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Sols 4486-4487: Ankle-Breaking Kind of Terrain!

Written by Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, Planetary Geologist at University of New Brunswick Earth planning date: Wednesday, March 19, 2025 This terrain is a tricky drive, with rocks angled chaotically all around. One of our geologists remarked that they wouldn’t like to even walk over this without solid boots coming way up over the ankles — this […]

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Mar 22, 2025 - 10:00

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Sols 4486-4487: Ankle-Breaking Kind of Terrain!

A grayscale, extreme wide-angle image of Martian terrain shows an exaggerated, curved horizon in the distance, where mesas rise from the ground on the left side and in the center. The entire field between that and the image foreground is covered in rocks of varying sizes poking out of the ground at various angles, with very few patches of flat ground. Many of the rocks are very light gray, compared to the medium gray of the soil. Some of the soil in between the rocks appears wavy, as if sculpted by wind or water. Parts of the Curiosity rover are visible, but shadowed, in the four corners of the image. One wheel is visible at lower left, and another in the lower right.

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Front Hazard Avoidance Camera (Front Hazcam) on March 18, 2025 — sol 4484, or Martian day 4,484 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 11:54:13 UTC.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Written by Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, Planetary Geologist at University of New Brunswick

Earth planning date: Wednesday, March 19, 2025

This terrain is a tricky drive, with rocks angled chaotically all around. One of our geologists remarked that they wouldn’t like to even walk over this without solid boots coming way up over the ankles — this is definitely the kind of terrain to result in twisted and broken ankles! So it wasn’t too unexpected that the drive we had planned on Monday cut short after 18 meters (about 59 feet). Fortunately, we ended up both at a workspace with abundant bedrock and in an orientation that allowed us to pass SRAP (our “Slip Risk Assessment Process”).

The rover planners were quickly able to find a spot to brush, so we have a coordinated target on “Palm Grove,” one of the laminated rocks in the lower half of the accompanying image. APXS and MAHLI will look at this target on the first sol of the plan, and then ChemCam LIBS and Mastcam will look at it on the second sol. Although the bulk of the bedrock is relatively nodule free, ChemCam will look at the nodular target “Refugio” to compare to the more dominant, nodule-poor bedrock.

On Monday, our workspace included some very interesting layers in the bedrock that might represent preserved sand ripples, but sadly, as Conor reported on Monday, we didn’t pass SRAP, which precluded any contact science. However, today we ended up near rocks that had similar layer geometry, and will acquire a MAHLI “Dog’s Eye” or mosaic image of these rocks at “Duna Vista” and two Mastcam 5×3 mosaics (“Bayside Trail” and “Oso Flaco”) on other examples.

Mastcam is taking several other images here. A 14×3 mosaic will capture the “nearfield” or area close to the rover, and a set of four further images focus on four distinct trough features, to help us better understand ongoing modification of the surface. Further afield, the “Quartz Hill” and “Pino Alto” mosaics look at areas of fragmented bedrock which may be similar to the “Humber Park” outcrop we analyzed this past weekend. Even further from the rover, ChemCam will acquire RMI (Remote Micro Imager) images of the “Boxworks” and an almost circular depression (“Torote Bowl”) whose origin is not clear.

The environmental theme group (ENV) planned a Mastcam tau (to look at dust in the atmosphere) and a Navcam dust-devil survey (to look for dust devils!) for the first sol of the plan. On the second sol, we fill out the movies with Navcam movies looking toward the south of the crater (suprahorizon, cloud shadow, and zenith movies) and a Mastcam sky survey.

In between the movies on the second sol, our drive is planned to take us another 34 meters (about 112 feet)… but we will have to see how far our intrepid rover will make it on this tricky terrain. Slow and steady will win this race!