Unfortunately, our weekend drive stalled, so this morning we found ourselves still at Friday's workspace. Fortunately, it was an understood issue... and this was a good place to spend some extra time and fill our science glass with amazing data!

This workspace ("Hartle Loup") has examples of different textures, bands of "vuggy" (the little holes or pits that you can see in the above image) material and smoother material. On Friday, APXS and MAHLI had to make some hard choices between all our desired targets, and we opted to characterize some "vuggy" targets but were unable to also get the "smooth" targets.

So, in a sense, the drive stall worked in our favour, allowing us to get three "smooth" targets here. APXS and MAHLI will investigate "Broadfell" and a brushed target "Venlaw," whilst ChemCam will use LIBS to target "Cleveland".

Mastcam will take multispectral imagery (a further tool to help understand composition, often used for brushed targets) of Venlaw and were able to add a bonus multispectral image of the weekend DRT target ("Donkey Trail") which we didn't have time for on Friday.

MAHLI took the opportunity to slip in a six image mosaic (series of overlapping images) looking at the interaction between the two textures. ChemCam will also examine "Bowder Stone," a bedrock target that was broken up by the wheels last week.

Mastcam has, as always, a very busy plan. They will document the ChemCam targets from this plan, recover an image from the weekend on "Burn Mouth" which didn't complete and get some more images of the pediment landscape.

Mastcam will also aid the environmental group (ENV) in monitoring dust concentrations in the air, obtaining a crater rim extinction observation and a basic "tau" measurement, both of which are used to determine how much dust is the atmosphere.

Once we finish getting all this lovely bonus science at Hartle Loup, we will continue on our way, following the same drive path as we had planned to take over the weekend.

Related Links
Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory
Mars News and Information at MarsDaily.com
Lunar Dreams and more

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Sols 3425-3427: Vuggy Buggy
Greenbelt MD (SPX) Mar 29, 2022
I learned a new word today: vug. Vugs are small cavities or pits on a rock surface and the rock in our workspace today was noticeably "vuggy." Particularly, the triangular rock face in the bottom center portion of this Navcam image. This vuggy rock in the "Hartle Loup" outcrop seemed particularly unique relative to the other rocks on the Greenheugh Pediment that we've seen to-date. We chose this triangular rock face as one of our two contact science targets today (termed "Burn Mouth") and the flat ... read more