s first images of Mars captured Mount Sharp, whose layered geological deposits the rover will explore. N ASA/JP L-CALT ECH
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UGS AND HIGH-FIVES among mission staff
marked the risky but successful landing last week of Curiosity, the newest of the National Aeronautics & Space Administration’s Mars rovers. If all continues to go well, the craft will spend the next two years searching for evidence that the Red Planet has ever been able to support life. As the craft touched down at 1:32 AM EDT on Aug. 6, mission control engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory jumped up from their monitors in relief after the high-stakes landing; a few shed tears. Minutes later, shouts erupted as Curiosity sent back its first images, including one of its own shadow against the dusty martian surface. The 1-ton Curiosity is the “most sophisticated roving laboratory ever sent to another planet,” said John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, at a post-touchdown briefing. Curiosity, sent to Mars at a cost of $2.5 billion, will search for signs of life and probe the planet’s watery history through detailed analysis of its geology and organic compounds. In what NASA engineers dubbed “seven minutes of terror,” Curiosity hurtled into Mars’s atmosphere at 13,000 mph and parachuted toward the surface. It powered its descent with eight rocket engines. According to NASA engineer Adam Steltzner, who also spoke at the briefing, Curiosity landed “in a nice flat spot” in Mars’s Gale Crater. NASA scientists think the site’s stratified deposits could help them reconstruct Mars’s geological history.
tunable laser spectroscopy, gas chromatography, and X-ray diffraction. Curiosity is powered by a plutonium-based thermoelectric generator that could last longer than the mission time span, NASA engineers said. The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which landed in 2004, they noted, long outlasted their original missions. Opportunity is still roving the surface of Mars.—DEIRDRE LOCKWOOD VIDEO ONLINE
Watch ACS’s Bytesize Science takes a closer look at Curiosity’s science labs at cenm.ag/marsrover.
EMPLOYMENT Dutch firm DSM will slash 1,000 positions as profits tumble The Dutch specialty chemical company DSM says it will cut 1,000 jobs—4% of its workforce—as part of a companywide program to reduce costs. The move follows a 14% drop in the firm’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization to $359 million in the second quarter compared with the year-ago period. Sales were flat at $2.8 billion. More than half of the job cuts will be made in Europe, including about 400 in the Netherlands. The company says its plans include the closure of a plant in Sweden producing lipids and a “comprehensive program” to reduce fixed
costs and accelerate sales of innovative specialty chemicals in its engineering plastics business. DSM expects its program, which will be implemented over the next 18 months, to deliver annual savings of about $185 million by 2014. This program is in addition to alreadyannounced restructuring initiatives at DSM’s resins business that aim to deliver annual savings of more than $30 million by 2013. CEO Feike Sijbesma blames the company’s dip in financial performance partly on weakness in caprolactam, a
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nylon intermediate. DSM is introducing its cost-reduction program now because of “challenging developments in some markets,” particularly Europe, Sijbesma adds. DSM continues to make acquisitions despite the savings plan. A day after revealing the cuts, it announced it would acquire the Brazilian animal nutrition supplements producer Tortuga Companhia Zootécnica Agrária for $575 million. Sijbesma says the purchase will bring to $2.2 billion the value of nutrition-related acquisitions the firm has made in the past two years.—ALEX SCOTT
