3 min read

Sols 4257-4258: A Little Nudge on Kings Canyon

This image was taken by Left Navigation Camera onboard NASA's Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 4255 (2024-07-26 05:09:58 UTC).
This image was taken by Left Navigation Camera onboard NASA's Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 4255 (2024-07-26 05:09:58 UTC).
NASA/JPL-Caltech

Earth planning date: Friday, July 26, 2024

Today’s 2-sol weekend plan is our first taste of a new location for a potential sampling campaign. We call today’s plan type: Drill Sol 1 - triage contact science.

We arrived this morning to a lovely new workspace. The science team has been eagerly observing these lighter-toned rocks first from orbital data, then from our drive direction imaging as we approached them, and now they are right in front of us! Because the science team had been contemplating the possibility of sampling these rocks, the drive that we planned on Wednesday ended in just the right orientation in case the team does decide to drill here. Variables that matter are the rover roll and pitch – so that we can both drill the rock safely but also then deliver sample to our two internal instruments, CheMin and SAM. Additionally, the rover heading needs to be just right so that we can communicate clearly with Earth – perhaps for several weeks if we remain for a campaign! We have specially certified Rover Planners called Sampling Campaign Rover Planners (SCaRPs) and they go into action on Drill Sol 1 to confirm that all those special considerations for drilling are met including finding the actual target on the ground that we want to assess. 

This morning, the SCaRPs swiftly found a great target and we named it “Kings Canyon.” Kings Canyon National Park is in the southern Sierra Nevada range in California. Kings Canyon itself is a glacially carved canyon more than a mile deep! The national park also contains some of the world’s largest stands of Giant Sequoia trees. 

The Drill Sol 1 plan has two purposes – first to determine if our target, Kings Canyon, meets the science teams criteria for sampling – for example, is it compositionally interesting? The second objective is to determine if the rock and specific target, are safe to drill; can it handle the forces from the drill, for example. We call this activity a “drill preload test.” Therefore, the primary activities in today’s plan are the preload test and contact science on Kings Canyon – we will first brush the target to remove surface dust and then take close-up imaging with our MAHLI instrument and compositional data with our APXS instrument.

In anticipation of a notional full drill on Monday, today’s team was very conservative with the amount of power we used. This meant limiting our remote sensing observations to only those that the team thought were most important to get down timely to support a drill campaign. We’ll use our ChemCam instrument to also study Kings Canyon, ChemCam provides complementary compositional data to the APXS observations. Together these observations will help inform the science about whether they want to proceed with sampling. Today’s plan also includes our typical environmental monitoring observations that we take at a regular cadence. 

Hope your weekend is as busy and fun as Curiosity’s!

Written by Elena Amador-French, Science Operations Coordinator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Share

Details

Last Updated
Jul 29, 2024
Editor
NASA Science Editorial Team

Related Terms

Explore More

A grayscale photograph of the Martian surface from the Curiosity rover captures medium gray, very uneven terrain in front of the rover, with many angular, lighter-toned, medium-sized rocks protruding from the smooth soil. The bottom of the frame shows part of the rover, running from the middle left to the lower right corner of the image, including part of its robotic arm which carries a nameplate imprinted with “Curiosity” outlined in all capital letters, and to the right of that a line drawing of the rover.
2 min read

Sol 4370-4371: All About the Polygons

Article5 days ago
A grayscale photograph of the Martian surface shows, in the foreground, medium gray soil that looks like wind-blown sand dunes, with a few rounded, medium-sized rocks poking up from the ground. Beyond this area, and covering the upper half of the frame in this circular image, is much more rocky terrain, with both sharp and rounded rocks of all sizes covering the ground.
3 min read

Sols 4368-4369: The Colors of Fall – and Mars

Article7 days ago
A grayscale landscape photo from Mars, showing a broad, medium gray, rock-strewn plain in the foreground extending far into the distance, surrounded by several hills. The closest hill, in the lower right corner, rises up toward the side of the frame, and is darker than the floor below. A little farther out, on the left, a gentle slope rises from the low middle of the frame to middle of the left side; it’s about the same color as the valley floor, except for a band at its farthest edge, which darkens abruptly as if covered in shadow. The terrain appears softer than the ground below, more sandy than rocky. Beyond that along the same rising plane is a much lighter area, with scattered tiny peaks that are darker – looking like the top of a baked meringue pie. The channel floor runs between these hills, then appears to curve toward the right, behind the first hill and in front of the second. Finally, one other rounded peak appears above the horizon, behind these other two hills in the lower right of the frame, all of this below a light-gray sky filling more than half of the frame above.
3 min read

Sols 4366–4367: One of Those Days on Mars (Sulfate-Bearing Unit to the West of Upper Gediz Vallis)

Article1 week ago
Keep Exploring

Discover More Topics From NASA

Mars

New InSight into the Red Planet Poster

All Mars Resources

Rover Basics

NASA's Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image using its SHERLOC WATSON camera, located on the turret at the end of the rover's robotic arm.

Mars Exploration: Science Goals

Water carved channels and transported sediments form fans and deltas within lake basins in this image of Mars' Jezero crater.