Earth planning date: Friday, February 14, 2025
Curiosity continues to progress along the strategic path, crossing laterally through the sulfate carrying unit (salt) to boxwork structures. The team celebrated the completion of another successful journey when we received the downward affair this morning, then we immediately set to work thinking about the next one. There is a vacation in the United States on Monday, so instead of the three-soles weekend plan, we actually planned four floors, which put us in place to planning next Tuesday.
The first floor of the plan focuses on remote sensing, and we will take several small mosaics MASTCAM of features around the rover. One of my favorite targets that the team has chosen is a deliciously pointed rock visible to the left of the Navcam image illustrated above. The color images that we will take with Mastcam will give us more information on the textures of this rock and potentially offer an overview of the geological forces which have transformed it into this comic form. The team has chosen what I think is a very suitable name for this Martian target in the shape of a pyramid – “lake pyramid”. The earthly inspiration behind this name is a human manufacturing reservoir (lake) near Los Angeles with a large pyramidal hill (also made to humans).
On the second floor of the plan, we will use the instruments on the arm of Curiosity to collect rock target data at our feet, including “Strawberry Peak”, a piece of rocky substratum, “Lake Arrowhead”, a piece of substratum Smooth rocky, and “Skyline Trail”, a dark floating rock. Chemcam will also collect Skyline Trail’s chemical data, “Big Tujunga” – which is similar to Strawberry Peak – and “Momyer”. We will also take the first part of a 360 -degree color mosaic with Mastcam!
In the third ground of the plan, we will finish the 360-degree mosaic and will continue to drive to the southwest along our strategic route. The fourth floor is quite calm, with some atmospheric observations and an AEGIS Chemcam. Atmospheric observations are also sprinkled in other soils of the plan. This time of year, we are particularly interested in studying the Clouds above the scab!
I look forward to Nice Long weekend and I come back Tuesday morning to see all the curiosity accomplished.
Written by Abigail Fraeman, planetary geologist at the NASA propulsion laboratory