Sol 883: A Closer Look at the Latest Drill Hole on Mars

29 January 2015

On Sol 882 Curiosity completed another full drill hole on Mars. The target was “Mojave2” and it proved to be much more stable than “Mojave” (our previous attempt at doing a mini-drill at Mojave resulted in breaking the rock apart). This time everything went smoothly and we have a beautiful new drill hole to analyze.

The main activities in today’s plan are ChemCam, Mastcam and MAHLI observations to characterize the drill hole and tailings. First we’ll acquire several ChemCam LIBS observations of the drill tailings to study their composition. Then we’ll image the drill hole using all of the Mastcam camera filters. Overnight, we’ll acquire a number of MAHLI images to characterize the drill hole and tailings. Looking forward to learning more about the composition of this interesting target!

By Lauren Edgar

--Lauren is a Research Geologist at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center and a member of MSL science team.

Dates of planned rover activities described in these reports are subject to change due to a variety of factors related to the Martian environment, communication relays and rover status.