Exploring Blunts Point: Curiosity’s Busy Weekend Plan on Mars

Curiosity, the Mars rover, is currently exploring the Blunts Point member of the Murray formation and searching for a suitable location to drill in the near future. Today, I had the honor of serving as the SOWG Chair and outlining a busy weekend plan that involves wrapping up contact science at our current location and moving further north into the Blunts Point member.

The plan includes starting with a ChemCam water adsorption experiment to investigate seasonal variations in hydrogen in the soil at different times of day. On Sol 2048, we have scheduled some contact science activities such as a MAHLI “dogs eye” image of the “Culver” target to analyze the relationship between veins and bedding. This will be followed by DRT, MAHLI, and APXS on typical bedrock at the “Floodwood” target, along with additional MAHLI and APXS on the “Carleton” target to examine variations in chemistry.

After completing an overnight APXS integration on “Floodwood,” Curiosity will conduct another early morning ChemCam water adsorption observation. Midday on Sol 2049 will involve taking Mastcam multispectral images of the DRT targets from Sols 2048-2049, a ChemCam passive sky observation, and documenting images of the ChemCam targets. ChemCam LIBS will be used on the target “Mountain Iron” to analyze the composition of dark nodules.

The focus on Sol 2050 will be a roughly 10 meter drive to the north, followed by post-drive imaging to prepare for contact science activities or moving to a drill location in the following week. Due to some recent limitations in data volume, we had to be cautious with our data usage in this plan. However, we are optimistic that this will not hinder