Curiosity Blog: Sols 4913-4919: Planetary explorers, freewheeling to the Yardang unit!

Composed by Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, APXS Strategic Organizer and Haul Uplink/Downlink Lead, University of New Brunswick, Canada

Planet planning day: Friday, June 5 th, 2026

In a really wide sense, Interest has two settings of doing science– one centred around a defined scientific research project (such as the recent boxwork project) and the various other as we move in between projects. During a scientific research project, with a very specified beginning and end place, every image and every work space is meticulously choregraphed to ensure we struck all of our scientific research objectives for the campaign. This is a lot of stress!

Yet in between projects, the emphasis transfers to driving in the direction of the next significant campaign. Our next significant quit is the yardang system, a series of interesting wind shaped, light coloured hillsides which you can simply see in the distance in the cover picture for this blog The rover organizers (RPs) in some cases make our drives as long as they can and we drive as far as we can go, various other times we stop a little brief to consider fascinating looking work spaces as we go. As part of the APXS team, I liked being part of the boxwork campaign and obtaining all the info we needed there … yet as a geologist, there is something extremely unique about this type of exploring, the feeling of being a global explorer, ambling along to see what the rocks will certainly show us.

So we proceed southwards, rotating over laminated bedrock which differs from primarily pale coloured laminated bedrock to bands with abundant slim half-cracked, darker coloured, layers and patches. Some of the rocks protrude at strange angles, which make planning drives much more difficult. This previous week there has been plentiful dark layers interbedded with the more dominant pale coloured rock, both in position and in pieces around the office. APXS and MAHLI characterized a few of this darker product, as an example at” Rio Bio Bio and” Placilla de Caracoles and some of the paler material at the brushed targets” La Primavera and” Los Quemados ” ChemCam likewise assessed both kinds of rocks along the way.

We are persistently acquiring Mastcam and ChemCam LD-RMI (“Long Distance Remote Micro Imager”) pictures of whatever also remotely fascinating– and there are lots and lots of cool functions around below. The wide open landscape here allows us to image attributes from several different angles and distances, such as “Mira Flores,” a tiny erosional outlier seen from a distance in this photo and closer up here Another wonderful example is the “Kimsa Chata” trough which shows some amazing sedimentary frameworks, which may help us to establish if this was a desert or a lake or maybe something in between, such as a desert with some water moving with.

The Environmental Theme Team continues to populate each strategy with environmental monitoring activities. Tasks varied from dirt adversary tracking in Wind crater to taking a look at levels of dust in the skies expenses. The weekend drive is intended to take us additionally into that drive range shown in the cover photo, to an area where the contrast in between dark and light bedrock is a lot more pronounced, and just past that, to an area which looks really smooth, without any jutting out blocks. Where we sit today, its impossible to claim what it is yet that is the fun of exploring– that knows what we will find? Stay tuned to figure out over the coming weeks.