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25 November 2018
Sols 2243-2244: Curiosity has a minor post-holiday hiccup, but is happy and healthy
Curiosity was happy and healthy after the Thanksgiving holiday, but experienced a minor post-holiday hiccup during a test of delivering sample portions to the workspace. The rover’s robotic arm tripped a safety limit such that the activity did not quite go to completion.
21 November 2018
Sol 2240-2242: Anticipating InSight’s Arrival
Today Curiosity is preparing for the imminent arrival of a new visitor to Mars, just as many of us are preparing for the out-of-town visitors who’ll be descending into our homes over the Thanksgiving holiday.
20 November 2018
Sol 2236-2239: No turkey, but many side dishes
Curiosity is planning a smorgasbord of science over the next few days as it awaits results from digesting the ‘Highfield’ drill target material.
16 November 2018
Sol 2233-2235: Monitoring Dynamic Modern Mars
It’s the windy season on Mars, and Curiosity’s activities this weekend include taking oodles of images at different times throughout the day to catch how the wind moves sand and dust around.
13 November 2018
Sol 2231-32: SAM goes to Highfield
Today we planned to deliver a sample of the ground up rock from our Highfield drill hole to the SAM instrument. The rover will open one of its SAM inlet covers and the arm will be moved over to the top of it…
11 November 2018
Sols 2229-2230: Preparing for more SAMple!
Following a successful weekend of science activities at the ‘Highfield’ drill site, today we’re planning Sols 2229-2230. We’re eagerly awaiting data from CheMin, which will tell us all about the mineralogy of our newest drill hole sample.
10 November 2018
Sols 2226-2228: We came, we science’d, we… still have a lot to do!
The science team will continue to characterize the drilled ‘Highfield’ workspace by using ChemCam LIBS to examine the chemistry of the drill hole, seen in the above RMI image.
8 November 2018
Sol 2225: Science Galore at the Eighteenth Hole
Tosol (Martian for “today”) we received confirmation that Curiosity’s drill yestersol was successful, as shown in this Navcam image of the ‘Highfield’ target – our eighteenth drill hole in the martian surface!
7 November 2018
Sol 2224: Go for Drilling at Highfield!
Today was a good day on Mars. The science and engineering teams are making preparations to drill a patch of grey bedrock named ‘Highfield’, which will be our latest attempt to characterize this unique rock unit on Vera Rubin Ridge.
Sol 2223: Optimism for "Highfield"
On Sol 2222, Curiosity drove ~10 m towards the ‘Lake Orcadie’ location, in the hopes that we would be able to drill the gray Jura member here.
