NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity captured this picture displaying its wheel awkwardly perched atop one of many rocks on this location, in addition to the textures of the layered sulfate unit bedrock blocks. The rover used its Left Navigation Digital camera (Navcam), one among a pair of stereo cameras on both aspect of the rover’s masthead, to document the picture on Feb. 28, 2025, on sol 4466, or Martian day 4,466 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission, at 00:34:10 UTC.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Written by Lucy Lim, Planetary Scientist at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Middle
Earth planning date: Friday, Feb. 28, 2025
Curiosity continues to climb roughly southward by means of the layered sulfate strata towards the “boxwork” features. Though the earlier plan’s drive efficiently superior the rover roughly 21 meters southward (about 69 ft), the drive had ended with an awkwardly perched wheel. Due to this, sadly it was thought-about too dangerous to unstow the arm for contact science on this plan.
However the workforce made the a lot of the imaging and LIBS observations out there from the rover’s present location. A big Mastcam mosaic was deliberate on the close by Texoli butte to seize its sedimentary constructions from the rover’s new perspective. Towards the west, the boxwork strata uncovered on “Gould Mesa” have been noticed utilizing the ChemCam long-distance imaging functionality, with Mastcam offering shade context.
A number of near-field Mastcam mosaics additionally captured some bedding and diagenetic construction within the close by blocks in addition to some fashionable aeolian troughs within the finer-grained materials round them.
On the close by blocks, two consultant native blocks (“Gabrelino Path” and “Sespe Creek”) are to be “zapped” with the ChemCam laser to present us LIBS (laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy) compositional measurements. The unique Gabrelino Path on Earth close to the JPL campus is at present closed attributable to harm from the latest wildfires.
In the meantime, the season on Mars (L_s ~ 50, or a photo voltaic longitude of about 50 levels, heading into southern winter) has introduced with it the chance to watch some recurring atmospheric phenomena: It is aphelion cloud belt season, in addition to Hadley cell transition season, throughout which a extra southerly air mass crosses over Gale Crater.
This plan contains an APXS atmospheric commentary (no arm motion required!) to measure argon and a ChemCam passive-sky commentary to measure O2, which is a small (lower than 1%) however measurable element within the Martian environment. Devoted cloud altitude observations, a part operate sky survey, and zenith and suprahorizon motion pictures have additionally been included within the plan to characterize the clouds. As standard, the rover additionally continues to observe the fashionable atmosphere with measurements of atmospheric opacity by way of imaging, temperature, and humidity with REMS, and the native neutron atmosphere with DAN.
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