1 Like
NASA's Mars Exploration Program (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Sol 3288: Assessing a New Potential Drill Target
The images for panorama obtained by the rover's 34-millimeter Mast Camera. The mosaic, which stretches about 30,000 pixels width, includes 141 images taken on Sol 3288 (November 4, 2021).
After our short bump on Tuesday, Curiosity has reached a new potential drill location. When we first arrived at the clay-sulfate transition, the science team decided on a strategy to drill every ~25 m in elevation gain. This allows us to systematically document any changes in the composition of the terrain while being reasonable with our limited rover resources. The terrain is beginning to steepen as Curiosity gets close to the end of this region, so even though we’re only a few drives away from our last drill site at Maria Gordon, we’ve already climbed 25 m higher!
The main activity in this two-sol plan will be characterizing the chemistry and textures of our planned drill target with APXS, MAHLI, Mastcam, and ChemCam. We will also place the drill bit on the rock to make sure the rock is stable enough to support the force of drilling. Additional environmental science monitoring observations will round out the plan. We named the planned drill target "Zechstein." On Earth, the Zechstein Group describes a succession of rocks that were deposited in an ancient ocean located east of the present location of the British Isles. The terrestrial sequence contains many salts that formed during periods when the waters became shallow, such as halite (sodium chloride, table salt) and gypsum (calcium sulfate), so we felt this was an appropriate name to use as we transition to rocks on Mars that could contain similar salty minerals.
Written by Abigail Fraeman
Other panoramas of Mars by Curiosity rover:
...
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".
