Curiosity Rover chose the first goal for his manipulator - a stone the size of a soccer ball.

Stone Jake Mateevic has about 25 cm in height and 40 cm in width. (Here and below the image NASA / JPL-Caltech.)

The machine is about 2.5 m from the boulder and somewhere halfway from the landing field name Bradbury to the place called Glenelg. In the coming days, the operators will give the command to touch the stone spectrometer and make close-up photos.

Cobble was named in honor of Jake Mateevici, responsible for operations on the surface in the Mars Science Laboratory, the brainchild of which was Curiosity. Researcher died on August 20 at the age of 64 years. Mateevic served also all previous Rovers NASA: Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity.

To reach the stone, the Rover spent on the road for six days, passing through 22-37 m per day.

Glenelg the Rover first time will try to analyze the powder remaining from the drilling of the breed. Here overlap areas of three types, one of them is lighter, and the other stronger riddled with craters than the one on which now moves Curiosity. The bright region is of particular interest, for it all night saves the day's heat.

"The closer this light area, the better visible thin dark lines of unknown origin", says project Mars Science Laboratory John Grotzinger from the California Institute of technology (USA).

But mast camera Curiosity looks not only downwards. The Rover also photographed the passage of the Martian moon Deimos and Phobos across the solar disk. This portion of long-term studies of changes in the orbits of the satellites. Similar observations were Rovers Spirit and Opportunity arrived at the Red planet in 2004.

"The orbit of Phobos very slowly approaching Mars, Deimos getting farther," explains mark Lemmon of Texas University A&m In the calculations of this movement is still uncertainty, because the internal structure of Mars is not fully understood. In addition, Phobos leads to small changes of the form of the red planet (in this way the Moon causes the tides on the Earth), and these changes in turn affect the satellite's orbit.