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31 May 2018
Sols 2068-2069: Triple delivery for CheMin
The environmental theme group planned two early morning Navcam cloud movies on Sol 2069 less than an hour after sunrise. The cooler early morning is now the best time to see clouds, as we move well past the ‘cloudy’ season and into the warmer half of the year.
30 May 2018
Sol 2067: ‘Tis the Season to be Dusty.
We’ve just moved past southern spring equinox, which means we’re now in the half of the Mars year when global dust storms are observed to begin.
25 May 2018
Sol 2063-2066: Sample drop-off testing
ChemCam will also be busy this weekend, measuring the chemistry of a bumpy bedrock target named ‘Brule Mountain’ and layered bedrock targets ‘Devil Track’ and ‘Devilfish Tower’ on Sol 2063.
22 May 2018
Sols 2061-2062: Time to feed CheMin
After successfully drilling the ‘Duluth’ target on Sol 2057 (as seen in the above Mastcam image), the science team is eager to find out what it’s made of.
Sol 2059-2060: Characterizing a Successful Drill!
This past weekend, Curiosity successfully drilled into the ‘Duluth’ rock target, generating a beautiful pile of drill tailings! This is a very exciting time for us on the rover team, who have been waiting for quite a while to successfully drill into a target and to ingest samples into the rover’s analytical instruments.
21 May 2018
Sols 2056-2058: Poised
This weekend, Curiosity will attempt to sink the drill into the complexly-layered ‘Duluth’ block. Before that, she will gather more data from the ‘Blunts Point’ member rocks in front of and around us.
19 May 2018
Sol 2055: Drill Site Perspectives from a Duluth Native
I was excited to learn earlier this week that my native city was chosen as the name of the latest drill site on Mars!
16 May 2018
Planning Sol 2054: Duluth at our feet… er, wheels
Today we received only 1.6 MB (Megabytes) of data at the start of our planning day. This was just enough to tell us the drive executed successfully and the rover was healthy, but not enough to include any new images from our current spot.
15 May 2018
Sol 2053: Bump to "Duluth"
A successful drive on Sol 2052 brought Curiosity within bumping distance of what will likely be our next intended drill target. The science team named this target ‘Duluth.’
14 May 2018
Sol 2052: We’ve Been Here Before
We expected to start planning today examining a new location within arm’s reach (or a very short drive’s reach) of a possible location for our next drilling attempt, but instead found images like this.
