Blogs

Blogs
Earth planning date: Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2024 The star of today’s plan is SAM’s GCMS, which continues our analysis of the “Kings Canyon” drill sample. As Natalie mentioned, this is a relatively energy-hungry activity, but luckily our last plan left us in a good position to not only complete the GCMS experiment but also fit […]
Posted August 15, 2024
Blogs
Earth planning date: Monday, Aug. 12, 2024 The SAM EGA over the weekend was successful, and that means we’re well on our way to planning the GCMS (Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometry) on our “Kings Canyon” drill sample! GCMS is an energy-intensive activity, so we’ll be using today’s two-sol plan mainly for recharging our battery and […]
Posted August 15, 2024
Blogs
Earth planning date: Friday, Aug. 9, 2024 The focus for this three-sol weekend plan is delivering a portion of the Kings Canyon drill sample to SAM for Evolved Gas Analysis (EGA), following on from a successful CheMin analysis. The CheMin and SAM analyses, coupled with APXS and ChemCam analyses, will tell us about the composition […]
Posted August 12, 2024
Blogs
Earth planning date: Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024 Curiosity is admiring our latest drill hole, “Kings Canyon.” Today’s plan is dedicated to continuing analysis of the drilled sample, including preconditioning for SAM evolved gas analysis (EGA) scheduled for the weekend.
Posted August 12, 2024
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
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