Glimpse of 'Bagnold Dunes' Edging Mount Sharp. (NASA / Mars Curiosity)

NASA's Curiosity is going where no rover has ever gone before: Martian sand dunes.

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Therover will be closing in on an area called the "Bagnold Dunes," which the Mars researchers affectionately named afterRalph Alger Bagnold, the father of dune exploration. The robotic vehicle is expected to arrive shortly after Thanksgiving, likely after the first week of December, according to scientists with knowledge of the rover's path.

"We’re slowly making our way uphill to study the rocks on Mount Sharp, andwe have to cross the dunes to get further uphill," Ray Arvidson, science adviser for mobility for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, told weather.com.

Arvidson's job is to help the engineers get the rover from point A to point B safely and efficiently. The scientists have been using the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), a mineral detector, in mapping the dunes to help navigate the rover.

"Mount Sharp is a very large and shallow slope of a mountain, so we've been climbing it for awhile now, but we're getting to a place where there's these large dunes. Sand piled up by the mountain. To get higher and higher, we have to drive through them,"Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity Project Scientist, told weather.com.

"We've known there's been dunes since the 1970s, but it's only been recently from the MRO that we've seen they're active," Vasavada added.

The BagnoldDunes are approximately 30-feet high, and multiple patches are roughly as wide as a football field. The NASA scientists say the dune passage will take them into 2016.

"The spectral instruments at the dunes are indicating that the sand grains are made from lava flows; they’re all broken up and ground up by wind, and it's a type of a rock called basalt, like the kind seen in Hawaii," Arvidson explained.

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Using the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on MRO, also known as HiRISE, scientists will be able to examine the surface of the dunes closely and after repeating coverage, measure the movement of the dunes.

"We can study dunes from Earth because we can go right up to them," Vasavada noted. "We're going to see how it operates on a planet with an atmosphere that's only one percent as thick as Earth's and gravity that's only a third [of] Earth's."

Nadine Barlow, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northern Arizona University, told weather.com that it will be interesting to learn if the lower surface gravity and/or thinner atmosphere affect sand dune formation differently.

"It is an interesting area since it will (a) be the first time a rover has explored an actual sand dune field on Mars, and (b) the dune field is actively moving," observed Barlow. "This investigation will help us answer a number of questions about eolian processes (relating to impacts of wind) operating in the thin Martian atmosphere. For example, are the sand particles making up the dune field locally derived or were they transported in from a greater distance? We know from the various rover and lander sites across Mars that the fine dust component is pretty homogenous around the planet, probably because of the global dust storms that Mars can experience."

The scientists will be careful in approaching the surface of the dunes, as they potentially could be a sand trap for the rover.

To be safe, Curiosity will do a "toe dip," just enough to excavate the sand, expose the depth and gather up samples to put into the two instruments inside the robot.

"We can use our wheels to dig into the sand, one thing we're going to do is test how well the rover can drive, we call that a 'toe dip' because we don't commit the rover to drive way into a dune where we could get stuck, so it's like putting your toe in the swimming pool, just a couple meters into the dune," Vasavada explained."We may do that as early as next week. The second thing we'll do is use one wheel to dig a little trench into the dune and then we actually scoop up the sand. We'll study that trench and deliver it to the laboratories that are inside the rover. One of them is a mineralogy instrument, and then the other one will study the chemical composition of the sand."

Arvidson said the rover's study of the dunes could be instrumental in our understanding of Mars's surface.

"The reason to investigate the dunes is to understand the current environment of Mars and see how wind has shaped features on the planet,"Arvidson explained."In geology, there's a paradigm that the present is key to the past."