Earth planning date: Friday, April 12, 2024

As we've continued to drive up into Gediz Vallis, the ground in front of us has become increasingly littered with large rocks sticking up out of the sand. While certainly good for geology, these rocks frequently slow down our forward progress, as even our team of skilled rover planners can't anticipate every challenge that Mars loves to throw at us. On Wednesday, we planned a drive of just over 20 metres to bring us closer to the edge of the Gediz Vallis channel. When we arrived this morning, we learned that the drive had ended early after about nine metres. A quick analysis of the post-drive Front Hazcam images revealed that Curiosity's front right wheel was perched atop one of the many rocks along the planned route. Although there were initially concerns that this would prevent us from safely unstowing the arm to do contact science at this location, it was eventually determined that there was no risk of the rover moving from atop its perch if we did so.

Although we didn't make it to our intended location at the edge of the channel, this weekend's plan is still packed full of science. We start off with a hefty two hours of activities, starting off with a ChemCam LIBS of the bedrock target "Kaweah River." ChemCam RMI will then take a 10x1 mosaic of Fascination Turret, which has featured in many mission update posts over the last few weeks. After ChemCam finishes its work for this first sol, we have a full hour of Mastcam imaging. This hour begins with documentation images of the LIBS target, then continues with a 6x4 mosaic of the area we will be driving towards. We'll then take some pictures of "Goodale Mountain," a vertically-oriented fractured bedrock block about 6.5 metres from our current location. Our big Mastcam activity for this plan is a 22x3 mosaic of a bedrock trough that can be seen in orbital imagery. Mastcam finishes off its first sol with a mosaic of some rocks off to the right side of the rover. These two hours wrap up with a Navcam suprahorizon movie to observe dust and cloud activity over Gale, as well as a Navcam line-of-sight to measure the amount of dust in the crater.

Not content with the geology team getting nearly two hours of activities in, the environmental science team will get their own two hours thanks to a Navcam "shunt prevention" activity. You may have heard that it's not a good idea to leave your phone or computer plugged in and fully charged for an extended period of time because it will hurt their batteries' maximum capacity. The same thing is true for our rover. Because this plan is not particularly power-hungry, the rover would be at a high state-of-charge for longer than we would prefer. So, this observation was developed several years ago to eat up some of that extra power while getting some extra bonus science. The version used in this plan consists of eight dust devil movies and four suprahorizon movies.

Following an afternoon nap, Curiosity will wake up about an hour before sunset for some arm activities. First, APXS will be touched to the target "Hetch Hetchy." We will then perform a DRT "brush height test." DRT will be lowered to three different heights above Hetch Hetchy and spun to brush the target. In addition to the usual Navcam and Hazcam images that typically accompany DRT activities, MAHLI will image Hetch Hetchy before and after each height to determine how well DRT is removing the dust at each distance from the target. Overnight, APXS will take two lengthy integrations, first of its calibration target and then of Hetch Hetchy before the arm is retracted.

The second sol contains more science time as well as this plan's drive. Once again, we begin with a LIBS observation, this time of "Twin Lakes," which is located about halfway between Kaweah River and Hetch Hetchy. We'll then take yet another RMI mosaic of Fascination Turret, then image this plan's second LIBS target with Mastcam. As usual, environmental science observations round out the second sol, with a series of short movies looking for dust devils around the rover and a Navcam mosaic of the rover deck to monitor how the accumulated dust shifts with the wind and as we drive.

Having driven away from our current location, the third sol of this plan will be focused on untargeted remote science. This includes a ChemCam AEGIS activity as well as another suprahorizon movie, dust devil movie, and a post-drive rover deck mosaic. In the mid-afternoon, Curiosity will briefly wake up to take a Mastcam tau observation to measure the amount of dust in the atmosphere.

After sleeping overnight, we will wake up one last time before handing the rover over to Monday's planning team to take some early-morning environmental science observations: another Mastcam tau and suprahorizon movie, a zenith movie, and another Navcam line-of-sight. As always, REMS, RAD, and DAN will be diligently doing their duties throughout this plan.

Earth planning date: Wednesday, April 10, 2024

The extremely rocky terrain wasn’t a problem for Curiosity’s rover drivers on Monday, and we learned this morning that the drive they planned completed successfully. Today’s two-sol plan will take the familiar form of a “two-sol touch and go.” In this style of plan, we perform contact science and drive on the first sol, and then we spend the second sol taking “untargeted” science observations, which can be planned without knowledge of the rover’s location. For the contact science target, the team settled on investigating a piece of the bedrock in front of us that is flat enough to be brushed and then analyzed by MAHLI and APXS. We named the target “Burro Pass.” We will also collect some remote sensing data before we drive away, pointing Mastcam and ChemCam’s RMI at various geologic features around us, and zapping a darker looking rock with ChemCam’s laser on a target we named “Graveyard Peak.” We’ll then pack up and drive a few tens of meters to the southwest, heading much closer to Gediz Vallis ridge for some good imaging opportunities on Friday. We’ll fill the rest of the plan with observations to monitor the environment, including atmospheric conditions and surface radiation.

My role today was the “Long Term Planner.” One of the responsibilities I have in that role is to put together a presentation for the science team that gives a big picture overview of Curiosity’s science goals for the next weeks or months. I had extra fun in my presentation today because I added some slides showing photos taken by members of Curiosity’s operations team of the total solar eclipse which crossed a large portion of North America on Monday. Curiosity-ians traveled everywhere along the path of totality, from Mexico to Maine, to view the celestial sight, and I learned that they are not just talented photographers on Mars, but also here on Earth! I remained in Pasadena on Monday, so I was able to view the partial solar eclipse as it passed over JPL. I didn’t take any of my own images, but I did remind that team that technically we are all solar eclipse photographers – we’ve helped Curiosity capture several images of solar eclipses on Mars, including some very cool ones nearly five years ago, Mars’ moons Phobos and Deimos are teeny tiny compared to Earth’s Moon, so they aren’t able to block out the sun in the same way. Solar eclipses on Mars are a spectacular sight, and it blows my mind that we can predict them and subsequently image them using a robot on the surface millions of miles away! Seeing these images also gives me yet another reason to feel so grateful for this planet we live on and its Goldilocks Moon, sized just right to produce a little bit of magic when the stars align.

Earth planning date: Friday, April 5, 2024

Curiosity continues to drive south along the eastern margin of the upper Gediz Vallis ridge and will pause over the weekend for Mastcam to snap over 350 images that will be stitched together to create a beautiful 360-degree mosaic. Our current location along the rover’s traverse provides the optimal position for this postcard view because the rover is parked along a bend in the ridge between “Fascination Turret” and “Hinman Col” to the north, and “Pinnacle Ridge” to the south. The 360-degree mosaics are some of my favorite data products and this one will surely be a stunner!

In addition to the Mastcam 360-degree mosaic, we will investigate a light-toned block in the workspace with fractures, or breaks, named “Ahwahnee.” Curiosity will brush the surface of “Ahwahnee” with the Dust Removal Tool (DRT) and will characterize the rock with APXS and images from MAHLI. Mastcam will collect small stereo mosaics of the contact between the Mt. Sharp bedrock and the upper Gediz Vallis ridge materials, and of a light-toned target, “Fleming Mountain,” that was described by a science team member as a rock with an “elephant-skin” texture. ChemCam LIBS will investigate the chemistry of a smooth, dark rock in the workspace, a target that was named “Thunder Mountain” despite its small stature.

After completing a ~20-meter drive over the bumpy and tilted bedrock surface, we will take some post-drive imaging. The second science block is untargeted, and therefore includes a ChemCam AEGIS measurement that will add another data point to our ongoing bedrock survey. The Environmental Theme Group planned several observations including a ChemCam passive sky survey, a dust devil movie, and a zenith, suprahorizon, and Mastcam tau that will measure the amount of dust in the Martian atmosphere.

Earth planning date: Monday, April 8, 2024

It’s a rocky road out there (and solar eclipse day on Earth!). Regular readers of the blog will have noticed the terrain change, and the many rounded rocks that are appearing embedded in sand. We’ve had a few instances, here and at other locations before, where rocks were embedded in sand, where drives did not complete or a wheel ended up on a rock. A blog that I still remember is the one by my fellow blogger Natalie, where she called it a ‘wheelie’ – of course not an official term! The question I am always asking myself is: if I had a 4x4 all-terrain vehicle, would I like to drive there? Well, it would be doable, but like is an entirely different question. Yes, if you wonder, I am not very adventurous behind the steering wheel of a car, especially when I am far away from any civilization. So, a big shout out to our rover drivers who navigate through this, safely and without the benefit of being there to make real time adjustments. We couldn’t do any science without them!

This morning, the first thing that caught my eye was the image from the hazard camera, which you can see above. There is a little rock, right under the left wheel, and you can see how the sand around it has changed its surface texture compared to other places. Someone called it ‘breadcrust texture’ (not an official geologic term, but I am sure you know what they meant). That’s a telltale sign that this rock moved, even if only slightly. And you can see a little scratch on the rock, too. Hence, we decided that it is not safe to move the arm, and APXS and MAHLI are getting a break. Their loss is mast-instrument’s gain, of course and we have four long distance RMIs in the plan, two LIBS observations and a lot of atmospheric investigations! In detail these are:

On sol 4150 the plan starts with a LIBS measurement on a target called “Deadhorse Lake,” which is a bedrock targets – a special name for a standard target. There is more than one way to stand out, I guess! ChemCam continues its activities with two long distance RMIs on the Fascination Turret target that has been in the focus of many images before and we continue to add more and more fascinating details to our range of observations. Whoever named this target had a good sense for what was going to come, a sense that they probably got from looking at orbital data and images and at images we got from further away. Mastcam has a packed programme, too. ENV brings dust devil movies into the plan in this science block, too. After that, Mastcam takes over and documents the LIBS target and adds a small mosaic to document the target “Hospital Rock,” and images the upper Geddiz Vallis Ridge with a large, 25 frame mosaic.

On sol 4151, ChemCam starts off with observing a sand target called “Avalanche Lake,” and adding two long distance RMIs on the target area Kukenan. Mastcam again documents the ChemCam target and has an observation of their own with 28 frames looking at the target “Shepherd Creek.” But with no arm activities there is plenty of time for more atmospheric investigations, which include another dust devil movie, then looking at the horizon to check atmospheric dust levels, a cadence which is repeated three more times in the plan, taking full advantage of the power available to better understand the atmospheric changes. In addition, the DAN instrument observes the subsurface, and the weather station continues its cadence of measurements. And when we wake up in two days time here on Earth, we expect the rover to also have driven through another 15 or so meters across this challenging terrain, and hopefully it won’t be perched on a rock again... but... that’s offroad driving of the hardest kind, and we are safe, which is what matters most... and I can report that those of us lucky enough to be in the path of the solar eclipse also got to see it. It’s a practical demonstration of orbital mechanics, not to be missed!

Earth planning day: Wednesday, April 3, 2024

Today we planned a Touch and Go plan. Our workspace had abundant large, stable blocks – not always a given! - which made for a relatively easy planning process for the geology and mineralogy theme group (GEO). The bedrock here is predominantly a pale coloured rock, massive (non-lineated) in appearance, but there are rare fragments of darker layers in places, which look more like the dark layered rocks back at “Mineral King,” our last drill site. We will brush the dominant lithology at “Ruby Creek” and use APXS and MAHLI on this target. We will also get ChemCam LIBS and a Mastcam image of a small patch of the darker layer at “Tuttle Obelisk” which will allow us to compare the chemical composition of both the dominant paler bedrock and the rarer fragments of dark material.

In Monday’s plan, we drove away from the “intriguing mess” at “Hinman Col,” a poorly sorted pile of rubble and rocks as described by Melissa on sol 4143. For this plan, Hinman Col is about 20 metres behind the rover, so we can now image the back of it. This will allow us to get more information on the stratigraphy and structure of this feature. Mastcam will take a large 14x3 frame mosaic (3 rows of 14 images) of Hinman Col and “Fascination Turret,” part of the upper Gediz Vallis ridge (uGVR). ChemCam will also acquire a long distance image (RMI) of Fascination Turret.

Further afield, Mastcam will image an area higher up in the uGVR with a 14x2 mosaic and ChemCam will target the “Kukenan” butte (shown here) with an RMI which may help characterise the stratigraphy in the butte.

We are making our way back onto the MSAR (Mount Sharp Ascent Route – the path our science team working rover engineers have picked out as the best way forward), with more imaging and analysis of the upper Gediz Vallis ridge. The drive in this plan is a short one, as the terrain here is a bit on the tricky side (as shown in the accompanying Left Nav image) but the drive hopefully will place us on some cool targets for the weekend plan.

Earth planning date: Monday, April 1, 2024

All went well over the weekend for Curiosity, and we came in this morning to find our wheels securely placed on the base of the Hinman Col mound. Even though we only drove ~4 meters, the science team was ablaze with science requests to start off this week of planning. Our battery state of charge was in great shape, too, and the uplink team went to work! It was a swift day with not a lot of time to breathe, let alone make an April Fools joke.

We start off this two-sol plan with an early arm backbone for APXS to take measurements as cold as possible on a rubbly rock target named “Bodie.” ChemCam also prefers cooler temperatures for data quality and instrument performance, so after APXS is done the arm is placed out of the way for ChemCam to shoot their laser on another workspace block named “Crystal Crag.” Mastcam likes to take advantage of noon-ish lighting, and follows with over 170 images of the terrain in about 45 minutes. By this time, the sun is in a good spot for MAHLI lighting during their 25 cm and 5 cm stereo images of Bodie. And then, before even taking a nap, we are driving away from Hinman Col and into the next phase of our adventure.

The second sol of this plan includes our usual in-the-blind activities like a ChemCam LIBS decided by the rover software, Navcam dust devil movies, and the standard DAN passive measurements. Bye, Hinman Col! On Wednesday, Mastcam will take a mosaic to show what it looks like from the other side.

Earth planning date: Friday, March 29, 2024

Curiosity is approaching an intriguing pile of rocks called “Hinman Col” – a poorly sorted collection of clasts located along the margin of Gediz Vallis ridge. We’re hoping to get closer to this deposit over the weekend, to set up for contact science on the different rock types next week. In doing so, we hope to investigate where the different clasts might have come from and how this feature (which looks like a bit of a mess!) relates to the rest of Gediz Vallis ridge.

Today’s 3-sol plan is focused on contact science on the bedrock in our workspace, remote sensing to understand our surroundings, and a short bump to prepare for contact science at Hinman Col next week. Before we get to Hinman Col, we have another opportunity to assess the light-toned, laminated bedrock in our workspace. The science team planned 3 contact science targets, including DRT, MAHLI, and APXS on the target “Rose Lake” to assess the chemistry and textures in typical bedrock. We also planned a MAHLI stereo mosaic on “Whorl Mountain” to model the rock surface and study bedding orientations around some disrupted laminations, and another MAHLI/APXS target called “Little Slide Canyon” to investigate the texture and composition of the more convoluted bedding.

The geology theme group also planned ChemCam LIBS on two bedrock targets, “Robinson Lake” and “Ward Mountain,” to characterize rougher and smoother parts of the local bedrock. ChemCam will also be used to acquire long distance RMI mosaics to assess parts of upper Gediz Vallis Ridge at the location known as “Fascination Turret.” Meanwhile Mastcam will be busy documenting the ChemCam targets and acquiring mosaics to assess layering and clast configuration in the vertical face of “Fascination Turret.”

Then Curiosity will take a very short drive to get into just the right position in front of Hinman Col, hopefully with a variety of rocks in the workspace. After the drive we’ll take some post-drive imaging to prepare for future targeting. The third sol includes an untargeted science block, so the team planned an AEGIS activity to add to the bedrock survey of compositional variations. Throughout the plan, the Environmental theme group planned a lot of great monitoring activities to search for dust devils and clouds, assess atmospheric opacity, and monitor the movement of fines on the rover deck.

Looking forward to learning more about this messy pile of rocks and unraveling the clues that they might record about their emplacement!

Earth planning date: Wednesday, March 27, 2024

As someone who studies planetary atmospheres, the geology of Curiosity's mission often flies straight over my head. I like to think that I've picked up some of the basics just through exposure, but sitting in with the geology team at the start of planning each day can sometimes still leave me feeling like I've forgotten how to swim seconds before being dropped into the deep end of a pool. One thing that I'm definitely able to do though is appreciate the stunning photos that Curiosity has been taking as we drive up along the side of the upper Gediz Vallis Ridge. Today, the pile of phenomenal images we have of this area will continue to grow.

Curiosity's day begins with some observations of the bedrock in our workspace, first getting APXS observations of "Rainbow Falls" and then five LIBS shots at "Crystal Turret." ChemCam will then turn its eye to Fascination Turret, which we have imaged from other angles in previous plans, taking two long-distance RMI mosaics. (As an aside, "long-distance" is definitely a relative term here. The part of Fascination Turret we're imaging is about 25–30 m away, which feels like nothing compared to the RMI mosaics of the northern rim of Gale that we've taken in the past, which is over 30 km away!)

Once ChemCam is done, it will be Mastcam's time to shine with documentation images of Cristal Turret post-LIBS, a mosaic of our eventual drive target "Hinman Col," as well as context imaging of the upper Gediz Vallis Ridge to help us choose targets in the future and two colour images of the areas captured in the RMI mosaics earlier. After we're finished taking a look around us, we'll turn back to our workspace for one last time, taking MAHLI images of Rainbow Falls and "Rancheria Falls." Finally, we drive away towards Hinman Col, taking some Mastcam images once we arrive to help us build our next few plans.

Overnight, we take a nice long rest to help recharge our batteries before waking up in the early morning to take another Mastcam mosaic of Fascination Turret (it's definitely living up to its name!), this time under different illumination conditions than we get in the midsol or afternoon. After a quick one hour power nap, we'll wake up again for some more remote sensing science. As is typical after a drive, we let ChemCam choose its own post-drive target with AEGIS before moving into some environmental science.

We're rapidly nearing the peak of the dusty season, so the environmental science team's observations are very dust-focused. We begin by using Navcam to take some images of the northern crater rim to observe the amount of dust between the rover and the rim. As can be seen in the above image, we've got quite a bit of dust in the air at the moment. You really have to squint to just barely make out the crater rim! We'll then take some "deck monitoring" image to see how the wind and the rover's motion as it drives affects the sand that has gathered on top of the rover deck since landing. After that, we'll survey the area around us for dust devils and take a "Suprahorizon Movie." The Suprahorizon Movie is usually used to look for clouds over Gale, but we've adjusted the direction that it points to look over a large sand patch that we drove past about 260 sols ago so that it can pull double-duty to hunt for wind-driven sand lifting or dust devils in addition to clouds.

Thoroughly exhausted, Curiosity will sleep the rest of the plan away, briefly waking up several times to send data back to Earth. Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the ongoing efforts of REMS, RAD, and DAN throughout this plan to monitor the weather and radiation environment and look for hydrated minerals in the subsurface.

Earth planning date: Monday, March 25, 2024

Today, we planned two sols on Mars in a Touch and Go plan, where we do some early morning contact science and imaging followed by a drive to a new workspace on the first sol. As always, we will characterise the bedrock in our workspace. APXS and MAHLI will be deployed on the bulk bedrock at “Sunrise Lakes” right in front of the rover. ChemCam and Mastcam will capture rarer smooth grey looking layers at “Keough Hot Springs” further away from the rover. Mastcam will acquire more imagery of “Sentinel Dome,” a patch of gnarly looking bedrock that we previously imaged in the last plan.

However this plan (and many of the others around now) will probably be remembered for its imaging of the uGVR (upper Gediz Vallis ridge) rather than chemistry! The closer we get to the uGVR, the more jaw dropping the images are getting. Every morning, we open up the new image products and just … drool over the beauty and detail. We have been talking about the GVR for so long, and we are definitely being rewarded now, despite that pesky sun blob getting in the way!

Today, as part of the uGVR campaign, Mastcam mosaics and ChemCam LD RMIs (Long Distance Remote Images) will be taken along the east wall of Fascination Turret, the part of the uGVR just ahead of us. We have already taken images of the wall, but as the position of the rover changes, our viewshed (or what we can see) changes. Getting images from many different angles and distances allows us to constrain any stratigraphy or layering that we see and (hopefully!) help us to understand the origin of the uGVR and the role it played in Gale crater.

We continue our environmental monitoring, with solar taus to characterize dust in the atmosphere (by Mastcam), some dust devil movies (Navcam) and our usual suite of REMS and DAN activities.

Earth planning date: Friday, March 22, 2024

Sometimes it feels like we all make up the same brain and planning goes smooth as silk. Today I'm thankful it felt like that, because Friday plans have a higher potential to get rough. It really helps when the morning downlink brings down more data than expected and shows our drive completing successfully! The only thing getting us down was the “sun blob,” a 13 degree cone around the sun that ChemCam is not allowed to point within. If ChemCam is pointed at the sun while not in a safe focus setting, its optics or RMI detector could be damaged. The sun blob includes the sun’s entire daily path through the sky plus 13 degrees, in the event ChemCam gets stuck pointed somewhere and Earth is unable to respond in time. Unfortunately, the ChemCam RMI areas of interest these days are mostly all inside the sun blob, and it’s slowly moving southwards just like us! So while on Wednesday our rover was singing Back to the uGVr, today she’s singing the “Sun Blob Blues” by the Channel Surfers (not a real band). Some of the team even thinks the blob itself might be sentient and hunting us (not really).

The first sol of this plan includes a ChemCam RMI of the beautiful Fascination Turret uGVr (upper Gediz Vallis ridge) outcrop that isn’t in the sun blob, 5 laser shots and a Mastcam documentation image of a bedrock target in our workspace named “Petite Capucin,” and a 12-frame Mastcam stereo mosaic of some gnarled-looking bedrock in front of us named “Sentinel Dome.” We also have full arm backbones with three contact science targets named “Thompson Canyon,” “Cabin Lake,” and “Smoky Jack” for MAHLI and APXS.

The second sol of this plan includes some highly-desired Mastcam imaging in the early morning of Fascination Turret and the rest of the uGVr from this location, which we’re hoping will illuminate some of the self-shadows inherent in the outcrop faces. ChemCam will acquire another RMI of Fascination Turret outside the sun blob and shoot another workspace target named “Phlox.” Then, we drive onward! Hopefully on Monday we will be ~23 meters further south and continue our imaging spree of this gorgeous area.