File:PIA17762-MarsCuriosityRover-DAN-2M-Pulses-20140129.png

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Summary

Description	English: PIA17762: Russian Hydrogen-Checking Instrument on Curiosity Fires 2 Millionth Pulse http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA17762 The Russian-made instrument on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity for detecting water that is adsorbed into soil or bound into shallow underground minerals has fired its 2 millionth pulse of energetic neutrons into the ground. It reached this milestone in late January 2014, not quite 18 months after the rover's landing on Mars in early August 2012. Each pulse into the ground lasts about one microsecond. The instrument, Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN), measures the flow of neutrons with different energy levels returning from the ground, and their delay times, as an indication of the amount and depth of hydrogen in the ground beneath the rover. Any detected hydrogen would most likely be in the form of water. This graph shows the cumulative total of pulses from DAN's pulsing neutron generator (PNG) rising to the 2 million level (vertical axis) as time progressed from the start of the mission. The top horizontal axis is labeled by Earth dates; the bottom one by the number of sols (Martian days) into the mission. Each pulse DAN fires includes approximately 10 million high-energy neutrons, so the total number of neutrons fired by the device on Mars is about 20,000,000,000,000. That is about one-fifth of DAN's supply of these "bullets" for use during Curiosity's investigations on Mars. DAN detects water down to about 2 feet (60 centimeters) deep. During the rover's investigations so far, data from DAN have enabled researchers to calculate that an upper portion of that zone averages about 1.5 percent water content, by weight, and a deeper portion averages about twice as much. The amount of water has varied slightly along the route. Russia's Space Research Institute developed DAN in close cooperation with the N.L. Dukhov All-Russia Research Institute of Automatics, Moscow, and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna. More information about Curiosity is online at http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/.
Date	1 February 2014, 14:53:32
Source	http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA17762.jpg
Author	NASA/JPL-Caltech/Russian Space Research Institute

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	This file is in the public domain in the United States because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted". (See Template:PD-USGov, NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy.)
	Warnings: Use of NASA logos, insignia and emblems is restricted per U.S. law 14 CFR 1221. The NASA website hosts a large number of images from the Soviet/Russian space agency, and other non-American space agencies. These are not necessarily in the public domain. Materials based on Hubble Space Telescope data may be copyrighted if they are not explicitly produced by the STScI.[1] See also {{PD-Hubble}} and {{Cc-Hubble}}. The SOHO (ESA & NASA) joint project implies that all materials created by its probe are copyrighted and require permission for commercial non-educational use. [2] Images featured on the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) web site may be copyrighted. [3] The National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) site has been known to host copyrighted content. Its photo gallery FAQ states that all of the images in the photo gallery are in the public domain "Unless otherwise noted."

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	Date/Time	Thumbnail	Dimensions	User	Comment
current	17:14, 16 July 2015		1,502 × 934 (81 KB)	Cmdrjameson	Compressed with pngout. Reduced by 30kB (27% decrease).
	19:55, 1 February 2014		1,502 × 934 (111 KB)	Drbogdan	User created page with UploadWizard