Curiosity Navigation Curiosity Home Mission Overview Where is Curiosity? Mission Updates Science Overview Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Curiosity Raw Images Images Videos Audio More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions The Solar System The Sun Mercury … Read more
It’s time to move on from our “Kings Canyon” drill site, so today’s plan focused on our usual tidy up routine after a drill campaign. First we need to dump out any material in the drill chambers, in an action called “RAGE” – this sounds aggressive but stands for “Rotation to Agitate Granules for Expulsion,” … Read more
Curiosity Navigation Curiosity Home Mission Overview Where is Curiosity? Mission Updates Science Overview Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Curiosity Raw Images Images Videos Audio More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions The Solar System The Sun Mercury … Read more
The SAM EGA over the weekend was successful, and that means we’re well on our way to planning the GCMS (Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometry) on our “Kings Canyon” drill sample! GCMS is an energy-intensive activity, so we’ll be using today’s two-sol plan mainly for recharging our battery and prepping SAM by cleaning its GC column … Read more
The focus for this three-sol weekend plan is delivering a portion of the Kings Canyon drill sample to SAM for Evolved Gas Analysis (EGA), following on from a successful CheMin analysis. The CheMin and SAM analyses, coupled with APXS and ChemCam analyses, will tell us about the composition and mineralogy of this block within the … Read more
The GeoMin science group is enjoying the view too, extending Mastcam coverage of areas of interest including the Kings Canyon drill hole, and “Fairview Dome.” Looking further ahead, ChemCam planned a long distance RMI view of “Texoli butte,” to investigate the interesting sedimentology and stratigraphy here. To round off our plan, we are taking two … Read more
After the usual morning routine of doing some engineering housekeeping, Curiosity continues to take some remote science observations. We take a ChemCam LIBS observation and a Mastcam image of the “Peeler Lake” target, a dark, nodular target that appears to be more erosion-resistant than nearby rocks. By comparing Peeler Lake to “Kings Canyon” (which also … Read more
Around these pre-drilling activities, we still had some time left over for more typical science activities. Power wasn’t as much of a concern as it will become as the drill campaign progresses, but we did have to do some rearranging due to timing constraints. There are some activities that need to go at particular times, … Read more
Curiosity Navigation Curiosity Home Mission Overview Where is Curiosity? Mission Updates Science Overview Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Curiosity Raw Images Images Videos Audio More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions The Solar System The Sun Mercury … Read more
The Drill Sol 1 plan has two purposes – first to determine if our target, Kings Canyon, meets the science teams criteria for sampling – for example, is it compositionally interesting? The second objective is to determine if the rock and specific target, are safe to drill; can it handle the forces from the drill, … Read more