Continuing along the alternate route: Sols 3861-3864
by Abigail Fraeman, Planetary Geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Pasadena CA (JPL) Jun 21, 2023

Earth planning date: Friday, June 16, 2023 Hearing today's drive completed as planned for the third time in a row was a refreshing change from last week when Curiosity was struggling to get up a rocky and sandy slope. Our alternate route takes us laterally along this challenging terrain, rather than straight uphill, and this small change certainly seems to be helping.

I really hope we continue to have successful drives because we planned a ~50 meter drive today! This drive will continue to take us east, towards a slightly less steep part of Mt. Sharp as seen in orbital topographic maps and Curiosity's images.

In addition to the whopping 50 meter drive, we also planned lots of science for Curiosity during the four sol plan (we planned four sols to cover the US Holiday of Juneteenth on Monday). We'll collect oodles of remote sensing observations, snapping big color mosaics of a ridge to the starboard side of the rover, patterned troughs in the ground near our wheels, and the Chenapau butte with Mastcam, and we'll also take three ChemCam LIBS observations of rocks and veins named "Anavilhanas," "Boquierao da Lua," and "Cuche."

We'll be doing some unusual contact science this weekend, deliberately collecting APXS on a dusty rock target "Surpresa" before brushing it with our DRT and then taking follow-up APXS as well as MAHLI and Mastcam multispectral data on the cleaned surface. We're hoping this observation can be used to quantify the amount of dust that's on the rocks in the area.

We've seen some dramatic color changes when we've brushed rocks recently, so we're interested in trying to quantify how much dustier these rocks are then rocks lower on Mt. Sharp. To round out the plan, we'll be taking our usual cadence of environmental science observations, characterizing the weather, radiation, and dust in the atmosphere this weekend in Gale crater.

Related Links
Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory
Mars News and Information at MarsDaily.com
Lunar Dreams and more