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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 4491-4492: Classic Field Geology Pose
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Front Hazard Avoidance Camera (Front Hazcam), showing the rover’s right-front wheel perched on a small, angular block, where it ended its weekend drive of about 75 feet (23 meters). In the interest of stability, the Curiosity team prefers to have all six rover wheels on the ground before deploying its 7-foot-long robotic arm (2.1 meters), so they opted for remote sensing observations instead, then another drive higher in the canyon. Curiosity captured this image on March 23, 2025 — sol 4489, or Martian day 4,489 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 15:24:49 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Lauren Edgar, Planetary Geologist at USGS Astrogeology Science Center
Earth planning date: Monday, March 24, 2025
If you’ve ever seen a geologist in the field, you may have seen a classic stance: one leg propped up on a rock, knee bent, head down looking at the rocks at their feet, and arm pointing to the distant stratigraphy. Today Curiosity decided to give us her best field geologist impression. The weekend drive went well and the rover traversed about 23 meters (about 75 feet), but ended with the right front wheel perched on an angular block. In the Front Hazcam image above, you can see the right front wheel on a small block, and the rover’s shadow with the mast staring out at all the exciting rocks to explore. Great pose, but not what we want for planning contact science! We like to have all six wheels on the ground for stability before deploying the robotic arm. So instead of planning contact science today, the team pivoted to a lot of remote sensing observations and another drive to climb higher in this canyon.
I was on shift as Long Term Planner today, and it was fun to see the team quickly adapt to the change in plans. Today’s two-sol plan includes targeted remote sensing and a drive on the first sol, followed by an untargeted science block on the second sol.
On Sol 4491, ChemCam will acquire a LIBS observation of a well-laminated block in our workspace named “Big Narrows,” followed by long-distance RMI observations coordinated with Mastcam to assess an interesting debris field at “Torote Bowl.” The team planned a large Mastcam mosaic to characterize the stratigraphy at Texoli butte from a different viewing geometry than we have previously captured. Mastcam will also be used to investigate active surface processes in the sandy troughs nearby, and an interesting fracture pattern at “Bronson Cave.” Then Curiosity will drive further to the south and take post-drive imaging to prepare for the next plan. On the second sol the team added an autonomously selected ChemCam AEGIS target, along with Navcam movies to monitor clouds, wind direction, and dust.
Keep on roving Curiosity, and please watch your step!
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Last Updated Mar 26, 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 4486-4487: Ankle-Breaking Kind of Terrain!
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Front Hazard Avoidance Camera (Front Hazcam) on March 18, 2025 — sol 4484, or Martian day 4,484 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 11:54:13 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, Planetary Geologist at University of New Brunswick
Earth planning date: Wednesday, March 19, 2025
This terrain is a tricky drive, with rocks angled chaotically all around. One of our geologists remarked that they wouldn’t like to even walk over this without solid boots coming way up over the ankles — this is definitely the kind of terrain to result in twisted and broken ankles! So it wasn’t too unexpected that the drive we had planned on Monday cut short after 18 meters (about 59 feet). Fortunately, we ended up both at a workspace with abundant bedrock and in an orientation that allowed us to pass SRAP (our “Slip Risk Assessment Process”).
The rover planners were quickly able to find a spot to brush, so we have a coordinated target on “Palm Grove,” one of the laminated rocks in the lower half of the accompanying image. APXS and MAHLI will look at this target on the first sol of the plan, and then ChemCam LIBS and Mastcam will look at it on the second sol. Although the bulk of the bedrock is relatively nodule free, ChemCam will look at the nodular target “Refugio” to compare to the more dominant, nodule-poor bedrock.
On Monday, our workspace included some very interesting layers in the bedrock that might represent preserved sand ripples, but sadly, as Conor reported on Monday, we didn’t pass SRAP, which precluded any contact science. However, today we ended up near rocks that had similar layer geometry, and will acquire a MAHLI “Dog’s Eye” or mosaic image of these rocks at “Duna Vista” and two Mastcam 5×3 mosaics (“Bayside Trail” and “Oso Flaco”) on other examples.
Mastcam is taking several other images here. A 14×3 mosaic will capture the “nearfield” or area close to the rover, and a set of four further images focus on four distinct trough features, to help us better understand ongoing modification of the surface. Further afield, the “Quartz Hill” and “Pino Alto” mosaics look at areas of fragmented bedrock which may be similar to the “Humber Park” outcrop we analyzed this past weekend. Even further from the rover, ChemCam will acquire RMI (Remote Micro Imager) images of the “Boxworks” and an almost circular depression (“Torote Bowl”) whose origin is not clear.
The environmental theme group (ENV) planned a Mastcam tau (to look at dust in the atmosphere) and a Navcam dust-devil survey (to look for dust devils!) for the first sol of the plan. On the second sol, we fill out the movies with Navcam movies looking toward the south of the crater (suprahorizon, cloud shadow, and zenith movies) and a Mastcam sky survey.
In between the movies on the second sol, our drive is planned to take us another 34 meters (about 112 feet)… but we will have to see how far our intrepid rover will make it on this tricky terrain. Slow and steady will win this race!
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Last Updated Mar 21, 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 4 min read
Sols 4484-4485: Remote Sensing on a Monday
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Left Navigation Camera on March 17, 2025 — sol 4483, or Martian day 4,483 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 09:38:17 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Conor Hayes, Graduate Student at York University
Earth planning date: Monday, March 17, 2025
Last week I was in Houston, Texas, at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. The mid-March weather in Houston is often more like mid-summer weather here in Toronto, so it has been a bit of a shock coming home to temperatures that are hovering around freezing rather than being in the upper 20s (degrees Celsius, or the low to mid 80s for those of you still using Fahrenheit). Still, Toronto is positively balmy compared to Gale Crater, where temperatures usually range between minus 80°C and minus 20°C (or minus 110°F to minus 5°F) during this part of the year. These cold temperatures and their associated higher demands on the rover’s available power for heating are continuing to motivate many of the decisions that we make during planning.
We received the double good news this morning that the weekend’s drive completed successfully, including the mid-drive imaging of the other side of “Humber Park” that Michelle mentioned in Friday’s blog, and that our estimates of the weekend plan’s power consumption ended up being a little conservative. So we started planning exactly where we wanted to be, and with more power to play around with than we had expected. Yay!
The weekend’s drive left us parked in front of some rocks with excellent layering and interesting ripples that we really wanted to get a closer look at with MAHLI. (See the cover image for a look at these rocks as seen by Navcam.) Sadly, we also ended up parked in such a way that presented a slip hazard if the arm was unstowed. As much as we would have loved to get close-up images of these rocks, we love keeping Curiosity’s arm safe even more, so we had to settle for a remote sensing-only plan instead.
Both the geology and mineralogy (GEO) and the environmental science (ENV) teams took full advantage of the extra power gifted to us today to create a plan packed full of remote sensing observations. Because we’re driving on the first sol of this two-sol plan, any “targeted” observations, i.e. those where we know exactly where we want to point the rover’s cameras, must take place before the drive. The first sol is thus packed full of Mastcam and ChemCam observations, starting with a 14×3 Mastcam mosaic of the area in front of us that’s outside of today’s workspace. Individual targets then get some Mastcam love with mosaics of various ripple and layering features at “Verdugo Peak,” “Silver Moccasin Trail,” and “Jones Peak.” Mastcam and ChemCam also team up on a LIBS target, “Trancas Canyon,” and some more long-distance mosaics of Gould Mesa, a feature about 100 meters away from us (about 328 feet) that we’ll be driving to the south of as we continue to head toward the “boxwork” structures.
After a drive, there often aren’t many activities scheduled other than the imaging of our new location that we’ll need for the next planning day. However, in this plan ENV decided to take advantage of the fact that Navcam observations can take place at the same time that the rover is talking to one of the spacecraft that orbit Mars. This is a useful trick when power is tight as it allows us to do more science without adding additional awake time (since the rover needs to be awake anyway to communicate with the orbiters). Today, it’s being used to get some extra cloud observations right before sunset, a time that we don’t often get to observe. These observations include a zenith movie that looks straight up over the rover and a “phase function sky survey,” which takes a series of nine movies that form a dome around the rover to examine the properties of the clouds’ ice crystals.
The second sol of this plan is much more relaxed, as post-drive sols often are because we don’t know exactly where we’ll be after a drive. Today, we’ve just got our usual ChemCam AEGIS activity, followed by a pair of Navcam cloud and cloud shadow movies to measure the altitude of clouds over Gale. As always, we’ve also got our usual set of REMS, RAD, and DAN activities throughout this plan.
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Last Updated Mar 20, 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 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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Atomic Layer Processing Coating Techniques Enable Missions to See Further into the Ultraviolet
Astrophysics observations at ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths often probe the most dynamic aspects of the universe. However, the high energy of ultraviolet photons means that their interaction with the materials that make up an observing instrument are less efficient, resulting in low overall throughput. New approaches in the development of thin film coatings are addressing this shortcoming by engineering the coatings of instrument structures at the atomic scale.
Researchers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are employing atomic layer deposition (ALD) and atomic layer etching (ALE) to enable new coating technologies for instruments measuring ultraviolet light. Conventional optical coatings largely rely on physical vapor deposition (PVD) methods like evaporation, where the coating layer is formed by vaporizing the source material and then condensing it onto the intended substrate. In contrast, ALD and ALE rely on a cyclic series of self-limiting chemical reactions that result in the deposition (or removal) of material one atomic layer at a time. This self-limiting characteristic results in a coating or etchings that are conformal over arbitrary shapes with precisely controlled layer thickness determined by the number of ALD or ALE cycles performed.
The ALD and ALE techniques are common in the semiconductor industry where they are used to fabricate high-performance transistors. Their use as an optical coating method is less common, particularly at ultraviolet wavelengths where the choice of optical coating material is largely restricted to metal fluorides instead of more common metal oxides, due to the larger optical band energy of fluoride materials, which minimizes absorption losses in the coatings. Using an approach based on co-reaction with hydrogen fluoride, the team at JPL has developed a variety of fluoride-based ALD and ALE processes.
(left) The Supernova remnants and Proxies for ReIonization Testbed Experiment (SPRITE) CubeSat primary mirror inside the ALD coating facility at JPL, the mirror is 18 cm on the long and is the largest optic coated in this chamber to-date. (right) Flight optic coating inside JPL ALD chamber for Pioneers Aspera Mission. Like SPRITE, the Aspera coating combines a lithium fluoride process developed at NASA GSFC with thin ALD encapsulation of magnesium fluoride at JPL. Image Credit: NASA-JPL In addition to these metal-fluoride materials, layers of aluminum are often used to construct structures like reflective mirrors and bandpass filters for instruments operating in the UV. Although aluminum has high intrinsic UV reflectance, it also readily forms a surface oxide that strongly absorbs UV light. The role of the metal fluoride coating is then to protect the aluminum surface from oxidation while maintaining enough transparency to create a mirror with high reflectance.
The use of ALD in this context has initially been pursued in the development of telescope optics for two SmallSat astrophysics missions that will operate in the UV: the Supernova remnants and Proxies for ReIonization Testbed Experiment (SPRITE) CubeSat mission led by Brian Fleming at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the Aspera mission led by Carlos Vargas at the University of Arizona. The mirrors for SPRITE and Aspera have reflective coatings that utilize aluminum protected by lithium fluoride using a novel PVD processes developed at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and an additional very thin top coating of magnesium fluoride deposited via ALD.
Team member John Hennessy prepares to load a sample wafer in the ALD coating chamber at JPL. Image Credit: NASA JPL The use of lithium fluoride enables SPRITE and Aspera to “see” further into the UV than other missions like NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which uses only magnesium fluoride to protect its aluminum mirror surfaces. However, a drawback of lithium fluoride is its sensitivity to moisture, which in some cases can cause the performance of these mirror coatings to degrade on the ground prior to launch. To circumvent this issue, very thin layers (~1.5 nanometers) of magnesium fluoride were deposited by ALD on top of the lithium fluoride on the SPRITE and Aspera mirrors. The magnesium fluoride layers are thin enough to not strongly impact the performance of the mirror at the shortest wavelengths, but thick enough to enhance the stability against humidity during ground phases of the missions. Similar approaches are being considered for the mirror coatings of the future NASA flagship Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO).
Multilayer structures of aluminum and metal fluorides can also function as bandpass filters (filters that allow only signals within a selected range of wavelengths to pass through to be recorded) in the UV. Here, ALD is an attractive option due to the inherent repeatability and precise thickness control of the process. There is currently no suitable ALD process to deposit aluminum, and so additional work by the JPL team has explored the development of a custom vacuum coating chamber that combines the PVD aluminum and ALD fluoride processes described above. This system has been used to develop UV bandpass filters that can be deposited directly onto imaging sensors like silicon (Si) CCDs. These coatings can enable such sensors to operate with high UV efficiency, but low sensitivity to longer wavelength visible photons that would otherwise add background noise to the UV observations.
Structures composed of multilayer aluminum and metal fluoride coatings have recently been delivered as part of a UV camera to the Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat (SPARCS) mission led by Evgenya Shkolnik at Arizona State University. The JPL-developed camera incorporates a delta-doped Si CCD with the ALD/PVD filter coating on the far ultraviolet channel, yielding a sensor with high efficiency in a band centered near 160 nm with low response to out-of-band light.
A prototype of a back-illuminated CCD incorporating a multi-layer metal-dielectric bandpass filter coating deposited by a combination of thermal evaporation and ALD. This coating combined with JPL back surface passivation approaches enable the Si CCD to operate with high UV efficiency while rejecting longer wavelength light. Image credit: NASA JPL Next, the JPL team that developed these coating processes plans to focus on implementing a similar bandpass filter on an array of larger-format Si Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) sensors for the recently selected NASA Medium-Class Explorer (MIDEX) UltraViolet EXplorer (UVEX) mission led by Fiona Harrison at the California Institute of Technology, which is targeted to launch in the early 2030s.
For additional details, see the entry for this project on NASA TechPort
Project Lead: Dr. John Hennessy, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
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Last Updated Mar 18, 2025 Related Terms
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