Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, center,  welcomed Jim Erickson, Project Manager for JPL’s NASA Exploration Rover Program and Colette Lohr, JPL Systems Engineer, to commemorate the  one year anniversary of the Rover Curiosity’s successful landing on Mars at the Sept. 24 County Board of Supervisors meeting..

Seven weeks after touching down, Curiosity used its hammering drill to bore a 2.5 inch hole into the “John Klein outcrop,” making it the first time any rover had ever drilled into a rock on another planet.

Key chemical ingredients needed for life were found in the gray powder Curiosity drilled out of the John Klein outcrop, including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon. The fine-grained rock also contained clay minerals, suggesting a long-ago aqueous environment, perhaps a lake.

With this evidence in hand, the Curiosity team announced in early March that the Rover’s landing site could have supported microbial life billions of years ago.