Sols 4559-4560: Campaign for drilling-lining a drilling place in the box

Written by Lucy Lim, a planetary scientist at the NASA -in Center for Space Flights Goddard

Earth Planning Date: Monday, June 2, 2025

Now that she has spent a few soles of curiosity by collecting the measurements of a close -up of a rock in the outer edge of the geological unit that forms Boxwork, the team has decided that it is time to collect a drill sample. The APXS geochemical measurements have shown changes since we have exceeded the previous layered sulfate units, but we cannot discover mineralogy only from this information. As we often saw on Mars, the same chemical elements can be crystallized in several different mineral assemblies. This is even more in sedimentary rocks such as driving through which different grains in our rocks can form at different times and places. This also means that when we get our mineral information, these minerals will tell us a lot about the history of these new rocks.

In curiosity, this mineral analysis is a chemina instrument job, which he uses X -ray diffraction to identify minerals. Chemin shines a narrow X -ray bundle through a pattern powder to create a sample of diffraction, which means he needs a drilled pattern. So the team was busy today by looking for a drilling place. Unfortunately, the Rover’s drill from today’s parking space included only rocks that were too broken or sat too many fragments to be thought to be producing a good -drilled pattern, so we would have to move or “bump” at least again before progressing on the drilling test, which is the next step in drilling.

In the meantime, we take over more measurements to understand the range of compositions that can be found in this layer of rocks. Dust removal (DRT) + APXS + Libs + Mahli are all planned for the target “Holcomb Valley”, while at a small distance from the second DRT/APXS/Mahli measurements planned for “Santa Ysabel Valley”, and in the other direction, other libi for “Ready Sadla”. One chemcam chemcam is planned to cover the Boxwork structure in the distance. Mastcam had a relatively light recording day, with only a few small mosaics that covered the nearby feature of the trough and providing the context for the RMI Boxwork structure, except that he documented two Libs goals. The modern environment of Mars has also been recorded with several films to seek the activity-devil dust, the measurement of atmospheric opacity and a couple of observations of suprahorizon for cloud search, plus the usual passive observation of the day and REMS to monitor the environment of neutrons, temperature and humidity.

I will be on the Rover Planning on Wednesday as geology and the mineralogical science of the topic and look forward to what we find-we find ourselves some borehole for drilling and a unit!