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NASA's Mars Exploration Program (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Sol 1421: Determining drill activities at Marimba
The images for panorama obtained by the rover's 34-millimeter Mast Camera. The mosaic, which stretches about 30,000 pixels width, includes 133 images taken on Sol 1421 (August 4, 2016).
On Sol 1420 we planned a full drill hole on the target "Marimba" to characterize the composition of the Murray mudstone in this location. However, we came in early this morning to find that the drill hole didn’t penetrate very far into this rock target, as seen in the above MAHLI image. We’re trying to evaluate why this drill hole is different, and what prevented the drill from completing as planned. The rover is healthy and all other activities completed successfully, so this might just be a harder rock target than we’ve seen before. I was the GSTL today, and it was a complicated morning as we worked through several options for today’s plan. We decided to stick to remote sensing today while we continue to evaluate the drill activity and options moving forward. The GEO group decided to take advantage of the shallow drill hole as a way to assess variations in chemistry with depth. So we planned some Mastcam multispectral and ChemCam passive observations of the drill tailings, as well as a ChemCam LIBS observation across the drill hole. The plan also includes a ChemCam observation of "Cabinda" to assess an alternative drill site, as well as the target "Epukiro" to investigate an interesting vein. We’ll also use Mastcam and ChemCam to assess the post-sieve dump piles from the previous drill target "Oudam," which we dumped on a nearby rock slab. Then Curiosity will use Mastcam and Navcam to monitor the atmosphere and search for dust devils. In the afternoon, we’ll acquire a 360-degree Mastcam mosaic to provide geologic context for this drill site. I’ll be on duty again tomorrow, hoping to pick back up with drilling activities!
by Lauren Edgar
Other panoramas of Mars by Curiosity rover:
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The planet Earth has proven to be too limiting for our awesome community of panorama photographers. We're getting an increasing number of submissions that depict locations either not on Earth (like Mars, the Moon, and Outer Space in general) or do not realistically represent a geographic location on Earth (either because they have too many special effects or are computer generated) and hence don't strictly qualify for our Panoramic World project.But many of these panoramas are extremely beautiful or popular of both.So, in order to accommodate our esteemed photographers and the huge audience that they attract to 360Cities with their panoramas, we've created a new section (we call it an "area") called "Out of this World" for panoramas like these.Don't let the fact that these panoramas are being placed at the Earth's South Pole fool you - we had to put them somewhere in order not to interfere with our Panoramic World.Welcome aboard on a journey "Out of this World".
