Sol 1681-1683: Kicking the Tires

Our exploration of the light-and-dark-toned bands continues today as Curiosity has completed another successful drive and now has a promising block of light-toned bedrock in its latest workspace.

Despite a few bumps in the road, Curiosity tenaciously pushed on and has finally arrived at the intriguing light- and dark-toned bands.

When I opened the workspace imagery this morning, I was happy to see some nice big rock outcrops in reach of the rover and started to pick some nice targets for contact science with APXS, before re...

Curiosity speeds towards an exciting new region, specifically close to an area that, from orbit, has visible light and dark banding.

Coming in to planning today, we were greeted with another spectacular view back down Mt. Sharp and the distant crater rim visible through the haze.

Some days, the process of preparing a plan to be uplinked to our intrepid rover goes beautifully smoothly, with everyone and everything working together in near-perfect synchrony. Other days, it ca...

Our view out of the window, in this case the front hazard camera, is spectacular today, as you can see above.

Curiosity is making good progress towards our next potential drill location in a region of alternating light and dark banding.

Curiosity continues its bumpy travels across the bedrock blocks this weekend. We got the good news this morning that we would be able to safely do contact science in the plan!

The rover is currently driving across bumpy terrain consisting of rounded bedrock sticking up between dark sand and drift as she drives south, and slightly uphill, along the Mt. Sharp Ascent Route.

The team knew coming into planning today that there would be a discussion about which activities should take the highest priority.

Most long weekend plans are packed with lots of fun science, and this weekend’s plan - to get us through the US Labor Day holiday - was no exception.

Today, we’re back on track with planning with a lot of discussions about the degree to which we should copy and paste the original plan intended for sols 3932 to 3933.

In the next 2 sols we are wrapping up our mini campaign at the upper Gediz Vallis Ridge.

Curiosity successfully navigated the numerous resistant, dark boulders (once included in the Gediz Vallis ridge deposit and the focus of our recent investigations), 20 degree slopes and broken up b...

We decided to forgo our usual drive to fit more science in while we are still on our upper Gediz Vallis ridge (uGVr) waypoint. We want to be absolutely certain that we've collected all the data we ...

While Southern California was hunkering down during a rare hurricane-ish weather event, our contrasting dry and cold rover was working through the weekend plan we sent up last Friday.

The Gediz Vallis Ridge has been a long-term, and, at times, seemingly impossible goal of the Curiosity Rover mission.

Curiosity had a successful drive on Monday and is now positioned at the transition between lighter and darker-toned materials with a myriad of exciting geologic targets to investigate in the coming...

Since leaving the “Jau” crater cluster, we have been driving to an area at the base of the ridge which appears to mark a contact between the underlying “sulfate unit” bedrock and the overlying ridge.

In this weekend's plan, Curiosity is behaving much as you would as you climb a mountain.

Curiosity continues her steady winter drive through the Kalavryta quadrangle with her sights set on the Gediz Vallis ridge ahead!

To start the first plan of its 12th Earth year on Mars, Curiosity brushed the rock target "Ouranoupoli" and acquired an APXS analysis as well as MAHLI and Mastcam images.

We’re planning a special weekend today – Saturday is the 11th (Earth) anniversary of Curiosity’s landing!

We start this two-sol plan with a nap to save up power. After waking up in the afternoon, we do a short block of imaging.

Today we wrapped a single-sol plan for sol 3906. Our planning for this sol was primarily constrained by power.

Curiosity will start off the morning on Sol 3905 with an APXS touch-and-go observation of target “Novo Paraiso” (a junction of polygonal fractures on a flat block of bedrock in the rover’s workspac...

Our Thursday drive on sol 3901 was successful and put us ~30 meters further from Bradbury Landing!

The plan for Sol 3900 starts with Navcam and Mastcam measurements of dust in the atmosphere and a Mastcam mosaic of a nearby crater.

The rover engineers yet again did a fantastic job navigating Curiosity through this tricky terrain of fractured blocks and sand.

Today’s single sol plan takes us further into our road trip through the Jau crater cluster.

Curiosity is working her way through the “Jau” crater cluster, with the goal of trying to understand how all of these small craters formed and have since been eroded.

Today we only planned one sol because Thursday is a "soliday," a day off for the rover to allow Earth and Mars time to resynchronize.

Today we planned a two sol “Touch and Go” plan.

We did indeed do a touch and go in Wednesday’s plan, and at downlink we learned that both the touch (contact science on target “Sounion”) and go (a ~15 m drive) completed as planned.

A blue hue inches over the horizon illuminating a sea of rocks scattered across the landscape like the scales of a fish.

This weekend, Curiosity went into runout and was unable to execute the Sols 3882-3884 plan.

Happy Friday, Earthlings! Few things are better than planning an action-packed weekend on Mars.

While many of us were up late watching fireworks here on Earth, Curiosity wrapped up a very busy weekend on Mars.

Our latest assessment period over sols 3872 and 3873 was a “touch and go” plan: some contact science and other observations, followed by a drive.

We made it! We are peeking up over the edge of the ridge that we have been trying to climb for a few weeks now.

We started planning today with the great news that our drive was successful!

Today we started planning at a location short of our intended drive end position.

Time, it never seems to pass at a constant rate.

Curiosity is currently trekking east along a small detour due to recent challenges on steep, rocky, sandy terrain.

Hearing today’s drive completed as planned for the third time in a row was a refreshing change from last week when Curiosity was struggling to get up a rocky and sandy slope

It appears that Curiosity’s recent traverse has turned a new leaf as this is the second successful drive after lots of slipping and sliding.

After several attempts to drive through difficult terrain, Curiosity successfully completed a drive of about 11 m on Sol 3857!

Curiosity has been diligently driving uphill through a canyon but the terrain right near the crest has proven to be challenging due to a combination of steep slopes, bumpy bedrock, and fine-grained...

This blog covers two planning shifts this week, for a total of four sols of activities.

There’s a special sort of hopeful-nervousness I feel on a weekend with a challenging drive.

Today, when the team came in for planning our 3-sol weekend plan, we discovered the terrain had bitten us once again and ended the drive early.

What do you do when you are driving through challenging terrain? Well, hit a new record!

If you have ever had the experience of hiking up a sand dune, you can recall the feeling in your legs as you worked extra hard to stay stable and make forward progress as the sand shifted and moved...

May has been a busy month for Curiosity.

Curiosity successfully wrapped up the “Ubajara” drill campaign over the weekend with some imaging of the drill tailings.

The biggest question coming into today’s plan was whether or not the SAM team wanted to go ahead with their Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometry (GCMS) experiment on the Ubajara sample after gettin...

As I’m writing this, it’s about 8:30 pm on sol 3831 in Gale crater: ~16 hours after our SAM instrument ran its EGA experiment (which Abigail described so clearly in yesterday’s blog!).

Curiosity is still hard at work analyzing results from the Ubajara drilled sample.

We are in the midst of our 38th successful drill campaign, analyzing the “Ubajara” bedrock, a sample of what we have been referring to as the “above Marker band” bedrock.

Drilling campaigns force us to sit and stop, whilst the “Ubajara” drill sample is analyzed.

Coming in for sol 3825 planning today, the team was very excited to see that we successfully drilled a new hole on the Ubajara target.

A lot of preparation goes into assessing a potential drill site on Mars, and the “Ubajara” target got the usual treatment.

We continue our triage of the “Ubajara” potential drill site in this plan.

Tactical planning started an hour and a half later than usual this morning, because we had to wait for better-illuminated Navcam images of the Ubajara block.

Our weekend drive got us into a good position to attempt to examine a block we might attempt to drill.

We arrived this morning to Curiosity at a new location with some bright toned, and more rounded rocks in our vicinity.

I am ‘shadow’ Geo science team lead (GeoSTL) today, helping a new colleague to learn the details of the role.

We have cleared the canyon! The accompanying Left Navcam image shows the view back down the canyon, showing all those tricky rocks we had to climb over.

It always feels great to reach the top of a mountain, especially when the path was challenging. While the top of Mt. Sharp still looms above Curiosity, the team was very excited to see that in the ...

To quote our project scientist, Ashwin, it was clear when we assessed our downlink that Curiosity had almost literally taken “two steps forward and one steps back” during the drive in our previous ...

Curiosity is carefully and patiently driving up a local canyon, named Marker Band valley, across a variably tilting surface that is scattered with horizontally banded bedrock and patches of sand.

Here in Toronto, the weather feels like summer. But in Gale Crater it’s coming towards the end of Autumn.

After a short bump in yesterday’s plan to get to a better workspace, Curiosity is poised to get a detailed look at the next stratigraphic unit in this small canyon.

As you can see in the above image, the terrain our rover drivers is navigating is challenging - slippery sand surrounding big, wheel-unfriendly rocks.

As Ken noted in his recent blog, our beloved rover spent much of the last week completing a software upgrade while the science team met virtually to synthesize and discuss results.

An issue at a Deep Space Network station prevented the Sol 3785 plan from being sent to Mars, so none of those planned activities occurred.

Signs of spring are all around as most of us come on shift from various locations within the northern hemisphere today.

Due to some delayed downlink of images, we didn’t receive all the information we needed in time to do contact science today.

Curiosity is ten and a half years into operating in Gale cater, a concept that before and even a few years after landing seemed to be an impossible dream.

Monday's planned drive positioned Curiosity with a new workspace to investigate.

Our Tapo Caparo drill campaign is officially concluded and our wheels are turning again!

With a jam packed three-sol plan on her plate, Curiosity won’t have time to kick back and relax this weekend!

Today, we finally leave Tapo Caparo and begin something new. But... actually, we are not going very far.

Today’s 2-sol plan wraps up our remaining drill campaign and workspace liens at Tapo Caparo.

Curiosity has spent the last week or so balancing power constraints to enable remote science and environmental observations, along with the analyses of the “Tapo Caparo” Marker band drilled sample ...

What a contrast! When I look to my right, snow is accumulating on my window (yes, I am under the roof, if you are wondering) and in front of me are pictures of a beautiful red landscape!

We had another later start to planning today, and again are planning only a single sol. In a lot of ways, the plan is similar to yestersol’s.

This morning’s plan started a bit uncertain as we waited for the SAM team to decide whether to proceed with further analysis of the Tapo Caparo drill sample.

Curiosity is in the middle of a drill campaign at Tapo Caparo to characterize the rhythmically laminated unit of the Marker Band.

One of my favorite parts of mission operations is working with colleagues to react quickly to new information, both from the rover and from our ground systems on Earth.

Today we planned a single sol plan.

The tactical operations team was very happy this morning because it appears that a sample of the Tapo Caparo bedrock was successfully acquired!

Yesterday, on our weekly day off from planning, the team awaited Drill Sol 1 triage data to confirm if Tapo Caparo seemed more drillable.

We continue to drive along the Marker Band and found ourselves this morning (as planned) in an area of strongly laminated bedrock.

After a holiday/soliday weekend, we’re back to work with today’s single sol plan, and there’s a lot to pack into it.

Today, I was heading for my computer when my colleagues went off to celebrate the end of the working week.

The team was eagerly awaiting our downlink this morning to hear how the drill attempt from Sol 3742 went.

Today we are drilling the Dinira target! The scientists and engineers have been closely working together to adjust the drilling strategy to give us the best shot of a successful drill while also ma...

The team is taking a little time to work through the best strategy for drilling here, so today’s plan just focused on collecting additional contact science and remote sensing data from around the f...

In Monday's two-sol plan we completed a short drive to another drill location as we continued our attempt to acquire a sample of the Marker Band for potential analysis by SAM and CheMin.

Curiosity successfully followed her tracks and is back near the Encanto drill site! With a beautiful workspace in view, the science and operations team had a busy day of planning on the “Marker ban...

Today we made a three-sol plan for the weekend including contact science, lot of imaging, and a long drive back toward the previously attempted marker band drill target, Encanto.

The drive in our last plan took us to an area that appeared somewhat smoother and brighter from orbit (as well as from drive direction imaging) on the so-called “Marker band” that we have been inve...

The Sol 3727 drive went well, positioning the rover at the transition in the Marker Band that was the goal of the drive.

Today we came in to see another really beautiful workspace.

Your blogger is a little tired right now… I am just back from a field trip to the salt flats in Botswana, guided by colleagues from BUIST University, walking, viewing and sampling in 38 °C heat.

Despite giving it the “old college try,” Curiosity’s attempt to drill into the Marker Band at the “Encanto” site did not reach sampling depth.

In the previous plan, Curiosity conducted a preliminary assessment of the potential drill target “Encanto” (as seen in the above MAHLI image) and today we received the data.

Yesterday’s plan executed successfully including a short bump that placed us in front of an interesting block that may just contain our next drilled target!

Curiosity's science and engineering team members were back at it today after a holiday long weekend, while Curiosity itself was ready and waiting after its own soliday weekend.

We received the data that we had been missing during Wednesday’s planning, so we hit the ground running today, ready to plan for contact science and our drive onto the Marker Band in this new locat...

At this point in the mission, the team is very good at responding to tactical surprises.

Mastcam image of the 3708 workspace.

Curiosity is continuing to make the most of the new year – both on Earth and on Mars which recently entered Mars Year 37, only a few days before the new year on Earth.

The team came into our first day of planning for 2023 to learn that all our holiday activities had executed as expected!