Curiosity is advancing westward through a largely boulder-strewn channel that is leading us toward the Greenheugh Pediment.
Curiosity is advancing westward through a largely boulder-strewn channel that is leading us toward the Greenheugh Pediment. The Pediment is where our rover will spend the next many months, as we turn back uphill to the south and continue our ascent up Mt. Sharp. Despite it being quite craggy in our current location, we did have to drive over a large sand patch to get to our current parking location!
Today’s objective was to study one of the last remaining bedrock patches available to us before we ascend onto the Pediment in the days ahead. We quickly identified “Loch Coruisk” as our preferred bedrock slab for contact science with MAHLI and APXS. ChemCam will then zap it with LIBS in addition to two other bedrock pieces nearby. Both ChemCam and Mastcam will also be imaging the edge of the Pediment to our southwest and northwest so we can study the geologic contact that the edge represents. That imaging includes a Mastcam 360° mosaic, which will surely be spectacular! As we’re quickly approaching the dust storm season on Mars, we also added several dust devil movies with Navcam and observations to monitor the dust amounts in the atmosphere above us and within Gale Crater itself.
Written by Scott Guzewich, Atmospheric Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
