Category: Blogs

Written by Lucy Lim, Planetary Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Earth planning date: Friday, March 21, 2025 It’s the start of spring here in the Northern Hemisphere on Earth, but in Gale Crater on Mars our rover is still heading into the depths of Martian winter. We’re just a few weeks away from […]

Written by Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, Planetary Geologist at University of New Brunswick Earth planning date: Wednesday, March 19, 2025  This terrain is a tricky drive, with rocks angled chaotically all around. One of our geologists remarked that they wouldn’t like to even walk over this without solid boots coming way up over the ankles — this […]

Written by Alex Jones, Ph.D. candidate at Imperial College London Last week the Perseverance Science Team were astonished by a strange rock comprised of hundreds of millimeter-sized spheres… and the team are now working hard to understand their origin.  It has now been two weeks since Perseverance arrived at Broom Point, situated at the lower […]

Written by Conor Hayes, Graduate Student at York University Earth planning date: Monday, March 17, 2025 Last week I was in Houston, Texas, at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. The mid-March weather in Houston is often more like mid-summer weather here in Toronto, so it has been a bit of a shock coming home […]

Written by Michelle Minitti, Planetary Geologist at Framework Earth planning date: Friday, March 14, 2025 The rover successfully arrived at the “Humber Park” outcrop which, on this fine “Pi Day” on Earth, we could convince ourselves looked like a pie with a sandy interior and a rough and rocky crust. We can only hope our […]

Written by Ashley Stroupe, Mission Operations Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Earth planning date: Wednesday, March 12, 2025 The days are getting shorter and colder for Curiosity as we head into winter. So our rover is sleeping in a bit before waking up to a busy plan. Today I served as the Engineering Uplink […]

Written by Denise Buckner, student collaborator at University of Florida  Perseverance is hard at work on Mars, overcoming obstacles for scientific exploration! Just a few sols after successfully sealing the challenging Green Gardens core, Perseverance roved on to the Broom Point workspace to collect another sample called Main River. Broom Point is situated a few […]

Written by Sharon Wilson Purdy, Planetary Geologist at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Earth planning date: Monday, March 10, 2025 The Curiosity rover is winding between the spectacular Gould mesa and Texoli butte through beautifully layered terrain. The end-of-drive target from last week’s plan was a rock with a knobby/bumpy texture that appears […]

Written by Melissa Rice, Professor of Planetary Science at Western Washington University  This week, the Perseverance team faced a stubborn engineering challenge. After successfully collecting a core called “Green Gardens” from the “Tablelands” location, the rover struggled to seal the sample tube, despite multiple attempts. This isn’t entirely unprecedented — for a previous sample called […]

Written by Susanne Schwenzer, Planetary Geologist at The Open University Earth planning date: Wednesday, March 5, 2025 The Martian landscape never ceases to amaze me, there is so much variation in texture and color! As a mineralogist, I marvel at them, but my colleagues trained in sedimentology regularly teach me how to see even more […]