Sols 3425-3427: Vuggy Buggy

I learned a new word today: vug. Vugs are small cavities or pits on a rock surface and the rock in our workspace today was noticeably “vuggy.” Particularly, the triangular rock face in the bottom center portion of this Navcam image. This vuggy rock in the “Hartle Loup” outcrop seemed particularly unique relative to the other rocks on the Greenheugh Pediment that we’ve seen to-date. We chose this triangular rock face as one of our two contact science targets today (termed “Burn Mouth”) and the flatter rock face to its right as a second contact science target with DRT (termed “Donkey Trail”). ChemCam will also use LIBS on both targets.

In addition to the contact science, we continued this week’s effort to image as much of the Greenheugh Pediment and Gediz Vallis Ridge as we can from this location with Mastcam and ChemCam RMI. We will likely never have this perspective on this portion of those features, so we’re being very thorough with our imaging. ENV will use ChemCam to study atmospheric dust, ice, and gas abundances as well as take a series of dust devil movies, cloud movies, and measurements of atmospheric opacity.

Written by Scott Guzewich, Atmospheric Scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center