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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
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4631-4633: Radiant Ridge Revolution
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Left Navigation Camera on Aug. 14, 2025 — Sol 4629, or Martian day 4,629 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 12:11:32 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Remington Free, Operations Systems Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Earth planning date: Friday, Aug. 15, 2025
Today we uplinked a three-sol weekend plan with lots of exciting activities — to support both the science and engineering teams!
While usually our science activities take front and center stage, we often also do engineering maintenance activities as well to maintain the mechanisms and engineering health state of the rover. On Sol 4631, we planned a maintenance activity of our Battery Control Boards (BCBs) which are electronic control boards attached to the rover’s batteries and are what let us interact with the batteries as needed. This maintenance is done periodically to correct for any time drift on the BCBs, so we get as accurate of data as possible.
On this sol, we also did a dump of all of our parameters — these are essentially variables set onboard the rover which serve as inputs to a variety of functions. Occasionally we send a list of all these variables back down to the ground so we can verify they match as expected. We don’t want to have set a value and then forget about it!
We, of course, also did science activities on this sol. After completing our engineering activities, we started off with some remote science; this included Mastcam imaging and ChemCam measurements of several interesting targets. These were chosen in order to assess variability within the “Cerro Paranal” ridge within view, and to document any layering or fractures in the rock. We then completed several arm activities in order to get more information on these targets through the use of our APXS spectrometer.
On Sol 4632, we planned some remote atmospheric science, including a Navcam dust-devil survey, a Mastcam tau (measurement of the atmospheric opacity), APXS atmospheric observations, and more imaging of some of the ridge targets we looked at in the previous sol.
On Sol 4633, we continued with more science imaging, including a horizon movie using Navcam and a dust-devil movie, before proceeding into our drive. We planned a drive of about 19 meters (about 62 feet) to the south, along the eastern edge of Cerro Paranal. After the drive, it is then standard for us to take new imaging of our new location. We’re excited to get these science images back and to hear how the drive went when the team comes back on Monday!
Want to read more posts from the Curiosity team?
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Last Updated Aug 19, 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
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4627-4628: A Ridge Stop in the Boxworks
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this close-up view of the rock target “Bococo” at the intersection of several boxwork ridges, showing bright millimeter-scale nodules likely to be calcium sulfate. Curiosity acquired this image using its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), located on the turret at the end of the rover’s robotic arm, which uses an onboard focusing process to merge multiple images of the same target, acquired at different focus positions, to bring all (or, as many as possible) features into focus in a single image. Curiosity performed the merge on Aug. 10, 2025 — Sol 4625, or Martian day 4,625 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 08:00:39 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Earth planning date: Monday Aug. 11, 2025
Written by Lucy Lim, Planetary Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
On the Curiosity team, we’re continuing our exploration of the boxwork-forming region in Gale Crater. A successful 25-meter drive (about 82 feet) brought the rover from the “peace sign” ridge intersection to a new ridge site. Several imaging investigations were pursued in today’s plan, including Mastcam observations of a potential incipient hollow (“Laguna Miniques”), and of a number of troughs to examine how fractures transition from bedrock to regolith.
With six wheels on the ground, Curiosity was also ready to deploy the rover arm for some contact science. APXS and MAHLI measurements were planned to explore the local bedrock at two points with a brushed (DRT) measurement (“Santa Catalina”) and a non-DRT measurement (“Puerto Teresa”). A third MAHLI observation will be co-targeted with one of the LIBS geochemical measurements on a light-toned block, “Palma Seca.” Because we’re in nominal sols for this plan, we were able to plan a second targeted LIBS activity to measure the composition of a high-relief feature on another block, “Yavari” before the drive.
The auto-targeted LIBS (AEGIS) that executed post-drive on sol 4626 had fallen on a bedrock target and will be documented in high resolution via Mastcam imaging.
Two long-distance imaging mosaics were planned for the ChemCam remote imager (RMI): one on a potential scarp and lens in sediments exposed on the “Mishe Mokwa” butte in the strata above the rover’s current position, and the second on an east-facing boxwork ridge with apparently exposed cross-bedding that may be related to the previously explored “Volcán Peña Blanca” ridge.
As usual, the modern Martian environment will also be observed with camera measurements of the atmospheric opacity, a Navcam movie to watch for dust lifting, and the usual REMS and DAN passive monitoring of the temperature, humidity, and neutron flux at the rover’s location.
The next drive is planned to bring us to a spot in a hollow where we hope to plan contact science on the erosionally recessive hollow bedrock in addition to imaging with a good view of the rock layers exposed in the wall of another prominent ridge.
Want to read more posts from the Curiosity team?
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By NASA
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be a discovery machine, thanks to its wide field of view and resulting torrent of data. Scheduled to launch no later than May 2027, with the team working toward launch as early as fall 2026, its near-infrared Wide Field Instrument will capture an area 200 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s infrared camera, and with the same image sharpness and sensitivity. Roman will devote about 75% of its science observing time over its five-year primary mission to conducting three core community surveys that were defined collaboratively by the scientific community. One of those surveys will scour the skies for things that pop, flash, and otherwise change, like exploding stars and colliding neutron stars.
These two images, taken one year apart by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, show how the supernova designated SN 2018gv faded over time. The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will spot thousands of supernovae, including a specific type that can be used to measure the expansion history of the universe.Credit: NASA, ESA, Martin Kornmesser (ESA), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Hubble), Adam G. Riess (STScI, JHU), SH0ES Team Called the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey, this program will peer outside of the plane of our Milky Way galaxy (i.e., high galactic latitudes) to study objects that change over time. The survey’s main goal is to detect tens of thousands of a particular type of exploding star known as type Ia supernovae. These supernovae can be used to study how the universe has expanded over time.
“Roman is designed to find tens of thousands of type Ia supernovae out to greater distances than ever before,” said Masao Sako of the University of Pennsylvania, who served as co-chair of the committee that defined the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey. “Using them, we can measure the expansion history of the universe, which depends on the amount of dark matter and dark energy. Ultimately, we hope to understand more about the nature of dark energy.”
Probing Dark Energy
Type Ia supernovae are useful as cosmological probes because astronomers know their intrinsic luminosity, or how bright they inherently are, at their peak. By comparing this with their observed brightness, scientists can determine how far away they are. Roman will also be able to measure how quickly they appear to be moving away from us. By tracking how fast they’re receding at different distances, scientists will trace cosmic expansion over time.
Only Roman will be able to find the faintest and most distant supernovae that illuminate early cosmic epochs. It will complement ground-based telescopes like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, which are limited by absorption from Earth’s atmosphere, among other effects. Rubin’s greatest strength will be in finding supernovae that happened within the past 5 billion years. Roman will expand that collection to much earlier times in the universe’s history, about 3 billion years after the big bang, or as much as 11 billion years in the past. This would more than double the measured timeline of the universe’s expansion history.
Recently, the Dark Energy Survey found hints that dark energy may be weakening over time, rather than being a constant force of expansion. Roman’s investigations will be critical for testing this possibility.
Seeking Exotic Phenomena
To detect transient objects, whose brightness changes over time, Roman must revisit the same fields at regular intervals. The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will devote a total of 180 days of observing time to these observations spread over a five-year period. Most will occur over a span of two years in the middle of the mission, revisiting the same fields once every five days, with an additional 15 days of observations early in the mission to establish a baseline.
This infographic describes the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey that will be conducted by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The survey’s main component will cover over 18 square degrees — a region of sky as large as 90 full moons — and see supernovae that occurred up to about 8 billion years ago.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center “To find things that change, we use a technique called image subtraction,” Sako said. “You take an image, and you subtract out an image of the same piece of sky that was taken much earlier — as early as possible in the mission. So you remove everything that’s static, and you’re left with things that are new.”
The survey will also include an extended component that will revisit some of the observing fields approximately every 120 days to look for objects that change over long timescales. This will help to detect the most distant transients that existed as long ago as one billion years after the big bang. Those objects vary more slowly due to time dilation caused by the universe’s expansion.
“You really benefit from taking observations over the entire five-year duration of the mission,” said Brad Cenko of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the other co-chair of the survey committee. “It allows you to capture these very rare, very distant events that are really hard to get at any other way but that tell us a lot about the conditions in the early universe.”
This extended component will collect data on some of the most energetic and longest-lasting transients, such as tidal disruption events — when a supermassive black hole shreds a star — or predicted but as-yet unseen events known as pair-instability supernovae, where a massive star explodes without leaving behind a neutron star or black hole.
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This sonification that uses simulated data from NASA’s OpenUniverse project shows the variety of explosive events that will be detected by NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and its High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey. Different sounds represent different types of events, as shown in the key at right. A single kilonova seen about 12 seconds into the video is represented with a cannon shot. The sonification sweeps backward in time to greater distances from Earth, and the pitch of the instrument gets lower as you move outward. (Cosmological redshift has been converted to a light travel time expressed in billions of years.) Credit: Sonification: Martha Irene Saladino (STScI), Christopher Britt (STScI); Visualization: Frank Summers (STScI); Designer: NASA, STScI, Leah Hustak (STScI) Survey Details
The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will be split into two imaging “tiers” — a wide tier that covers more area and a deep tier that will focus on a smaller area for a longer time to detect fainter objects. The wide tier, totaling a bit more than 18 square degrees, will target objects within the past 7 billion years, or half the universe’s history. The deep tier, covering an area of 6.5 square degrees, will reach fainter objects that existed as much as 10 billion years ago. The observations will take place in two areas, one in the northern sky and one in the southern sky. There will also be a spectroscopic component to this survey, which will be limited to the southern sky.
“We have a partnership with the ground-based Subaru Observatory, which will do spectroscopic follow-up of the northern sky, while Roman will do spectroscopy in the southern sky. With spectroscopy, we can confidently tell what type of supernovae we’re seeing,” said Cenko.
Together with Roman’s other two core community surveys, the High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey and the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will help map the universe with a clarity and to a depth never achieved before.
Download the sonification here.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California; the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems, Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Melbourne, Florida; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
By Christine Pulliam
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
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Last Updated Aug 12, 2025 EditorAshley BalzerLocationGoddard Space Flight Center 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
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4616-4617: Standing Tall on the Ridge
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image, showing the impressive landscape it is currently navigating. The rover is standing tall on the ridge, its shadow casting forward, and Mount Sharp towers over the scene in the distance. Curiosity captured this image with its Front Hazard Avoidance Camera (Front Hazcam) on July 30, 2025 — Sol 4614, or Martian day 4,614 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 02:24:02 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Susanne P. Schwenzer, Professor of Planetary Mineralogy at The Open University, UK
Earth planning date: Wednesday, July 30, 2025
The day started with a little celebration of NISAR, a new Earth observation satellite that made it successfully into orbit a few hours before our planning started. We joined in by saying “GO NISAR, NASA, JPL, and ISRO” (the Indian Space Research Organisation, NASA’s mission partner, which launched NISAR). Learn more at the NISAR mission hub. Although our team studies Mars, Earth is a planet, too, and we are very happy for our colleagues’ successful launch!
On Mars, it’s still winter and the topic of every planning is how to maximize the science we can do given the increased power needs for heating our rover at this time of the year. Curiosity is parked on top of the main ridge, nicknamed the “autobahn.” It turned out to be not as smooth as its terrestrial namesake, as you can see in the image above. To arrive at this parking position, our rover drivers decided to take a small detour down into a flatter area and back up onto the ridge for safe off-road driving. The rover’s parking position allows for beautiful views around us, laying out the land of hollows and ridges perfectly to plan our next steps and to admire Mount Sharp in the distance.
Standing tall on the ridge, we got several investigations of the ridge-forming materials into today’s plan. APXS, MAHLI, and ChemCam are all teaming up to investigate the target “El Salto.” This is a target that could get us a glimpse into what formed the central line that is running along the big ridge. If you look closely at the images there are subtle differences in color and texture, and we are all curious whether that translates to chemical differences, too.
Of course, it’s not all about chemistry. Mastcam is busy documenting a small mound, and its context with veins and the hollow surrounding it, at the target “Llullaillaco.” The target “Cementerio De Tortugas” will capture sand ripples within a trough area, there is an extension of the workspace imaging in the plan for more context of today’s observations, and finally the ridge intersection is of interest at the target “Villa Abecia.” Of course, Mastcam didn’t forget the documentation of the ChemCam target “El Salto” and the AEGIS target from the last plan. Speaking of ChemCam: It’s using its imaging capabilities to document the side of the ridge to give finer details of the sedimentary structures of the target “Llullaillaco.”
Atmospheric observations are also of highest interest at this time of the day. We continue our atmospheric monitoring by looking for dust devils as well as up toward the clouds in a joint observation with the CASSIS instrument, which is aboard the European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter. In addition, Curiosity continues to monitor wind and temperature throughout the plan, and the DAN (dynamic albedo of neutrons) instrument observes the rocks underneath the rover for their water content.
After completing the observations at the current parking location, Curiosity will be driving off the ridge again, but this time to stay within the hollow, so we can make observations of the material that forms those hollows. Let’s see if we can find any chemical differences between those materials that might explain why one is standing up tall and the other one is weathering out. If you want to get a better impression of what I am talking about when I say ridges and troughs, have a look at this recent navigation camera mosaic.
Learn more about Curiosity’s science instruments
For more Curiosity blog posts, visit MSL Mission Updates
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NASA’s Black Marble: Stories from the Night Sky
Earth (ESD) Earth Explore Explore Earth Home Air Quality Climate Change Freshwater Life on Earth Severe Storms Snow and Ice The Global Ocean Science at Work Earth Science at Work Technology and Innovation Powering Business Multimedia Image Collections Videos Data For Researchers About Us Viewed from space, Earth at night tells endless stories. Using satellite data, we can track population growth, natural disaster damage, cultural celebrations, and even space weather. Studying these glowing patterns helps us understand human activity, respond to disasters, and witness a changing world.
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