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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 3 min read
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4595-4596: Just Another Beautiful Day on Mars
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Left Navigation Camera on July 9, 2025 — Sol 4594, or Martian day 4,594 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 11:03:48 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Ashley Stroupe, Mission Operations Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Earth planning date: Wednesday, July 9, 2025
In today’s plan, we have a little bit of everything. With it being winter still, we are taking advantage of the ability to let the rover sleep in, doing most of the activities in the afternoon when it is warmer and we need less heating. As the Systems Engineer (Engineering Uplink Lead) today, I sequenced the needed heating and some other engineering housekeeping activities.
We start off with an extensive remote science block with Mastcam imaging of a nearby trough to look for potential sand activity. There is color imaging of a displaced block, “Ouro,” near a circular depression — could this be a small crater? Mastcam also takes a look at a ridge “Volcán Peña Blanca” to look at the sedimentary structures, which may provide insights into its formation. ChemCam LIBS and Mastcam team up to look at the “Los Andes” target, which is the dark face of a nearby piece of exposed bedrock. ChemCam RMI and Mastcam check out a distant small outcrop to examine the geometry of the layers. We also throw in environmental observations, a Mastcam solar Tau and a Navcam line-of-site looking at dust in the atmosphere. After a nap, Curiosity will be doing some contact science activities on “Cataratas del Jardín” and “Rio Ivirizu” bedrock targets. Looking at two nearby targets for variability can help us understand the local geology. Cataratas del Jardín gets a brushing to clear away the dust before both targets are examined by MAHLI and APXS. Fortunately for the Arm Rover Planner, both of these targets are fairly flat and easy to reach. Before going to sleep for the night, Curiosity will stow the arm to be ready for driving on the next sol.On the second sol, there is more remote science. ChemCam LIBS and Mastcam will examine “Torotoro,” another piece of layered bedrock. ChemCam RMI will take a mosaic of “Paniri,” which is an interesting incision in the rock that is filled with another material. There are also environmental observations, a Navcam dust devil survey and a suprahorizon movie. After another nap, Curiosity is getting on the road. We’re heading southwest (direction shown in the image) about 50 meters (about 164 feet), but we need to sneak between sandy pits and skirt around some terrain that we can’t see behind. The terrain here provides pretty nice driving, though, without a lot of big boulders, steep slopes, or pointy rocks that can poke holes in our wheels. After the standard post-drive imaging for our next plan, there are some Navcam observations to look for clouds and our normal look under the rover with MARDI before Curiosity goes to sleep for the night.
For more Curiosity blog posts, visit MSL Mission Updates
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By European Space Agency
Image: This image tells the story of redemption for one lonely star. The young star MP Mus (PDS 66) was thought to be all alone in the Universe, surrounded by nothing but a featureless band of gas and dust called a protoplanetary disc. In most cases, the material inside a protoplanetary disc condenses to form new planets around the star, leaving large gaps where the gas and dust used to be. These features are seen in almost every disc – but not in MP Mus’s.
When astronomers first observed it with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), they saw a smooth, planet-free disc, shown here in the right image. The team, led by Álvaro Ribas, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge, UK, gave this star another chance and re-observed it with ALMA at longer wavelengths that peer even deeper into the protoplanetary disc than before. These new observations, shown in the left image, revealed a gap and a ring that had been obscured in previous observations, suggesting that MP Mus might have company after all.
Meanwhile, another piece of the puzzle was being revealed in Germany as Miguel Vioque, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory, studied this same star with the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Gaia mission. Vioque noticed something suspicious – the star was wobbling. A bit of gravitational detective work, together with insights from the new disc structures revealed by ALMA, showed that this motion could be explained by the presence of a gas giant exoplanet.
Both teams presented their joint results in a new paper published in Nature Astronomy. In what they describe as “a beautiful merging of two groups approaching the same object from different angles”, they show that MP Mus isn’t so boring after all.
[Image description: This is an observation from the ALMA telescope, showing two versions (side-by-side) of a protoplanetary disc. Both discs are bright, glowing yellow-orange objects with a diffused halo against a dark background. The right disc is more smooth and blurry looking. The left disc shows more detail, for example gaps and rings within it.]
Source: ESO
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By European Space Agency
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By European Space Agency
The European Space Agency (ESA) successfully established a transmission-reception optical link with NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment onboard its Psyche mission, located 265 million kilometres away, using two optical grounds stations developed for this purpose in Greece.
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