Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
-
Similar Topics
-
By NASA
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 Mosaics More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions 2 min read
Sols 4458-4460: Winter Schminter
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity captured this image of the Texoli butte, a Martian landmark about 525 feet (160 meters) tall, with many layers that scientists are studying to learn more about the formation of this region of the Red Planet. The butte is on the 3-mile-high Mount Sharp, inside Gale Crater, where Curiosity landed and has been exploring since 2012. The rover acquired this image using its Left Navigation Camera on sol 4456, or Martian day 4,456 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission, on Feb. 17, 2025, at 17:51:56 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Earth planning date: Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025
During today’s unusual-for-MSL Tuesday planning day (because of the U.S. holiday on Monday), we planned activities under new winter heating constraints. Operating Curiosity on Mars requires attention to a number of factors — power, data volume, terrain roughness, temperature — that affect rover operability and safety. Winter means more heating to warm up the gears and mechanisms within the rover and the instruments, but energy that goes to heating means less energy for science observations. Nevertheless, we (and Curiosity) were up to the task of balancing heating and science, and planned enough observations to warm the science team’s hearts.
We fit in DRT, APXS, and MAHLI on two different bedrock targets, “Chumash Trail” and “Wheeler Gorge,” which have different fracturing and layering features. In the workspace, ChemCam targeted a clean vertical exposure of layered bedrock at “Sierra Madre” and a lumpy-looking patch of resistant nodules at “Chiquito Basin.”
The topography of the local terrain and our end-of-drive position after the weekend fortuitously lined up to give us a view of an exposure of the Marker Band, which we first explored on the other side of Gediz Vallis Ridge. Having a view of another exposure of this distinctive horizon helps give us further insight into its origin, so we included both RMI and Mastcam mosaics of the exposure.
Documenting a feature that, unlike the Marker Band, has been and will be in our sights for a long time — “Texoli” butte (pictured above) — was the goal of additional Mastcam and ChemCam imaging. Observations of potential sedimentary structures on the flank of Texoli motivated acquisition of an RMI mosaic, and a chance to capture structures along its southeast face inspired a Mastcam mosaic. Good exposures of additional nearby bedrock structures at “Mount Lukens” and “Chantry Flat” drew the eye of Mastcam, while another small mosaic focused on the kind of linear troughs in the sand we often see bordering bedrock slabs. Environmental observations included Navcam cloud and dust-devil movies, Mastcam observations of dust in the atmosphere, and REMS and RAD measurements spread across the three sols of the plan.
Written by Michelle Minitti, Planetary Geologist at Framework
Share
Details
Last Updated Feb 20, 2025 Related Terms
Blogs Explore More
3 min read Cookies, Cream, and Crumbling Cores
Article
3 days ago
2 min read Sols 4454-4457: Getting Ready to Fill the Long Weekend with Science
Article
4 days ago
2 min read Sols 4452-4453: Keeping Warm and Keeping Busy
Article
7 days ago
Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
Mars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun, and the seventh largest. It’s the only planet we know of inhabited…
All Mars Resources
Explore this collection of Mars images, videos, resources, PDFs, and toolkits. Discover valuable content designed to inform, educate, and inspire,…
Rover Basics
Each robotic explorer sent to the Red Planet has its own unique capabilities driven by science. Many attributes of a…
Mars Exploration: Science Goals
The key to understanding the past, present or future potential for life on Mars can be found in NASA’s four…
View the full article
-
By NASA
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 Mosaics More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions 2 min read
Sols 4454-4457: Getting Ready to Fill the Long Weekend with Science
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image, which includes the pyramid-shaped rock at left in the photo, the science target dubbed “Pyramid Lake,” using its Left Navigation Camera. The rover acquired the image on sol 4452, or Martian day 4,452 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission, on Feb. 13, 2025, at 14:22:06 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Earth planning date: Friday, Feb. 14, 2025
Curiosity is continuing to make progress along the strategic route, traversing laterally across the sulfate (salt) bearing unit toward the boxwork structures. The team celebrated the completion of another successful drive when we received the downlink this morning, and then we immediately got to work thinking about what’s next. There is a holiday in the United States on Monday, so instead of the typical three-sol weekend plan, we actually planned four sols, which will set us up to return to planning next Tuesday.
The first sol of the plan focuses on remote sensing, and we’ll be taking several small Mastcam mosaics of features around the rover. One of my favorite targets the team picked is a delightfully pointy rock visible toward the left of the Navcam image shown above. The color images we’ll take with Mastcam will give us more information about the textures of this rock and potentially provide insight into the geologic forces that transformed it into this comical shape. The team chose what I think is a very appropriate name for this Martian pyramid-shaped target — “Pyramid Lake.” The terrestrial inspiration behind this name is a human-made reservoir (lake) near Los Angeles with a big (also human-made) pyramidal hill in it.
On the second sol of the plan, we’ll use the instruments on Curiosity’s arm to collect data of rock targets at our feet, including “Strawberry Peak,” a bumpy piece of bedrock, “Lake Arrowhead,” a smooth piece of bedrock, and “Skyline Trail,” a dark float rock. ChemCam will also collect chemical data of Skyline Trail, “Big Tujunga” — which is similar to Strawberry Peak — and “Momyer.” We’ll also take the first part of a 360-degree color mosaic with Mastcam!
In the third sol of the plan, we’ll complete the 360-degree mosaic and continue driving to the southwest along our strategic route. The fourth sol is pretty quiet, with some atmospheric observations and a ChemCam AEGIS. Atmospheric observations are additionally sprinkled throughout other sols of the plan. This time of year we are particularly interested in studying the clouds above Gale crater!
I’m looking forward to the nice long weekend, and returning on Tuesday morning to see everything Curiosity accomplished.
Written by Abigail Fraeman, Planetary Geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Share
Details
Last Updated Feb 17, 2025 Related Terms
Blogs Explore More
2 min read Sols 4452-4453: Keeping Warm and Keeping Busy
Article
3 days ago
2 min read Sols 4450-4451: Making the Most of a Monday
Article
5 days ago
3 min read Sols 4447–4449: Looking Back at the Marker Band Valley
Article
6 days ago
Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
Mars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun, and the seventh largest. It’s the only planet we know of inhabited…
All Mars Resources
Explore this collection of Mars images, videos, resources, PDFs, and toolkits. Discover valuable content designed to inform, educate, and inspire,…
Rover Basics
Each robotic explorer sent to the Red Planet has its own unique capabilities driven by science. Many attributes of a…
Mars Exploration: Science Goals
The key to understanding the past, present or future potential for life on Mars can be found in NASA’s four…
View the full article
-
By NASA
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 Mosaics More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions 2 min read
Sols 4452-4453: Keeping Warm and Keeping Busy
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image of the science targets before it, including “Catalina Island,” the flat rock at image center, using its Left Navigation Camera. The rover captured the image on sol 4450 — or Martian day 4,450 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — on Feb. 11, 2025, at 13:11:14 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Earth planning date: Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2025
I woke up this morning to my weather app telling me it felt like minus 15° C (5°F) outside. On days like this, it can take me a little longer to get myself up and out into the world. Curiosity has a similar problem — as we head toward winter and it gets colder and colder in Gale Crater, Curiosity has to spend more time warming up to do things like driving and all our good science. I’ve also been watching a couple winter storms that are expected in the next few days here in Toronto. Luckily, Curiosity doesn’t have to deal with snowstorms, and our drive in the last plan went ahead as planned and put us in a good position to go ahead with contact science today, a relief after having to forego it on Monday.
The contact science location that the geology team chose is called “Catalina Island,” the flat rock you can see in almost the center of the image above. As you can likely also see above, there’s a whole jumble of rocks in that image, and Mastcam and ChemCam have picked out a couple others to take a look at. These are “Point Dume,” which will be the target of ChemCam’s laser spectrometer, and “Whittier Narrows,” on which Mastcam will image some linear features. Mastcam and ChemCam are also turning their gazes further afield for Mastcam targets “Cleghorn Ridge,” “Cuyamaca Peak,” “Kratka Ridge,” and two long-distance ChemCam mosaics of the top of the Wilkerson butte and a spot a little further down known as “Pothole Trail.”
Much like I’m keeping an eye out the window on the changing weather here, Curiosity is also continuing to keep an eye on the environment in Gale Crater. Even though it’s not the dusty season, we continue to monitor the dust around us and in the atmosphere with a dust-devil survey and a tau. But we’re especially interested in what the clouds are up to right now, which we’re checking in on with our normal zenith and suprahorizon movies, and our cloud-season-only Phase Function Sky Survey. This is a series of movies covering the whole sky that we can use to determine how sunlight interacts with the individual water-ice crystals in the clouds.
Written by Alex Innanen, Atmospheric Scientist at York University
Share
Details
Last Updated Feb 14, 2025 Related Terms
Blogs Explore More
2 min read Sols 4450-4451: Making the Most of a Monday
Article
2 days ago
3 min read Sols 4447–4449: Looking Back at the Marker Band Valley
Article
3 days ago
4 min read Sols 4445–4446: Cloudy Days are Here
Article
1 week ago
Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
Mars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun, and the seventh largest. It’s the only planet we know of inhabited…
All Mars Resources
Explore this collection of Mars images, videos, resources, PDFs, and toolkits. Discover valuable content designed to inform, educate, and inspire,…
Rover Basics
Each robotic explorer sent to the Red Planet has its own unique capabilities driven by science. Many attributes of a…
Mars Exploration: Science Goals
The key to understanding the past, present or future potential for life on Mars can be found in NASA’s four…
View the full article
-
By NASA
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 Mosaics More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions 2 min read
Sols 4450-4451: Making the Most of a Monday
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image of its brightly lit workspace and its right-front wheel in the shadows, perched on some tall rocks. The rover used its Right Front Hazcam (Front Hazard Avoidance Camera) to capture the image on sol 4449 — or Martian day 4,449 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — Feb. 10, 2025, at 10:44:45 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Earth planning date: Monday, Feb. 10, 2025
Last Saturday around 20:00 Pacific Standard Time I saw a 22-degree halo encircling our mostly-full Moon and Mars; an entire planet hanging in the sky between our Moon and the atmospheric phenomenon. As I took in the view I wondered what our rover was doing at that moment… turns out the Sun had just risen over Gale crater and Curiosity was still asleep, waiting for her alarm to go off in about 2.5 hours for another full day of science.
She wouldn’t start the weekend’s drive until Monday morning about 1:30, while I was still asleep waiting for my alarm to sound at 5:15. The drive’s data arrived on Earth about 5:30, and told us we drove until our time-of-day limit for driving — stopping about 36 meters (about 118 feet) away from Friday’s location. Unfortunately, our right-front wheel was shown to be perched on some tall rocks and we couldn’t quantify the drop risk if we unstowed the arm. We decided to play it safe and keep the arm stowed instead.
Today’s two-sol plan would normally be in “nominal” sols — meaning we’d get a full day of science and a drive on the second sol — but due to some DSN downtime on Earth we moved our drive to the first sol, therefore switching to “restricted” sols a bit earlier than usual after our last soliday. Even though we couldn’t plan contact science, we’re making the most of our plan with almost 90 minutes of remote sensing. Mastcam will take an approximately 24-frame stereo mosaic of Wilkerson butte to the north, and ChemCam will shoot their laser at a rock in our workspace named “Carbon Canyon,” as well as three separate RMI mosaics! We’ll then attempt to drive until our time-of-day limit of about 15:00 local Gale time, hopefully getting us to a more stable spot on Wednesday for contact science. The second sol contains our usual dust-devil surveys with Navcam, atmospheric opacity measurements with Mastcam, and a blind LIBS on a piece of bedrock the rover chooses autonomously.
Written by Natalie Moore, Mission Operations Specialist at Malin Space Science Systems
Share
Details
Last Updated Feb 11, 2025 Related Terms
Blogs Explore More
3 min read Sols 4447–4449: Looking Back at the Marker Band Valley
Article
1 day ago
4 min read Sols 4445–4446: Cloudy Days are Here
Article
5 days ago
2 min read Sols 4443-4444: Four Fours for February
Article
6 days ago
Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
Mars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun, and the seventh largest. It’s the only planet we know of inhabited…
All Mars Resources
Explore this collection of Mars images, videos, resources, PDFs, and toolkits. Discover valuable content designed to inform, educate, and inspire,…
Rover Basics
Each robotic explorer sent to the Red Planet has its own unique capabilities driven by science. Many attributes of a…
Mars Exploration: Science Goals
The key to understanding the past, present or future potential for life on Mars can be found in NASA’s four…
View the full article
-
By NASA
4 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
A team at JPL packed up three small Moon rovers, delivering them in February to the facility where they’ll be attached to a commercial lunar lander in preparation for launch. The rovers are part of a project called CADRE that could pave the way for potential future multirobot missions.. NASA/JPL-Caltech A trio of suitcase-size rovers and their base station have been carefully wrapped up and shipped off to join the lander that will deliver them to the Moon’s surface.
Three small NASA rovers that will explore the lunar surface as a team have been packed up and shipped from the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, marking completion of the first leg of the robots’ journey to the Moon.
The rovers are part of a technology demonstration called CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration), which aims to show that a group of robots can collaborate to gather data without receiving direct commands from mission controllers on Earth. They’ll use their cameras and ground-penetrating radars to send back imagery of the lunar surface and subsurface while testing out the novel software that enables them to work together autonomously.
The CADRE rovers will launch to the Moon aboard IM-3, Intuitive Machines’ third lunar delivery, which has a mission window that extends into early 2026, as part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative. Once installed on Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander, they’ll head to the Reiner Gamma region on the western edge of the Moon’s near side, where the solar-powered, suitcase-size rovers will spend the daylight hours of a lunar day (the equivalent of about 14 days on Earth) carrying out experiments. The success of CADRE could pave the way for potential future missions with teams of autonomous robots supporting astronauts and spreading out to take simultaneous, distributed scientific measurements.
Members of a JPL team working on NASA’s CADRE technology demonstration use temporary red handles to move one of the project’s small Moon rovers to prepare it for transport to Intuitive Machines’ Houston facility, where it will be attached to the company’s third lunar lander. Construction of the CADRE hardware — along with a battery of rigorous tests to prove readiness for the journey through space — was completed in February 2024.
To get prepared for shipment to Intuitive Machines’ Houston facility, each rover was attached to its deployer system, which will lower it via tether from the lander onto the dusty lunar surface. Engineers flipped each rover-deployer pair over and attached it to an aluminum plate for safe transit. The rovers were then sealed in protective metal-frame enclosures that were fitted snuggly into metal shipping containers and loaded onto a truck. The hardware arrived safely on Sunday, Feb. 9.
“Our small team worked incredibly hard constructing these robots and putting them to the test, and we have been eagerly waiting for the moment where we finally see them on their way,” said Coleman Richdale, the team’s assembly, test, and launch operations lead at JPL. “We are all genuinely thrilled to be taking this next step in our journey to the Moon, and we can’t wait to see the lunar surface through CADRE’s eyes.”
The rovers, the base station, and a camera system that will monitor CADRE experiments on the Moon will be integrated with the lander — as will several other NASA payloads — in preparation for the launch of the IM-3 mission.
More About CADRE
A division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, JPL manages CADRE for the Game Changing Development program within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. The technology demonstration was selected under the agency’s Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative, which was established to expedite the development of technologies for sustained presence on the lunar surface. NASA’s Science Mission Directorate manages the CLPS initiative. The agency’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and its Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, both supported the project. Motiv Space Systems designed and built key hardware elements at the company’s Pasadena facility. Clemson University in South Carolina contributed research in support of the project.
For more about CADRE, go to:
https://go.nasa.gov/cadre
News Media Contact
Melissa Pamer
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-314-4928
melissa.pamer@jpl.nasa.gov
2025-018
Share
Details
Last Updated Feb 11, 2025 Related Terms
CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration) Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) Earth's Moon Game Changing Development Program Jet Propulsion Laboratory Space Technology Mission Directorate Technology Technology Demonstration Explore More
5 min read NASA’s Curiosity Rover Captures Colorful Clouds Drifting Over Mars
Article 2 hours ago 5 min read NASA-Led Study Pinpoints Areas Sinking, Rising Along California Coast
Article 1 day ago 5 min read Euclid Discovers Einstein Ring in Our Cosmic Backyard
Article 1 day ago Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics
Missions
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
-
Check out these Videos
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.