This image was taken by Navcam: Right B (NAV_RIGHT_B) onboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 1727 (2017-06-15 15:58:37 UTC). Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

After a busy day of contact science yesterday, today’s Curiosity rover plan was dedicated towards remote science and driving. As Mastcam PUL-1 today, I was fairly busy helping put together a suite of Mastcam images for Curiosity to take. These included mosaics of ‘Preble Cove’ and ‘Fernald Point’, some nice blocks of the Murray formation just in front of the rover (Fernald Point is the block just in front of the rover wheel in the Navcam image above). We’ll then take a few images of ‘Freeman Ridge’ to follow up on yesterday’s multispectral observation.

We also planned a series of environmental observations, including our standard REMS and DAN, as well as a ChemCam passive sky, Mastcam tau, and line-of-sight extinction. We’ll then continue driving towards Vera Rubin Ridge and take some post-drive images to set ourselves up for an exciting weekend of more remote and contact science!

Written by Rachel Kronyak, Planetary Geologist at University of Tennessee