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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 2 min read
Sols 4481-4483: Humber Pie
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Front Hazard Avoidance Camera (Front Hazcam) on March 14, 2025 — sol 4480, or Martian day 4,480 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 08:53:19 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Michelle Minitti, Planetary Geologist at Framework
Earth planning date: Friday, March 14, 2025
The rover successfully arrived at the “Humber Park” outcrop which, on this fine “Pi Day” on Earth, we could convince ourselves looked like a pie with a sandy interior and a rough and rocky crust. We can only hope our instruments are as excited to tuck into this outcrop as the Curiosity team is to eat our pizzas and favorite pies (for me, pumpkin) this afternoon and evening.
MAHLI gets a big serving of rock structures from the Humber Park “crust” with three separate imaging targets. One observation, at the target “Yerba Buena Ridge,” covers structures expressed across the front of the outcrop in the above image. A second target, “Sepulveda Pass,” has intriguing texture that warranted multiple flavors of stereo imaging. The final target, which MAHLI shared with APXS, was “South Fork.” It was the clearest place to put APXS down on the rough bedrock blocks.
ChemCam also feasted on rock chemistry from an array of targets with different textures. “Ridge Route” covered a low-lying bedrock slab with the fine layering we have seen consistently through the sulfate unit, while “Toyon Canyon” covered a lumpier portion of the Humber Park outcrop above Yerba Buena Ridge. The “Mount Lawlor” target was a mix of Ridge Route and Toyon Canyon — layered, but on a high-standing portion of the outcrop that also had some unusual chains of pits. ChemCam added two long distance mosaics on “Gould Mesa” to the menu, which captured a variety of structures on this impressive butte about 100 meters ahead of the rover.
Mastcam focused on covering the whole of Humber Park with a stereo mosaic but also added small mosaics across a trough in the sand and a bedrock block with potential cross bedding at “Rancho Los Feliz.” Because just imaging this side of Humber Park was not enough, Mastcam and Navcam worked closely with the rover drivers to plan a mid-drive mosaic of the other side of the outcrop so we fully capture Humber Park’s “crust.”
Our environmental observations were not just pie in the sky but will help us monitor the chemistry of and the amount of dust in the atmosphere, and record clouds and dust devils crossing above and around us.
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Last Updated Mar 18, 2025 Related Terms
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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
Sols 4479-4480: What IS That Lumpy, Bumpy Rock?
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image of its workspace, including two rocks in front of it with interesting textures, different from anything seen before in the mission. The rover took the image with its Left Navigation Camera on March 12, 2025 — sol 4478, or Martian day 4,478 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 07:00:42 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Ashley Stroupe, Mission Operations Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Earth planning date: Wednesday, March 12, 2025
The days are getting shorter and colder for Curiosity as we head into winter. So our rover is sleeping in a bit before waking up to a busy plan. Today I served as the Engineering Uplink Lead, managing the engineering side of the plan to support all the science activities.
We are seeing a lot of rocks with different, interesting textures, so Curiosity’s day begins with a lot of targeted imaging of this interesting area. The two rocks right in front of us (see image above) are different from anything that we have looked at before on the mission, so we are eager to know what they are. We are taking Mastcam images of “Manzana Creek” and “Palo Comado,” two of these interestingly textured rocks, and also of an area named “Vincent Gap,” where the rover disturbed some bedrock and exposed some regolith by driving over it in the prior plan. ChemCam is making a LIBS observation of a target called “Sturtevant Falls,” which is a nodule on the left-hand block in our workspace (on which we are later doing some contact science). ChemCam is also taking a long-distance RMI image in the direction of the potential boxworks formation (large veins), which is an area we will be exploring close-up in the future. There are also a Navcam dust devil movie and suprahorzion movie. Check out this article from November for more information on the boxwork formations.
After a nap, Curiosity wakes up to get in her arm exercise. I do not envy the Arm Rover Planner today (OK, maybe a little bit) in dealing with this very challenging workspace. The rock of interest (the left-hand rock in the above image) has jagged, vertical surfaces and a lot of crazy rough texture. Examining this rock is even more challenging because our primary targets are on the left side of the rock, rather than the side that is facing the rover. We are looking at two different targets, “Stunt Ranch,” which is a nodule on the rock, and “Pacifico Mountain,” which is the left-side face of the rock, with MAHLI and also doing a long APXS integration on Stunt Ranch. After the arm work, Curiosity is tucking herself in for the night by stowing the arm.
The next morning, after again getting to sleep in a bit, Curiosity will make some more targeted observations, starting with another dust-devil survey. ChemCam will make a LIBS observation of “Switzer Falls,” which is a target on the right-hand rock in the workspace (and in the image), an RMI of “Colby Canyon,” a soft sediment deformation, and “Gould,” which is another target on the boxworks formation. Lastly, Mastcam takes a look at “Potrero John,” yet another interestingly textured rock.
Curiosity will then be ready to drive away. Today’s drive is on slightly better terrain that we have been seeing recently, with fewer large and pointy rocks. Though, the mobility rover planners still have to be careful about picking the safest path through. We’re heading about 25 meters (about 82 feet) to another rock target named “Humber Park,” where we hope to do additional contact science. After the drive, we have our standard set of post-drive imaging, a Mastcam solar tau, and then an early-morning Navcam cloud observation.
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Sols 4477-4478: Bumping Back to Business
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Right Navigation Camera on March 10, 2025 — sol 4476, or Martian day 4,476 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 04:15:44 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Sharon Wilson Purdy, Planetary Geologist at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
Earth planning date: Monday, March 10, 2025
The Curiosity rover is winding between the spectacular Gould mesa and Texoli butte through beautifully layered terrain. The end-of-drive target from last week’s plan was a rock with a knobby/bumpy texture that appears quite different from the typical surrounding bedrock. While this interesting rock was in our workspace today, we ended up being just a touch too close to do contact science. As a result, the science team decided to “bump back” (e.g., drive backwards) to get the rover in an ideal position to analyze and characterize this rock on Wednesday.
In the middle of the rover’s workspace today there was a large patch of soil and sand that MAHLI and APXS teamed up to analyze at a target named “Angeles Crest.” Nearby, Mastcam imaged troughs (depressions) along the axis of the sand ridge to understand how they formed. Mastcam had several other targets in the plan that imaged the workspace and surroundings including “Potrero John,” the knobby rock in the workspace, a rock with similar nodular textures in the distance named “Modjeska Peak,” and a light tan rock with a dome-like structure in the vicinity of “Humber Park.”
ChemCam selected a slab of bedrock and loose (“float”) rock in the workspace to characterize their geochemistry with the LIBS instrument at “Millard Canyon” and “Cajon Pass,” respectively. Off in the distance, the science team selected the face of Gould mesa and upper Texoli butte for ChemCam long distance RMI imaging to get a closer look at the rocks, fractures, and layering.
The environmental theme group scheduled several activities to look at clouds, document the atmospheric opacity, and measure the optical depth of the atmosphere and constrain aerosol scattering properties. We have lots of exciting data in hand and more on the road ahead!
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Sols 4475-4476: Even the Best-Laid Plans
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image of “Gould Mesa,” named for a hill near NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, using its Right Navigation Camera on March 6, 2025 — sol 4472, or Martian day 4,472 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 01:37:17 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Deborah Padgett, OPGS Task Lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Earth planning date: Friday, March 7, 2025
In Curiosity’s last plan, the team decided to drive toward a very interesting nodular rock. The rover team hoped to do a detailed study of its surface texture over the weekend. However, Curiosity did not receive its expected Friday morning downlink of images taken after its drive. The MSL team did receive a tiny bit of data confirming that Curiosity’s drive finished as expected. Unfortunately, without images to determine exactly where Curiosity was located relative to its intended destination, the team was unable to do any instrument pointing at nearby objects, known as “targeted” observations. However, the rover team showed its resilience by filling the weekend plan with a full slate of fascinating remote observations of the terrain and sky around Curiosity’s current perch, high in the canyons of Mount Sharp. Our science and instrument teams always keep a list of backup observations close at hand — frequently those taking too much time to fit in a typical sol plan — in case they get an unexpected opportunity to use them!
On sol 4475, Curiosity will start its first science block midday with two back-to-back dust-devil surveys with Navcam. These searches for Martian whirlwinds will be followed by a measurement of atmospheric dust with Mastcam. Mastcam will then do its first large panorama image of the plan, an 11×3 mosaic starboard of the rover to document bedrock and regolith in an area with a dark band of material seen from orbit. This long observation will be followed by an AEGIS activity, using Navcam to find targets for ChemCam’s laser spectrograph. Curiosity will then repeat its post-drive imaging at high quality, hopefully to be received at JPL before Monday’s planning day. In the evening, APXS will do atmospheric composition studies for several hours.
The next day will be a “soliday,” without any observations. Early in the morning of sol 4476, Mastcam will take its second large panorama, which will be a fantastic 37×4 mosaic of sunrise on the slopes of Gould Mesa (see image). In the afternoon, there will be a Mastcam dust measurement, ChemCam calibration observation, ChemCam passive sky, and two more dust-devil surveys. The next morning, there will be a set of Navcam cloud movies, a dust measurement, and sky phase function observations to support the Mars aphelion cloud-belt campaign. On sol 4477, we will use the post-drive imaging taken over the weekend to plan contact science, then drive away from this location on sol 4478, continuing Curiosity’s journey toward the mysterious boxwork features to the west.
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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 5 min read
Sols 4473-4474: So Many Rocks, So Many Textures!
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Chemistry & Camera (ChemCam) of a boulder about 40 meters (about 131 feet) away from the rover at the time. Curiosity acquired the image, showing the variety of structures and textures around the rover, on March 5, 2025 — sol 4471, or Martian day 4,471 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 01:47:03 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL Written by Susanne Schwenzer, Planetary Geologist at The Open University
Earth planning date: Wednesday, March 5, 2025
The Martian landscape never ceases to amaze me, there is so much variation in texture and color! As a mineralogist, I marvel at them, but my colleagues trained in sedimentology regularly teach me how to see even more than the beauty of them: they can discern whether the materials that make up a rock were transported and laid down by the action of water or wind. The image above shows a rather unusual texture alongside more normal-looking laminated rocks. Just compare the small, brighter block in the foreground with the darker bigger rock in the center of the image. How should we interpret it? Well, that jury is still out. Are they sedimentary textures formed when the rock first was laid down, or shortly after, or are they textures that formed much later when water entered the rock and formed new minerals in the already existing rock? The latter would be more my area of research, and they are often called concretions. And I vividly remember the first concretions a rover ever found, the “blueberries.” Curiosity, of course, found many concretions, too. There is an interesting comparison between rocks that the Mars Exploration rover Opportunity found, and the one that Curiosity found very early in the mission, back at Yellowknife Bay. We have seen many more since, and the above might be another example.
The landscape directly around the rover today also has some interesting textures and, most important, some more regular-looking bedrock targets. Bedrock is what the team perceives to be the rocks that make up the part of the hill we are driving through. The dark blocks, like the one above, that are also strewn occasionally in the path of the rover are called float rocks, and we always look higher up into the hills to find out where they might have come from. As interesting as all those blocks and boulders are, they pose a huge challenge for the rover drivers. Today, they had managed to get us all the way to the intended stopping point, which in itself is a huge achievement. A mixture of large rocks and sand is just not conducive to any form of travel, and I always wonder how tiring it would be to just walk through the area. But we made it to the intended stopping point, driving just under 20 meters (about 65 feet), as intended. Unfortunately though, one of the rover’s wheels was perched on a rock in ways that posed a risk of dropping off that rock during an arm move. So, as is usual in those cases, we accept that contact science is not possible. The risk would just be too great that the rover moves just at the wrong moment and the arm bumps into the rock that an instrument is investigating at that moment. So, safety first, we decided to keep the arm tucked in and focus on remote science.
The team quickly pivoted to add some remote science to the already existing observations. As you might imagine in a terrain as interesting as this, Mastcam did get a workout. There are seven different observations in the plan! It looks into the distance to the Texoli Butte we are observing as we drive along it, and at a target, “Brown Mountain.” Looking into the many different features are also imaging activities on the targets “Placerita Canyon,” “Humber Park,” and two others just named “trough,” which is a descriptive term for little trough features the team is tracking for a while with the quest to better understand their formation. ChemCam has a LIBS investigation on target “Inspiration Point,” and two long-distance RMI (Remote Micro Imager) observations. One is truly at a long distance on Gould Mesa, another of the mounts we are observing as we go along. There is another RMI activity closer to the rover, to investigate more of those very interesting structures.
We also have environmental observations in the plan, observing the opacity of the atmosphere and of REMS investigations are occurring throughout the plan. REMS is our “weather station” measuring atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity, winds, and ultraviolet radiation levels. DAN looks at the surface to measure the water and chlorine content in the rocks that the rover traverses over and RAD is looking up to the sky to measure the radiation that reaches the Martian surface. We do not often mention those in our blocks, because we are so used to seeing them there every single sol, doing their job, quietly in the background.
With so much to do, the only remaining question was where to drive. That was discussed at length, weighing the different science reasons to go to places along the path, and after much deliberation we decided to go to one of the float rocks, but reserve the option to make a right turn in the next plan, to get to another interesting place. All those discussions are so important to make sure we are making the most of the power we have at this cold time of the year, and getting all the science we can get. I am excited to see the data from today’s plan… and to find out where we end up. Not with a wheel on a rock, please, Mars — that would be a good start. But if we do, I am absolutely confident there will be lots to investigate anyway!
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Last Updated Mar 06, 2025 Related Terms
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