“I really love operations days like today,” said Abigail Fraeman, a planetary geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a Friday blog post. “We came in this morning with a completely new Martian vista to admire, and then we had to work together as a team to make a quick decision about what to do next.”
She is part of the team currently leading the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover around the Red Planet. Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012 and its mission is to provide information about areas of the planet that may have been inhabitable at one time.
Now, it “continues to explore the rock record from a time when Mars could have been home to microbial life,” according to NASA.
After a Wednesday drive that included lots of twists and turns over bumpy terrain, the rover was parked at the south side of Pinnacle Ridge, part of he Gediz Vallis channel. Since this area of Mars looks similar to one of Earth’s dry riverbeds when viewed from space, scientists have been studying the area with Curiosity’s instruments to determine if the channel was carved by landslides, wind, or even an ancient river.
Fraemen said Pinnacle Ridge was the final area of upper Gediz Vallis ridge her team planned to investigate before crossing Gediz Vallis channel. Previously, exploration of the north side of Pinnacle provided information about the composition and texture of rocks there. Altogether, the group of around 25 scientists determined it was time to move on from Pinnacle Ridge with this information already collected.
So, they directed the rover around 23 meters to the southwest. There, they plan to collect observations using the Mastcam, a camera that takes color images and color video footage of Martian terrain. However, they also planned to study some nearby rock before heading out on the new journey.
“We’ll also collect two ChemCam LIBS observations of ‘Otter Lake,’ a target very close to Royal Arches, and another nearby rock named ‘Nevada Falls.’ A suite of environmental monitoring observations will round out the plan,” said Fraeman.
Soon, NASA is hoping to put a human crew on Mars. In February, Audacy reported that the space agency was looking for volunteers to join a one-year Earthbound mission to simulate what it would be like to live there.