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NASA
Curiosity Shakes Loose a Pesky Rock
After NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover drilled a sample from this rock on April 25, 2026, it withdrew its robotic arm and pulled the entire rock off the surface with it. Engineers spent several days repositioning the arm and vibrating the drill to try and get the rock loose. When it finally detached on May 1, the rock broke into pieces. This close-up…
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NASA
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4597-4599: Wide Open Spaces
Written by Michelle Minitti, MAHLI Deputy Principal Investigator, Framework Earth planning date: Friday, July 11, 2025 Imagine this vista as the view out your office window to start your workday. Your natural tendency would be to grab your camera and photograph as much of the view as possible. Curiosity was lucky enough to find herself in this situation today after…
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NASA
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4595-4596: Just Another Beautiful Day on Mars
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…
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NASA
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4580-4581: Something in the Air…
Written by Scott VanBommel, Planetary Scientist at Washington University in St. Louis Earth planning date: Monday, June 23, 2025 Curiosity was back at work on Monday, with a full slate of activities planned. While summer has officially arrived for much of Curiosity’s team back on Earth, Mars’ eldest active rover is recently through the depths of southern Mars winter and…
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NASA
Sols 4527-4528: ‘Boxwork Ahoy!’
Written by Natalie Moore, Mission Operations Specialist at Malin Space Science Systems Earth planning date: Wednesday, April 30, 2025 We’re back in our standard “touch and go” plan regime today, where we sandwich a midday remote science block between morning-APXS and afternoon-MAHLI contact science arm blocks. We had our first late-slide 9 a.m. PDT start in quite a while due…
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NASA
Sols 4464-4465: Making Good Progress
Written by Lauren Edgar, Planetary Geologist at USGS Astrogeology Science Center Earth planning date: Monday, Feb. 24, 2025 Over the weekend Curiosity drove about 48 meters (about 157 feet) to the southwest, continuing to march along on our traverse past Texoli butte and Gould Mesa. I was on shift as the LTP today, and it was great to see the…
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NASA
Sols 4391-4392: Rounding the Bend
Earth planning date: Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2024 For planning today, we have a beautiful view of the northern tip of Texoli, as seen in the image foreground. Unfortunately, the rocks that make the view so pretty also made it unsafe to unstow the arm for contact science. Instead we are doing a lot of imaging and a drive. Our primary…
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NASA
Sols 4341-4342: A Bumpy Road
Earth planning date: Monday, Oct. 21, 2024 After Curiosity’s busy weekend, the team is ready for another day of planning. We are able to take advantage of the Earth-Mars time offset to full plan on both sols of our plan today. For this plan, I served as Mobility Rover Planner, and planned Curiosity’s drive. The first sol begins with some…
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NASA
Sols 4336-4337: Where the Streets Have No Name
Earth planning date: Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024 Curiosity continues to drive along the western edge of the upper Gediz Vallis channel. After exiting the channel a few weeks ago, we turned north to image the “back side” of the deposits that we investigated on the eastern side before the channel crossing. As a member of the Channel Surfers working group, we believe…
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NASA
Sols 4325-4326: (Not Quite) Dipping Our Toes in the Sand
Earth planning date: Friday, Oct. 4, 2024 If you read this blog very often, you know that nearly every time the rover stops for science, MAHLI and APXS focus on interesting (and accessible!) rocks as targets. The rover science team is, after all, built with a lot of geologists. But geology is not all rocks, all the time — sand…
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