Sols 932-934 What’s Growing in Garden City

While many of us in the northern hemisphere are celebrating the first day of spring, Curiosity is busy tending to her “Garden City.” Sadly there are no flowers in sight, but the outcrop contains some beautiful veins.  This MAHLI image from Sol 930 shows some of the complex relationships that we’re trying to sort out.  I’ve been the Geology Science Theme Lead this week and Ken Herkenhoff has been the SOWG Chair and MAHLI PUL, so the team here at the USGS has been very involved in planning contact science at this location.

Today we’re planning 3 sols, during which Curiosity will acquire MAHLI and APXS on both the dark and light portions of these veins to better understand their texture and composition.  We’ll also acquire a ChemCam transect across one of the veins, to look for variations in chemistry.  And Curiosity will stay busy overnight, working on the third CheMin analysis of the “Telegraph Peak” sample.  In addition to these observations, Curiosity will perform a number of environmental monitoring activities to measure atmospheric composition and opacity, and search for dust devils.   Next week we’ll have to decide if we want to stay here at “Garden City” for further analyses, or continue driving down “Artist’s Drive.”

By Lauren Edgar

--Lauren is a Research Geologist at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center and a member of MSL science team.

Dates of planned rover activities described in these reports are subject to change due to a variety of factors related to the Martian environment, communication relays and rover status.