Blogs

Blogs
Earth planning date: Monday, Aug. 5, 2024 After the usual morning routine of doing some engineering housekeeping, Curiosity continues to take some remote science observations. We take a ChemCam LIBS observation  and a Mastcam image of the “Peeler Lake” target, a dark, nodular target that appears to be more erosion-resistant than nearby rocks.
Posted August 8, 2024
Blogs
Earth planning date: Friday, Aug. 2, 2024 Prepare your party poppers, horns, and confetti! On Aug. 6 (EDT), after 4,265 Martian sols since Curiosity first landed in Gale Crater, the rover will be turning 12 years old. I still remember the excitement of watching Curiosity’s landing back when I started high school. Now, as a […]
Posted August 5, 2024
Blogs
Earth planning date: Wednesday, July 31, 2024 As Cat mentioned on Monday, today’s plan is a second attempt at our Drill Sol 1 activities. We’ve shifted the target on Kings Canyon a little bit, but the activities remain the same — a preload test to ensure that we’re able to safely drill here, and contact […]
Posted August 1, 2024
Blogs
Earth planning date: Monday, July 29, 2024 Our weekend drill preload test on the target “Kings Canyon” (shown in the accompanying MAHLI image) didn’t give us the full range of data we need to move forward with the full drilling process. This coming Wednesday, we hope to rerun our preload test on Kings Canyon or somewhere […]
Posted July 30, 2024
Blogs
Earth planning date: Friday, July 26, 2024 Today’s 2-sol weekend plan is our first taste of a new location for a potential sampling campaign. We call today’s plan type: Drill Sol 1 – triage contact science. We arrived this morning to a lovely new workspace. The science team has been eagerly observing these lighter-toned rocks […]
Posted July 29, 2024
Blogs
Earth planning date: Wednesday, July 24, 2024 Happy Wednesday, terrestrials! We wrapped up our Mammoth Lakes drill campaign only three weeks ago and are already looking for our next drill site. This will be the last drill campaign in the Gediz Vallis region, an area on Mars the Curiosity team has had their eyes on since sol […]
Posted July 29, 2024
Blogs
Earth planning date: Monday, July 22, 2024 Last week we wrapped up activities at Fairview Dome and started heading south towards our next potential drill location in the Upper Gediz Vallis ridge campaign. We had about a 29-meter (about 95 feet) drive over the weekend, which set us up nicely for contact science and remote […]
Posted July 24, 2024
Blogs
Earth planning date: Friday, July 19, 2024 As usual with our weekend plans, we are packing a lot of science into today’s three-sol plan. I had the fun of planning a complex and large set of arm activities as the Arm Rover Planner today. Since we did not drive in Wednesday’s plan, we still are […]
Posted July 24, 2024
Blogs
Earth planning date: Wednesday, July 17, 2024 We started our day at an outcrop called “Fairview Dome,” a light-colored rock so big that it can easily be seen from orbit! We have had our eye on Fairview Dome since Curiosity descended into the Gediz Vallis channel. As a geologist who has spent a lot of […]
Posted July 19, 2024
Blogs
Earth planning date: Friday, July 12, 2024 Curiosity, now heading uphill from the Mammoth Lakes drill site, has focused on a very interesting exposure of conglomerate rocks, consisting of pebbles cemented together by a fine-grained matrix material.
Posted July 16, 2024
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