Sol 956: Mercury Transit

14 April 2015

With the last portion of the Telegraph Peak sample delivered to SAM and analyzed by APXS, we are ready to keep driving. In the sol 956 plan, there is a quick science block in the morning, to allow the rover to take a couple of Mastcam pictures of nearby boulders called “Waucoba” and… Read More

Sols 953-955: Dumping Telegraph Peak

13 April 2015

Our sol 952 drive went well, and we’re very close to crossing over into a new “quad” of the map that was made before landing (meaning we will get a whole new bunch of target names to choose from!). On Saturday the team planned for a lengthy ChemCam focus test on sol 953, where… Read More

Sol 952: Longer drive

10 April 2015

  MSL drove 18 meters on Sol 951, as planned, putting the rover in position to image the terrain ahead and plan a longer drive on Sol 952.  The total "wheel odometry" for the MSL mission is now over 10 km!  But the total traverse distance is still less than 10 km, because the… Read More

New Mars Education Website

10 April 2015

A new website, sponsored by Cochise College, provides easy access for Mars education. The website offers more than 4300 views of Mars including Martian landforms, landform distribution maps, over 2500 views of IAU-approved named features, and much more. You can visit this website here.

Sol 951: 10k

9 April 2015

We are continuing our driving tour of Artist’s Drive, and we should be reaching the 10k mark on Curiosity’s odometer in the sol 951 plan! The rover will start off the day with a targeted science block full of Mastcam observations. We are planning two Mastcam mosaics looking at the… Read More

Sol 950: Taking in the Scenery along Artist’s Drive

8 April 2015

  Like most tourists who visit Artist’s Drive on Earth, Curiosity is busy taking lots of photos to document the valley walls of Artist’s Drive on Mars.  We are officially on the road again, and working our way through a very scenic drive.  I’m the Geology Science… Read More

Sol 949: Leaving Garden City

7 April 2015

After an extensive study of the veins at Garden City, it’s finally time to continue on our path down Artist’s Drive. We’ve collected a lot of really great data, including MAHLI images like this one from Sol 946, which will help us to determine the history of fluid flow through… Read More

Sol 948: Good Morning Mars

6 April 2015

As we started the planning day before sunrise, I was reminded of the first three months of the mission that we spent living on Mars time.   Today is an early “slide sol,” meaning that the planning timeline is shifted 1.5 hours earlier in order to compensate for our downlink… Read More

Sols 946-947: MAHLI mosaic

3 April 2015

  The MAHLI operations team did a lot of good work preparing for Sol 946, so I expected that it would be an easy day for me as uplink lead.  Unfortunately, a problem on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) prevented some of the data we expected to receive in time for planning from… Read More

Sols 944-945: Return to Garden City

1 April 2015

After receiving and analyzing the most recent "Garden City" data, the MSL team decided that more data are needed to better understand this interesting outcrop.  Therefore, after acquiring some ChemCam and Mastcam observations near "Kanosh," the rover will drive back to Garden City on Sol… Read More