Planetary Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, written by Lucy Lim
Prithvi Plan Date: Monday, June 2, 2025
Now that curiosity has spent some soles in collecting close-up measurements of rocks in the outer edge of the boxwork-forming geological unit, the team has decided that it is time to sampling drill. Geochemical measurements by ApXS and Chemcam have shown changes ever since we have crossed the previous layered sulfate unit, but we cannot detect mineral science alone with those data. As we have often seen earlier on Mars, the same chemical elements can crystallize in many different minerals assemblies. This is even more sedimentary case such as we are driving, in which different grains in our rocks can be formed in different times and places. This also means that when we get our mineral data, those minerals will tell us a lot about the history of these new-to-US rocks.
The board is on curiosity, that mineral analysis is the work of chemin instrument, which uses X-ray diffraction to identify minerals. A powder brightens a narrow X-ray beam through a powder sample to generate the chemin diffraction pattern, which means that it requires a drilled sample. So today the team was busy looking for a drilled place. Unfortunately, the drill access of the rover from today’s parking lot included only rocks that were very fractured or there were too many debris on them, which were considered to be the possibility of producing a good drilled sample, so we have to transfer at least once and “bump” which is the next step in drilling.
Meanwhile, we are taking more measurements to understand the range of compositions that can be found in this rock layer. Dust Removal (DRT) + APXS + Libs + Mahli was all employed for the target “Halkom Valley”, while a short distance was planned for a second DRT/Apxs/Mahli measurement “Santa Ysabel Valley” and in the other direction, in the other direction, a second Libs for “Staff Kathi”. A long distance camcam remote imaging mosaic was planned to cover a boxwork structure in distance. Mastkam had a relatively mild day of imaging, with only a few small mosaic covers a trough facility, and in addition to documenting two veneer targets, the boxwork structure provided references for the RMI of the structure. The modern Mars atmosphere was also recorded with some films with a pair of dust-devil activity, a measure of atmospheric induction, and a pair of superhorizon comments to look for clouds, as well as to monitor normal passive comments and neutron environment, temperature and humidity by Dan.
I will be in the form of geology and mineral science theme theme on rover planning on Wednesday and looking forward to what we find-Aadha is that some drillable boxwork-units-unit bedock!
