Curiosity Blog, Sols 4818-4824: Thinking Out of the Boxwork

This week the team held three planning sessions to explore the eastern side of the boxwork unit. As Rover Planner on Monday, I worked on arm and drive activities; on Friday I served as Engineering Uplink Lead, planning engineering tasks such as heating and managing onboard data.

We drove twice to place different targets into the workspace and completed 19 Mastcam stereo mosaics, including a full 360-degree panorama and extra documentation of nearby ridges, hollows, and the adjacent sulfate unit. The months-long, careful investigation of the boxwork unit is meant to give the science team insight into the processes that produced this unusual terrain, and once we finish here we will head toward the sulfate unit as we continue our climb up Mount Sharp.

With warmer months and the start of dust-storm season approaching, we increased atmospheric monitoring: repeated crater-rim observations to watch it fade into haze, Mastcam solar Tau measurements, dust-devil movies, and other sky observations.

Mars, Mount Sharp

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