Curiosity Blog, Sols 4812-4819: Back Into the Hollows

Written by Diana Hayes, Graduate student at York University, Toronto

Earth planning date: Friday, Feb. 20, 2026

This has been a pretty routine week for Curiosity. As was mentioned last week, we’re now in the final phase of the boxwork exploration campaign. We’re currently making our way toward the eastern contact of the boxwork formation with the surrounding geology, which we plan to drive along before turning our attention to the southern contact. That will likely be our last opportunity to directly interrogate the boxwork area before we continue our adventure up the slopes of Mount Sharp.

Along the way, we’ve been performing our usual investigations of the geology that we encounter at our parking locations. As always, this includes contact science on bedrock targets close to the rover, ChemCam LIBS observations of targets slightly further afield, and a number of ChemCam RMI and Mastcam mosaics. These mosaics include observations deeper into the “Tapiche” hollow where we’re parked and the “Los Flamencos” ridge to its south, which we plan on investigating closer in the coming week.

Mars continues to move deeper into its dusty season, so the environmental science group filled this week’s plan with a typical assortment of atmospheric monitoring activities to track dust devils and the amount of dust in the atmosphere, as well as several Navcam cloud movies. So far this dusty season the atmosphere over Gale Crater appears to be behaving much like it does most years, with no signs of imminent dust storms. It’s now been almost eight years (four Mars years) since the last time that a global dust storm swept across the planet, so we’re keeping a close eye on the possibility of another one occurring this year.

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New Volunteer Data from 143 Observatories Unveils the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse

On April 8, 2024, volunteers participating in NASA’s Eclipse Megamovie citizen science project all around the United States hurried to photograph the solar eclipse with the latest, greatest equipment, capturing groundbreaking images of the Sun’s corona.

Now, the Eclipse Megamovie team has released the remarkable new dataset that resulted from this effort — the first-ever, white-light eclipse dataset with calibration frames, spanning more than a cumulative hour and a half of observations of the solar corona. This data, which includes 52,469 total photographs uploaded by project volunteers, is now live: https://eclipsemegamovie.org/database. The data include contributions from 143 unique, mobile, volunteer-led “observatories” – people with cameras charged with taking precise images of the eclipse, taking extra steps to allow the painstaking calibration required to reveal how the corona evolves from one person’s view to the next. Researchers around the world can now use these observations to identify solar jets leaving the Sun’s surface and study how solar plumes grow and develop. The public can also peruse and download all of this data, which is highly accessible and searchable by observatory name and location.

“Thank you for all you do and have done for us,” said Eclipse Megamovie volunteer Jessi McKenna. “Everyone in the group has been amazingly supportive of each other. And those who are running things are always so obviously appreciative of everyone who has contributed to the project.” 

The files include data at three different levels of processing, from raw (level 1) data to calibrated (level 3) data, in a format called FITS, or Flexible Image Transport System. It is the standard astronomical data format used by NASA and the International Astronomical Union. Of the 143 unique observatories involved, 28 observatories had clear skies, sufficient calibration frames, and enough unique exposure times to create calibrated level 3 images.

The Eclipse Megamovie team at Sonoma State University and the University of California, Berkeley and collaborators at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center began working together long before the eclipse to construct this database, together with EdEon STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics) Learning programmer Troy Wilson. But crucially, Eclipse Megamovie 2024 was made possible because of hundreds of volunteers who journeyed into the path of the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse with their cameras, patience, and curiosity.

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Webb Maps Uranus’ Upper Atmosphere

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope provided the first vertical view of Uranus’s ionosphere in this image released on Feb. 19, 2026, revealing auroras shaped by its tilted magnetic field.

Getting a look at the structure of the region where the atmosphere interacts strongly with the planet’s magnetic field is giving us the most detailed portrait yet of where its auroras form, how the magnetic field influences them, and also data on how Uranus’s atmosphere has continued to cool since the 1990s.

Uranus has the strangest magnetosphere in the Solar System. It is tilted and offset from the planet’s rotation axis (and this planet already rolls around the Sun nearly on its side), which means auroras move across the surface in complex ways. Better understanding Uranus will give us insight into ice-giant planets and help us better characterize giant planets outside our Solar System.

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Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, STScI, P. Tiranti, H. Melin, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb)

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Monika Luabeya

Technology Originally Developed for Space Missions Now Integral to Everyday Life

Groundbreaking “camera-on-a-chip” technology that was originally developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for use in space missions is currently employed in billions of devices like cell phones that are used daily by people worldwide.

In the 1980s, sensors used to produce high-quality images for space science (including the amazing images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope) and other applications employed charge coupled device (CCD) technology. Dr. Eric Fossum was originally hired at JPL in 1990 to advance CCD technology for use in interplanetary space missions, but he ended up advancing another technology called complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology for that purpose and much more. While at JPL, Fossum took advantage of a technique commonly used for CCDs and applied it to CMOS sensors to develop the first CMOS active pixel image sensor. This development began a chain of events that led to the present use of CMOS technology not only in space science missions, but also in billions of cameras in smartphones, webcams, automobiles, and medical devices used worldwide.

A new technology emerges…

In 1990, CCDs were the primary technology used to generate high-quality images. CCD sensors consist of arrays of pixels that convert light into electric charges. The charge from each pixel is transferred step-by-step to an output amplifier at the corner of the sensor and converted to a voltage that represents the brightness of the light received at the corresponding pixel. The data from all the pixels is then aggregated to generate an image. While CCD cameras can produce very high-quality images that are suitable for scientific use, they require a lot of power and an efficient charge transfer process to be effective.

CMOS sensors, on the other hand, have signal amplifiers within each pixel and signals can be read directly from each pixel instead of being transferred long distances to an amplifier for conversion. CMOS sensors therefore require less voltage to operate than CCDs and issues with the charge transfer process such as radiation susceptibility are greatly reduced. Although CMOS sensors existed in the 1990s, they produced too much noise to produce high-quality images required for science applications.

To reduce the signal noise typical of CMOS sensors at that time, Fossum applied a technique that was often used in CCD devices. This technique—called “intra-pixel charge transfer with correlated double sampling”—enables a double measurement of a pixel’s voltage without and with the light-generated charge. Subtracting the values of these two samples enables noise to be suppressed, improving the signal-to-noise ratio.

The next steps

Soon several companies signed Technology Cooperation Agreements with JPL and partnered with Fossum and his colleagues to develop the promising new technology. In 1995, Fossum and co-worker Dr. Sabrina Kemeny licensed the technology from CalTech and founded a company called Photobit to develop CMOS sensors. In 1996, Fossum left JPL to work at Photobit full time. The Photobit, team further refined the CMOS technology to get it closer to CCD capabilities, reduce power requirements, and make manufacturing cheaper.

Shortly thereafter, CMOS cameras started to be used in webcams, “pill cams” (small, swallowable devices that incorporate a tiny camera to take thousands of high-resolution images of the digestive tract), and other applications. In 2001 Photobit was acquired by Micron Technology, a larger company that devoted even more resources to development of CMOS technology. With the subsequent explosion of the cell phone industry, by 2013 more than a billion CMOS sensors were manufactured each year, and today that number has grown to about seven billion per year.

Where are these sensors now?

The CMOS technology Dr. Fossum originally developed has not only enabled space science, it has been infused into devices we depend on every day, dramatically and positively transforming many aspects of our lives. Virtually all digital still and video cameras, including those on cell phones, employ them. In addition, CMOS technology is used in automotive electronics, webcams, sports cameras, industrial equipment, security cameras including doorbells, and cinematography cameras, and for medical and dental imaging, among many other applications.

In addition to dominating the commercial and consumer market, CMOS imagers have been used as engineering cameras to enable the entry, descent, and landing of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover, in the camera onboard the OCO-3 (Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3) mission that monitors the distribution of carbon dioxide on Earth, and as scientific imagers on NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission that is revolutionizing our understanding of the Sun. CMOS imagers are on their way to Jupiter’s moon, Europa, on the agency’s Europa Clipper mission, and a delta-doped ultraviolet version with tailored response is under development for use on the upcoming UVEX (UltraViolet EXplorer) mission that will provide insight into how galaxies and stars evolve.

CMOS imagers are routinely used in monitoring the launch and deployment of CubeSats and SmallSats. They were recently used to monitor the deployment of Pandora, a small satellite that will characterize exoplanet atmospheres and their host stars; BLACKCAT (the Black Hole Coded Aperture Telescope), a small X-ray telescope; and the SPARCS (Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat) mission designed to monitor and characterize the stellar flares of low-mass stars in ultraviolet to provide context for the habitability of exoplanets in their system. NASA is also developing descendants of this technology for use in missions that will search for life beyond Earth like its Habitable Worlds Observatory.

In recognition of the impact this CMOS technology has had, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has named Dr. Fossum the recipient of the 2026 Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering “for innovation, development, and commercialization of the complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) active pixel image sensor ‘camera-on-a-chip.’” The NAE bestows this award biennially to honor an engineer “whose accomplishment has significantly impacted society by improving the quality of life, providing the ability to live freely and comfortably, and/or permitting the access to information.”

Sponsoring Organizations: The original efforts at JPL to develop this CMOS technology were funded by JPL and NASA.

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