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By NASA
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS The United States flag adorns an aluminum plate mounted at the base of the mast, or “head,” of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. This image of the plate was taken on June 28, 2025 (the 1,548th day, or sol, of the mission), by the WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera on the end of the rover’s robotic arm.
WATSON, part of an instrument called SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals), was built by Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) in San Diego and is operated jointly by MSSS and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. JPL, which is managed for the agency by Caltech, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
Learn more about Perseverance’s latest science.
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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 Mars Home 4 min read
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4577-4579: Watch the Skies
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image inside a trough in the boxwork terrain on Mars, using its Right Navigation Camera. Curiosity captured the image on June 20, 2025 — Sol 4575, or Martian day 4,575 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 00:30:12 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Deborah Padgett, OPGS Task Lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Earth planning date: Friday, June 20, 2025
During the plan covering Sols 4575-4576, Curiosity continued our investigation of mysterious boxwork structures on the shoulders of Mount Sharp. After a successful 56-meter drive (about 184 feet), Curiosity is now parked in a trough cutting through a highly fractured region covered by linear features thought to be evidence of groundwater flow in the distant past of Mars. With all six wheels firmly planted on solid ground, our rover is ready for contact science! Unfortunately, a repeat of the frost-detection experiment expected for the weekend plan is postponed for a few days due to a well-understood ChemCam issue. In the meantime, our atmospheric investigations have a chance to shine, as they received additional time to observe the Martian sky.
In the early afternoon of Sol 4577, Curiosity’s navigation cameras will take a movie of the upper reaches of Aeolis Mons (Mount Sharp), hoping to see moving cloud shadows. This observation enables the team to calculate the altitude of clouds drifting over the peak. Next, Navcam will point straight up, to image cloud motion at the zenith and determine wind direction at their altitude. Mastcam will then do a series of small mosaics to study the rover workspace and features of the trough that Curiosity has entered. First is a 6×4 stereo mosaic of the workspace and the contact science targets “Copacabana” and “Copiapo.” The first target is a representative sample of the trough bedrock, and its name celebrates a town in Bolivia located on the shores of Lake Titicaca. The second target is a section of lighter-toned material, which may be associated with stripes or “veins” filling the many crosscutting fractures in the local stones. These are the deposits potentially left by groundwater intrusion long ago. The name “Copiapo” honors a silver mining city in the extremely dry Atacama desert of northern Chile. A second 6×3 Mastcam stereo mosaic will look at active cracks in the trough. Two additional 5×1 Mastcam stereo mosaics target “Ardamarca,” a ridge parallel to the trough walls, and a cliff exposing layers of rock at the base of “Mishe Mokwa” butte. At our current location, all the Curiosity target names are taken from the Uyuni geologic quadrangle named after the otherworldly lake bed and ephemeral lake high on the Bolivian altiplano, but the Mishe Mokwa butte is back in the Altadena quad, named for a popular hiking trail in the Santa Monica Mountains. After this lengthy science block, Curiosity will deploy its arm, brush the dust from Copacabana with the DRT, then image both it and Copiapo with the MAHLI microscopic imager. Overnight, APXS will determine the composition of these two targets.
Early in the morning of Sol 4578, Mastcam will take large 27×5 and 18×3 stereo mosaics of different parts of the trough, using morning light to highlight the terrain shadows. Later in the day, Navcam will do a 360 sky survey, determining phase function across the entire sky. A 25-meter drive (about 82 feet) will follow, and the post-drive imaging includes both a 360-degree Navcam panorama of our new location and an image of the ground under the rover with MARDI in the evening twilight. The next sol is all atmospheric science, with an extensive set of afternoon suprahorizon movies and a dust-devil survey for Navcam, as well as a Mastcam dust opacity observation. The final set of observations in this plan happens on the morning of Sol 4580 with more Navcam suprahorizon and zenith movies to observe clouds, a Navcam dust opacity measurement across Gale Crater, and a last Mastcam tau. On Monday, we expect to plan another drive and hope to return to the frost-detection experiment soon as we explore the boxwork canyons of Mars.
For more Curiosity blog posts, visit MSL Mission Updates
Learn more about Curiosity’s science instruments
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Last Updated Jun 20, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
L. Y. Zhou, a senior at Skyline High School, Ann Arbor, MI, representing the SunRISE Ground Radio Lab (GRL) summer research project team at the Solar Heliospheric and INterplanetary Environment (SHINE) conference, held in Juneau, AK in August 2024. Other contributing high school students were S. Rajavelu-Mohan (Washtenaw Technical Middle College, Ann Arbor, MI), M. I. Costacamps-Rivera (Centro Residencial de Oportunidades Educativas de Mayagüez, Mayagüez, PR), E. Schneider (Marquette Senior High School, Marquette, MI), and L. Cui (Skyline High School, Ann Arbor, MI). Solar radio bursts, intense blasts of radio emission associated with solar flares, can wreak havoc on global navigation systems. Now, as part of the Ground Radio Lab campaign led by the University of Michigan and NASA’s SunRISE (Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment) mission, which is managed by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, high school and college students across the nation are collecting, processing, and analyzing space weather data to help better understand these bursts.
Participating students have presented their findings at local science fairs and national conferences, including the Solar Heliospheric and INterplanetary Environment (SHINE) conference held in Juneau, Alaska in August 2024. These students sifted through thousands of hours of observations to identify and categorize solar radio bursts.
Your school can get involved too!
Participating high schools receive free, self-paced online training modules sponsored by the SunRISE mission that cover a range of topics, including radio astronomy, space physics, and science data collection and analysis. Students and teachers participate in monthly webinars with space science and astronomy experts, build radio telescopes from kits, and then use these telescopes to observe low frequency emissions from the Sun and other objects like Jupiter and the Milky Way.
Visit the Ground Radio Lab website to learn more about the new campaign and apply to participate.
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Last Updated May 28, 2025 Related Terms
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By Space Force
On May 23, the Department of the Air Forcereleased updated guidance for implementation of Executive Order 14183, ‘Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness, aligning with updated Department of Defense policy and addressing medical standards, accession, retention, and administrative processes for transgender Airmen and Guardians.
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