Sol 3102: Putting a Bow on ‘Bardou’

We’re finishing up our activities at the "Bardou" drill hole today and in Wednesday’s plan. Our onboard laboratories, SAM and CheMin, have each completed their work, and today we will dump the remaining amount of rock sample out of the drill assembly onto the ground where APXS and MAHLI will study it in the afternoon and overnight.

This left relatively little time for additional science, and outside of planning a few Mastcam images, GEO spent most of the time today prioritizing activities that will occur tomorrow. As ENV theme lead, I included a long dust devil movie (nearly 30 minutes long) looking back down Mt. Sharp, roughly in the direction of this Navcam image (and note that we are parked at a tilt!). We are in early southern hemisphere fall and about to enter the “aphelion cloud belt” season on Mars. This is the cloudiest time of year on Mars, and we soon expect to see clouds filling our atmospheric movies and cloud shadows on the upper reaches of Mt. Sharp. We’ll start intensive monitoring of clouds beginning this upcoming weekend.

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