The Blunts Point member of the Murray formation is currently being explored by Curiosity, a rover on Mars. As the SOWG Chair, I helped outline a busy weekend plan that involves moving north into the Blunts Point member and conducting contact science activities at various locations.
On the first sol, we have scheduled several contact science activities, including 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, as well as additional MAHLI and APXS on the “Carleton” target to examine variations in chemistry.
After completing the overnight APXS integration on “Floodwood,” Curiosity will conduct another early morning ChemCam water adsorption observation. Midday on the second sol 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 the third sol 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