Category: Blogs

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 […]

Written by Denise Buckner, Postdoctoral Fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center  Over the past few weeks, Perseverance has been investigating some curious spherules peppered across the “Witch Hazel Hill” region along the rim of Jezero crater. A striking cluster of the small bubble-shaped stones were first spotted by the Mastcam-Z instrument on Sol 1442 […]

Written by Natalie Moore, Mission Operations Specialist at Malin Space Science Systems Earth planning date: Wednesday, April 30, 2025 We’re back in our standard “touch and go” plan regime today, where we sandwich a midday remote science block between morning-APXS and afternoon-MAHLI contact science arm blocks. We had our first late-slide 9 a.m. PDT start […]

Written by Lucy Lim, Planetary Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Earth planning date: Monday, April 28, 2025 Curiosity is back on the road! For sols 4525 and 4526, we have an isolated nominal plan in which the communication pass timing works out in such a way that the rover can fit in fully […]

Written by Deborah Padgett, OPGS Task Lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Earth planning date: Friday, April 25, 2025 On Sols 4520 and 4521, Curiosity was supposed to study layered rocks in its workspace, then drive on. Unfortunately, a communications pass didn’t go as expected, preventing this plan from being transmitted. Our rover is fine, […]

Written by Eleanor Moreland, Ph.D. Student Collaborator at Rice University  Perseverance has been busy exploring lower “Witch Hazel Hill,” an outcrop exposed on the edge of the Jezero crater rim. The outcrop is composed of alternating light and dark layers, and naturally, the team has been trying to understand the makeup of and relationships between […]

Written by Scott VanBommel, Planetary Scientist at Washington University Earth planning date: Wednesday, April 23, 2025 I will start this blog with an apology, an apology because I suspect, by the end of this post, you, the reader, may have a craving for chocolate, or cake, or both. While we saw hints of it in […]