Category: Blogs

Written by Athanasios Klidaras, Ph.D. candidate at Purdue University, and Megan Kennedy Wu, Senior Mission Operations Specialist at Malin Space Science Systems To celebrate her 1,500th Martian day (“Sol”) exploring the red planet, the Perseverance rover used its robotic arm to take a selfie of the rover and the surrounding landscape. But when team members […]

Written by Conor Hayes, Graduate Student at York University Earth planning date: Friday, May 23, 2025 In Wednesday’s mission update, Alex mentioned that this past Monday’s plan included a “marathon” drive of 45 meters (148 feet). Today, we found ourselves almost 70 meters (230 feet) from where we were on Wednesday. This was our longest […]

Written by Alex Innanen, Atmospheric Scientist at York University Earth planning date: Wednesday, May 21, 2025 Monday’s single-sol plan included a marathon 45-meter drive (about 148 feet), which put us in position for two full sols of imaging. This means both sols have what we call “targeted” science blocks, in which we have images of […]

Written by Michelle Minitti, Planetary Geologist at Framework Earth planning date: Monday, May 19, 2025 Have you ever played the game Jenga, where you remove one wooden block from a stack, gently place it on another part of the stack, then repeat over and over as you try to keep the stack from toppling over? […]

Written by Susanne Schwenzer, Planetary Geologist at The Open University Earth planning date: Friday, May 16, 2025 As Curiosity progresses up Mount Sharp, it crosses different terrains, which the team has mapped from orbit. If you want to follow the path and see for yourself, you can have a look on the “Where is Curiosity?” […]

Written by Ashley Stroupe, Mission Operations Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Earth planning date: Wednesday, May 14, 2025 Today we came into another strange and interesting workspace (see image above) that is as exciting as the one we had on Monday. This is our first arrival at a potential boxwork structure — a series […]

Written by Remington Free, Operations Systems Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Earth planning date: Friday, May 9, 2025 I was on downlink today for SA-SPaH, our robotic arm team. We successfully completed a number of fun arm activities, including a DRT brushing and APXS observations of a bedrock target, and also completed a traverse […]

Written by Lucy Lim, Planetary Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Earth planning date: Wednesday, May 7, 2025 The drive from the Monday plan brought Curiosity up next to a geomorphic contact visible in the orbital data (from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE imager). To the east of the contact are the layered sulfates that […]

Written by Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, Planetary Geologist at University of New Brunswick Earth planning date: Monday, May 5, 2025 Our 29-meter weekend drive (about 95 feet) was successful, and we are still in the band of polygon-rich bedrock. The origin of these cracks is not clear — could they have formed as desiccation cracks as Mars […]

Written by Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, Planetary Geologist at University of New Brunswick Earth planning date: Friday, May 2, 2025 From our Wednesday stopping spot, the drive direction ahead (looking along the path we would follow in the Wednesday drive) appeared to be full of rough, gnarly material, which can be tricky targets for contact science instruments […]