Curiosity Blog, Sols 4695-4701: Searching for Answers at Monte Grande

por admin | 14 noviembre, 2025 - 12:03 am |14 noviembre, 2025 Astronomy

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4695-4701: Searching for Answers at Monte Grande

3 min read

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4695-4701: Searching for Answers at Monte Grande

A color close-up photo of the Martian surface shows dry, flaky, tan-orange ground. At the image center is a hole cored into the ground, surrounded by material dug out from the hole, which looks like a mixture of soil and sharp flakes or shards of rock, and is slightly lighter-toned than the surrounding ground.

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image of the “Valle de la Luna” drill hole using its Mast Camera (Mastcam) on Oct. 19, 2025 — Sol 4693, or Martian day 4,693 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 02:04:29 UTC.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Written by William Farrand, Senior Research Scientist, Space Science Institute

Earth planning date: Friday, Oct. 24, 2025

Curiosity has successfully drilled its 44^th hole on Mars, which is a major milestone in our investigation of the enigmatic “boxwork unit,” a region of resistant ridges surrounding pits or “hollows” of less-resistant rock. The drilling took place over the past weekend within the “Monte Grande” hollow at the “Valle de la Luna” target.

Rover planning this week consisted of ensuring that the granular drill tailings from Valle de la Luna were transferred to the SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) and CheMin (X-ray diffraction) instruments, and analyzing the results. Results from these instruments, which will provide mineralogical and other compositional information, will be especially critical for determining how the boxwork features formed, since chemistry from the APXS and ChemCam instruments and reflectance spectra from ChemCam have revealed subtle, but not striking, differences between the rocks making up the ridges and those making up the hollows. Thus, a compositional explanation for the differences between the two terrain types has yet to be determined.

While these internal studies of the Valle de la Luna samples were going on, remote sensing data were collected by Mastcam of a series of targets, as well as atmospheric remote sensing. Among the Mastcam studies being conducted is a photometry study, a kind of study usually only carried out during an extended stationary period, such as the current drill campaign. Photometry is the study of changes in the apparent reflected brightness of rocks and soils based on the illumination geometry (for example, whether the Sun is low on the horizon or high in the sky). During this photometry campaign, multiple images are collected of the same target regions at different times of day.

In the final plan of the week, as part of the ongoing assessment of the Valle de la Luna sample, material will undergo an evolved gas analysis (EGA) in which the drilled sample is baked in an oven in SAM and volatile molecules including H₂O, CO₂, and SO₂ are released and used to further aid in the characterization of the target materials. Mastcam observations will include further images collected as part of the photometry campaign. Also mosaics of the west wall of the Monte Grande hollow will be collected as well as several atmospheric measurements.

Next week the rover will continue analyzing the drilled sample with more SAM experiments, and also analyze the tailings. The team is also starting to search for a suitable drilling location on a ridge as the next drilling site, in order to compare with the results from the Monte Grande hollow.

Want to read more posts from the Curiosity team?

Visit Mission Updates
Want to learn more about Curiosity’s science instruments?

Visit the Science Instruments page

A rover sits on the hilly, orange Martian surface beneath a flat grey sky, surrounded by chunks of rock.

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity at the base of Mount Sharp

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Curiosity Blog, Sols 4689-4694: Drill in the Boxwork Unit is GO!

por admin | 14 noviembre, 2025 - 12:02 am |14 noviembre, 2025 Astronomy

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Curiosity Blog, Sols 4689-4694: Drill in the Boxwork Unit is GO!

3 min read

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4689-4694: Drill in the Boxwork Unit is GO!

A wide-angle, grayscale photo from the Mars surface shows mostly flat, medium gray, slightly rough terrain ahead of the rover, with a lighter-toned indentation in the round directly in front of it. In the distance at the upper right of the image, the ground becomes much more uneven and rocky, with a mesa rising from the ground on the horizon beyond that. Parts of the rover are visible, but dark and shadowed, around the sides and bottom of the image, including two of its wheels at the bottom of the frame.

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image showing the “Valle de la Luna” block in the “Monte Grande” hollow, a location it targeted for drilling the weekend of Oct. 18-19, 2025. Curiosity captured the image with its Front Hazard Avoidance Camera (Front Hazcam) on Oct. 12, 2025 — Sol 4687, or Martian day 4,687 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 23:11:12 UTC.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Written by Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, APXS Payload Uplink/Downlink Lead, University of New Brunswick

Earth planning date: Friday, Oct. 17, 2025

Curiosity has been investigating the “boxwork unit” for several months now. Readers might remember we drilled at the edge of the boxwork at “Altadena,” back in June. Since then, we have driven just under a kilometer across the boxwork unit (about 0.6 miles) and now we are ready to acquire the next drill target, in an area where the structure is really well preserved.

The boxwork structures are a series of ridges and hollows, so our plan is to drill within one of the hollows and then on one of the adjacent ridges. On Monday, we did our drill triage on “Valle de la Luna” within the hollow “Monte Grande” – a multi-instrument endeavor. We assessed the chemistry using APXS and ChemCam, to make sure it is within the expected range and not something completely different from the bedrock compositions we have been tracking. The rover planners (RPs) use a “pre-load” test, putting pressure on the bedrock surface to characterize how the rover arm and rock might behave during drilling. We take multiple images (including images before and after the pre-load test), using MAHLI and Mastcam to help the RPs assess the surface of the potential drill area.

Finding a suitable place to drill in the hollows was a challenge, as the low point of each hollow (what we are most interested in) is often covered in sand or small pebbles, with just sparse bedrock peeking through, as you can see in the accompanying image. However, we got lucky here in Monte Grande. The chemistry shows that this rock is within our expected compositional range. The MAHLI images show a smoother surface in the center of the brushed area (where the drill will focus), and the before-and-after images indicated that the rock reacted well to the pre-load test. On Friday, the RPs and mission scientists pored over the data in a very intensive meeting called the “Target Acquisition Assessment Meeting,” or TAAM. We have drilled 43 holes on Mars now and it’s always nerve-wracking, waiting to see if the information we gathered during our initial contact science and preload give us a go-ahead. About midway through the planning day, we got the news that TAAM said yes to drilling here, so we will drill on the first sol of this weekend plan.

If the drill is successful, we will have no contact science for at least a week, as the arm cannot be deployed during a drill campaign. Normally, as I’m APXS PUDL (responsible for uplinking new APXS targets and assessing downlink of previous targets), the idea of a week with no contact science would be disappointing to me — but not during a drill campaign! CheMin (Chemistry Mineralogy) and SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) will use the drilled sample to give us extra depth of information, looking at mineralogy and composition in a way that is not possible for APXS and ChemCam.

We can then use that drill data to help us interpret the APXS and ChemCam data and better understand the formation of these boxworks, especially if we can pair it with a suitable target on the ridges.

In the meantime of course, we continue to monitor the atmosphere and environment around us. The Mastcam team are planning some amazing images from this site and ChemCam will continue to characterize the nearby bedrock and image the far-off hills.

Want to read more posts from the Curiosity team?

Visit Mission Updates
Want to learn more about Curiosity’s science instruments?

Visit the Science Instruments page

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity at the base of Mount Sharp

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

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Last Updated

Nov 13, 2025

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