Our Curiosity Mars rover recently drilled into the Martian bedrock on Mount Sharp and uncovered the highest amounts of clay minerals ever seen during the mission. The two pieces of rock that the rover targeted are nicknamed “Aberlady” and “Kilmarie” and they appear in a new selfie taken by the rover on May 12, 2019, the 2,405th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.
On April 6, 2019, Curiosity drilled the first piece of bedrock called Aberlady, revealing the clay cache. So, what’s so interesting about clay? Clay minerals usually form in water, an ingredient essential to life. All along its 7-year journey, Curiosity has discovered clay minerals in mudstones that formed as river sediment settled within ancient lakes nearly 3.5 billion years ago. As with all water on Mars, the lakes eventually dried up.
But Curiosity does more than just look at the ground. Even with all the drilling and analyzing, Curiosity took time on May 7, 2019 and May 12, 2019 to gaze at the clouds drifting over the Martian surface. Observing clouds can help scientists calculate wind speeds on the Red Planet.
For more on Curiosity and our other Mars missions like InSight, visit: https://mars.nasa.gov.
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the God Shu (wearing the feather) and the Goddess Tefnut (lioness-heaeded, wearing the Solar disk with the Uraeus). Temple of the Goddess Isis at west ‘Uaset’-Thebes, detail from the north-east wall of the Sanctuary
For this season, the farmers we work for are letting us use a field to grow some produce to sell at market. And we decided to try out some no till techniques since this is pretty low risk for us. This past winter we tarped off the section we wanted to use with some plastic that we got for free from a farmer friend. I think we laid it all out in early January. We originally used landscaping staples but found that the plastic tore really easily so rock bags work better.
And then we waited!
We occasionally had to go out and adjust the plastic when it was really windy and it came loose from the rock bags but other than that we didn’t do anything. Ideally, what we wanted to happen was the plastic warm the ground enough to cause seeds to geminate but then they wouldn’t get any light and ultimately die. Thus helping to reduce the weeds that would come up in the spring.
Then this spring it looked like this! Very nice and weed free, plus lots of organic matter added in. We also had to use a metal detector to find our staples since they had torn out.
At this point we broad forked half of the row we needed to plant and then used a cultivator to break up the clumps. I think if we had needed to we could’ve seeded right into the beds at that point. But instead we transplanted dill, parsley and basil. (The basil wasn’t doing well in the greenhouse because it was staying too wet and didn’t have great air flow so we decided to plant it early instead of risking it getting diseased.)
We put some row cover on to protect against cold overnight lows and pests like caterpillars and groundhogs and there ya have it!
The only worrisome parts we’ve encountered so far are: 1) there’s a lot of Johnson grass in this area because it hasn’t been in production and J grass is a pain in the butt and hard to kill. 2) the ground was harder than we would’ve ideally wanted for transplanting but again, this area has probably never been tilled but has been driven on a lot so it’s pretty compact. I don’t think one season of cultivating the ground is going to loosen the soil up but hopefully it’ll be enough for the plants
Awesome! You might see if you can get your hands on some mycorrhizae to help build the soil / soil life, especially if you think you might be doing this for more than a season. We’ve been experimenting with different products, so far ‘Mykos Xtreme Gardening’ seems the most promising - https://www.xtreme-gardening.com/mykos
