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By NASA
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Sols 4518-4519: Thumbs up from Mars
This image was taken by Front Hazard Avoidance Camera (Front Hazcam) onboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 4516. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Susanne Schwenzer, Planetary Geologist at The Open University
Earth planning date: Monday, 21st April 2025
It is Easter Monday, a bank holiday here in the United Kingdom. I am Science Operations Working Group Chair today, a role that is mainly focused on coordinating all the different planning activities on a given day, and ensuring all the numbers are communicated to everyone. And with that I mean making sure that everyone knows how much power we have and other housekeeping details. It’s a fun role, but on the more technical side of the mission, which means I don’t get to look at the rocks in the workspace as closely as my colleagues who are planning the activities of the instruments directly investigating the rocks. It’s a lot of fun to see how planning day after planning day things come together. But why am I doing this on a bank holiday, when I could well be on my sofa? I just was reminded in the hours before planning how much fun it actually is to spend a little more time looking at all the images – and not the usual hectic rush coming out of an almost complete work day (we start at 8 am PDT, which is 4 pm here in the UK!). So, I enjoyed the views of Mars, and I think Mars gave me a thumbs up for it, or better to say a little pointy ‘rock up’ in the middle of a sandy area, as you can see in the image above!
I am sure you noticed that our team has a lot to celebrate! Less than a month after the publication about alkanes made headlines in many news outlets, we have another big discovery from our rover, now 4518 sols on Mars: in three drill holes, the rover instruments detected the mineral siderite, a carbonate. That allowed a group of scientists from our team to piece together the carbon cycle of Mars. If you want to know more, the full story is here. I am looking forward to our next big discovery. Who knows that that is? Well, it would not be exploration, if we knew!
But today’s workspace looks intriguing with all its little laminae (the very fine layers) and its weathering patterns that look like a layered cake that little fingers have picked the icing off! (Maybe I had too many treats of the season this weekend? That’s for you to decide!) But then Mars did what it did so many times lately: we did not pass our slip risk assessment and therefore had to keep the arm stowed. I think there is a direct link between geologists getting exciting about all the many rocks, and a wheel ending up on one of them, making it unsafe to unstow the arm. There was a collective sigh of disappointment – and then we moved on to what we actually can do.
And that is a lot of imaging. As exciting as getting an APXS measurement and MAHLI images would be, Mastcam images, ChemCam chemistry and RMI images are exciting, too. The plan starts with three Mastcam activities to document the small troughs that form around some of the rocks. Those amount to 15 frames already, then we have a ten-frame mosaic on a target called “West Fork,” which is looking at rocks in the middle ground of the scenery and display interesting layering. Finally, a 84 frame mosaic will image Texoli, one of the large buttes in our neighbourhood, in all its beauty. It shows a series of interesting layers and structures, including some that might be akin to what we expect the boxwork structures to look like. Now, did you keep count? Yes, that’s 109 frames from Mastcam – and add the one for the documentation of the LIBS target, too, and Mastcam takes exactly 110 frames!
ChemCam is busy with a target called “Lake Poway,” which represents the bedrock around us. Also in the ChemCam activities is a long distance RMI upwards Mt Sharp to the Yardang unit. After the drive – more of that later – ChemCam as an automated observation, we call it AEGIS, where ChemCam uses a clever algorithm to pick its own target.
The drive will be very special today. As you may have seen, we are imaging our wheels in regular intervals to make sure that we are keeping track of the wear and tear that over 34 km of offroad driving on Mars have caused. For that, we need a very flat area and our rover drivers did locate one due West of the current rover positions. So, that’s where we will drive first, do the full MAHLI wheel imaging and then return to the originally planned path. That’s where we’ll do a MARDI image, post drive imaging to prepare the planning for the next sols, and the above mentioned AEGIS.
In addition to all the geologic investigations, there is continuous environmental monitoring ongoing. Curiosity will look at opacity and dust devils, and REMS will switch on regularly to measure wind speeds, humidity, temperature, ultraviolet radiation and pressure throughout the plan. Let’s not forget DAN, which monitors water and chlorine in the subsurface as we are driving along. It’s so easy to forget the ones that sit quietly in the back – but in this case, they have important data to contribute!
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First Results from the Eclipse Soundscapes Project: Webinar on May 7
How do the sudden darkness and temperature changes of a solar eclipse impact life on Earth? The Eclipse Soundscapes project invited you to document changes in the environment during the week of the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse, using your own senses or an audiomoth sound recorder.
Thanks to your participation, the Eclipse Soundscapes team collected 25 terabytes of audio data during the 2023 and 2024 solar eclipses. “It was really empowering for me to participate in a scientific research study with my son beside me so he could see how scientific data can be (collected),” said one Eclipse Soundscapes volunteer.
More than 500 volunteers collected data using AudioMoth recorders during the April 8, 2024 eclipse for the Eclipse Soundscapes project. Credit: Eclipse Soundscapes Since the eclipse, the Eclipse Soundscapes team has been turning the submitted data into a new, carefully validated data set. They have been assessing recording quality, verifying timestamps, and logging other kinds of information that support the submitted data. With the newly validated data, they are now using machine learning to study wildlife behavior and compare regional differences. They do some of this work using spectrographic analysis—spreading out the sound into different frequency ranges like a prism spreads light into a rainbow. The team is also working to make the validated data freely available to the public on the Zenodo website—a free, open-source research data repository developed by CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) that allows researchers to share and preserve their work, regardless of discipline or format.
The team’s first inspection of the data suggests that some species may mimic dusk-like behavior during totality. Want to hear more early results? You can join the team’s live webinar on May 7, 2025, at 2:00 p.m. EST with Dr. Brent Pease. Register now at EclipseSoundscapes.org. You can also explore this interactive map of data analysis sites, with details about each site, including partner organizations.
Register for the May 7 Preliminary Results WEBINAR
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Last Updated Apr 22, 2025 Related Terms
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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover sees its tracks receding into the distance at a site nicknamed “Ubajara” on April 30, 2023. This site is where Curiosity made the discovery of siderite, a mineral that may help explain the fate of the planet’s thicker ancient atmosphere.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS New findings from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover could provide an answer to the mystery of what happened to the planet’s ancient atmosphere and how Mars has evolved over time.
Researchers have long believed that Mars once had a thick, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere and liquid water on the planet’s surface. That carbon dioxide and water should have reacted with Martian rocks to create carbonate minerals. Until now, though, rover missions and near-infrared spectroscopy analysis from Mars-orbiting satellites haven’t found the amounts of carbonate on the planet’s surface predicted by this theory.
Reported in an April paper in Science, data from three of Curiosity’s drill sites revealed the presence of siderite, an iron carbonate mineral, within the sulfate-rich rocky layers of Mount Sharp in Mars’ Gale Crater.
“The discovery of abundant siderite in Gale Crater represents both a surprising and important breakthrough in our understanding of the geologic and atmospheric evolution of Mars,” said Benjamin Tutolo, associate professor at the University of Calgary, Canada, and lead author of the paper.
To study the Red Planet’s chemical and mineral makeup, Curiosity drills three to four centimeters down into the subsurface, then drops the powdered rock samples into its CheMin instrument. The instrument, led by NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, uses X-ray diffraction to analyze rocks and soil. CheMin’s data was processed and analyzed by scientists at the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) Division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“Drilling through the layered Martian surface is like going through a history book,” said Thomas Bristow, research scientist at NASA Ames and coauthor of the paper. “Just a few centimeters down gives us a good idea of the minerals that formed at or close to the surface around 3.5 billion years ago.”
The discovery of this carbonate mineral in rocks beneath the surface suggests that carbonate may be masked by other minerals in near-infrared satellite analysis. If other sulfate-rich layers across Mars also contain carbonates, the amount of stored carbon dioxide would be a fraction of that needed in the ancient atmosphere to create conditions warm enough to support liquid water. The rest could be hidden in other deposits or have been lost to space over time.
In the future, missions or analyses of other sulfate-rich areas on Mars could confirm these findings and help us better understand the planet’s early history and how it transformed as its atmosphere was lost.
Curiosity, part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program (MEP) portfolio, was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
For more information on Curiosity, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity
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Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-2433
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov
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Last Updated Apr 17, 2025 Related Terms
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Credit: NASA NASA is marking progress in strengthening the agency’s small business partnerships, supply chain resiliency, and domestic space manufacturing capabilities.
Under the agency’s enhanced Mentor-Protégé Program, NASA has announced the first Mentor-Protégé Agreement between L3Harris Technologies, a NASA large prime contractor, and Parametric Machining, Inc., a veteran-owned small business.
This agreement will help advance NASA’s mission by fostering innovation and reinforcing the agency’s supply chain. As NASA continues to advance the Artemis campaign, deep space exploration, and aeronautics research, partnerships like this are essential in securing a resilient and efficient supplier base.
“We are excited to facilitate the first agreement under the newly enhanced NASA Mentor-Protégé Program,” said Dwight Deneal, assistant administrator for NASA’s Office of Small Business Programs. “This agreement, and the many that will follow, promote domestic ingenuity and manufacturing and provide opportunities for small businesses to grow and thrive within NASA’s industrial base.”
Through Mentor-Protégé Agreements, large prime contractors serve as mentors, offering technical and business development assistance to small business protégés. This collaboration not only enhances protégés’ capabilities but also provides mentors with a stronger, more reliable subcontracting base, enabling them to fill their supply chain gaps. Additionally, protégés gain potential prime and subcontract opportunities, enhanced technical capabilities, technical training, and long-term business growth.
Relaunched in November 2024, the merit-based NASA Mentor-Protégé Program is designed to bolster small business development while strengthening NASA’s supply chain and industry base. By focusing on a targeted set of North American Industry Classification System codes, including research and development and aerospace manufacturing, NASA ensures that participating small businesses are well-positioned to contribute to long-term mission objectives.
The agreement between L3Harris Technologies and Parametric Machining, Inc. demonstrates the value of NASA’s revamped Mentor-Protégé Program. NASA is actively accepting new Mentor-Protégé Agreements and encourages large prime contractors and small businesses to explore the benefits of forming partnerships under the program. Participating in the Mentor-Protégé Program provides:
Enhanced manufacturing capabilities and subcontracting opportunities. Mentorship from experienced NASA prime contractors. Opportunities to advance competitiveness in government contracts. Access to technical assistance and business development support. A pathway for small businesses to integrate into NASA’s supply chain. L3Harris Technologies is a prime contractor at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, supporting the Geostationary Extended Observations Imager Instrument Implementation contract. NASA Goddard also will serve as the administering center for this agreement.
For more information on NASA’s Mentor-Protégé Program and how to participate, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/osbp/mentor-protege-program
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Last Updated Apr 17, 2025 ContactTiernan P. Doyletiernan.doyle@nasa.govLocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
Office of Small Business Programs (OSBP) View the full article
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