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8 April 2015
Sol 950: Taking in the Scenery along Artist’s Drive
By Lauren Edgar Like most tourists who visit Artist’s Drive on Earth, Curiosity is busy taking lots of photos to document the valley walls of Artist’s Drive on Mars. We are officially on the road again, and working our way through a very scenic drive. I’m the Geology Science Theme Lead today, and today’s plan involves a pre-drive science block, a drive for hopefully ~30-40m, and some post-drive imaging …
6 April 2015
Sol 948: Good Morning Mars
By Lauren Edgar As we started the planning day before sunrise, I was reminded of the first three months of the mission that we spent living on Mars time. Today is an early “slide sol,” meaning that the planning timeline is shifted 1.5 hours earlier in order to compensate for our downlink and uplink times. Today is also a “tight” planning sol, meaning that the planning timeline is slightly shorter …
3 April 2015
Sols 946-947: Mars Hand Lens Imager mosaic
by Ken Herkenhoff The MAHLI operations team did a lot of good work preparing for Sol 946, so I expected that it would be an easy day for me as uplink lead. Unfortunately, a problem on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) prevented some of the data we expected to receive in time for planning from being relayed to Earth. MRO has been very reliable in the past and we have gotten used to …
1 April 2015
Sols 944-945: Return to Garden City
by Ken Herkenhoff After receiving and analyzing the most recent “Garden City” data, the MSL team decided that more data are needed to better understand this interesting outcrop. Therefore, after acquiring some ChemCam and Mastcam observations near “Kanosh,” the rover will drive back to Garden City on Sol 944. The goal is to position the rover for contact science activities in a part of the outcrop that was not previously within the arm’s …
31 March 2015
Martian Chronicles is Back!
Good news everyone: this blog is coming out of retirement! For a while now, I and two other USGS scientists on the Curiosity team, Ken Herkenhoff and Lauren Edgar, have been posting brief updates on what the Curiosity rover is up to, over at the USGS Astrogeology website. Now, through the wonders of the internet (and some behind the scenes work by the USGS and AGU webmasters) those updates will …
30 March 2015
Sols 942-943 Cap Rock “Kanosh”
By Lauren Edgar Over the weekend, Curiosity drove further into Artist’s Drive to investigate a rock named “Kanosh.” This boulder appears to represent the “capping unit,” so we’re planning to study Kanosh in more detail to understand this resistant type of rock. Today’s two sol plan consists of remote sensing and contact science to investigate this boulder. We’ll acquire ChemCam on the targets “Piru,” “Little Devil,” and “Tierra Blanca.” We’ll …
3 July 2013
All Good Things…
… must come to an end. And unfortunately this blog is one of them. As you no doubt have noticed, the frequency of my posts has dwindled down to almost nothing and I think the time has come to stop pretending that this blog is still active and face the fact that it has run its course. And what a course it has been! This blog started back in 2008 …
30 April 2013
Rocketplanes, Science comics, and Curiosity
First of all, in case you missed it, we live in the future. Proof? This actual photograph from Virgin Galactic’s successful supersonic rocketplane flight:
5 April 2013
A last hurrah of flowing water on Mars
This is not so much a review of a recent paper as a review of a significant paper. “An intense terminal epoch of widespread fluvial activity on early Mars:1. Valley network incision and associated deposits” by Alan Howard, Jeff Moore, and Ross Irwin is the first of a pair of papers published in 2005 that make the case that instead of a gradual transition from warm and wet to cold …
15 February 2013
Huge Fireball in Russia Blows Out Windows and Doors, Injures Hundreds
Reports are coming in from all over the place that the sonic boom(s) from the meteor have shattered windows, blown out doors, and injured hundreds of people (mostly from falling glass). Here are some videos that show the fireball and some of the damage:
