Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Sequence of Curiosity Mastcam Left images taken on September 10, 2015 Sol 1100.
Credits: Panorama by Leonard David from NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS images.

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover continues to capture striking images of its surroundings.

Curiosity has been working on Mars since early August 2012. It reached the base of Mount Sharp last year after investigating outcrops closer to its landing site and then trekking toward the mountain.

Curiosity Mastcam Left, Sol 1100, taken on September 10, 2015.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Today is Sol 1102 on Mars for Curiosity.

Over the weekend, mission operators were to make use of the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) to take up-close images of the rover’s wheels, and then acquire a full suite of images of a rock dubbed “Badlands.”

Also on tap is to use the Mastcam and Chemistry & Camera (ChemCam) to observe targets named “Madison” and “Jefferson,” reports Ken Herkenhoff of the USGS Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona.

On Sol 1104, the Remote Micro-Imager (RMI) and Mastcam are slated to take images of a bright ridge on the flank of Mt. Sharp.

Curiosity Mastcam Right image taken on Sol 1100, September 9, 2015.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Arm error

Last last week, the robot encountered an “arm error” while being stowed, Herkenhoff explains. “Apparently the shoulder azimuth motor was too cold, so the rover software halted the stow,” he adds, which precluded a rover drive that was to follow.

“The operations team had to scramble to recover from the arm error and plan science observations, but was able to put together an excellent weekend plan,” Herkenhoff reports.

Curiosity/Mars Odyssey team up

Now on tap, early on Sol 1105, Herkenhoff explains, the rover’s Mastcam and Navcam will observe the Sun and sky soon after NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter flies over, “so that orbiter observations can be compared with nearly simultaneous observations from the surface.”

Dates of planned rover activities are also subject to change due to a variety of factors related to the Martian environment, communication relays and rover status.

Large-scale crossbedding in the sandstone of this ridge on a lower slope of Mars’ Mount Sharp is typical of windblown sand dunes that have petrified. NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover used its Mastcam to capture this vista on Aug. 27, 2015.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Sand dune deposits

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has detailed some earlier rover imagery of dark sandstone. The Mars rover photos show texture and inclined bedding structures characteristic of deposits that formed as sand dunes…then were cemented into rock.

“This sandstone outcrop — part of a geological layer that Curiosity’s science team calls the Stimson unit — has a structure called crossbedding on a large scale that the team has interpreted as deposits of sand dunes formed by wind,” JPL explains.

Sets of bedding laminations lie at angles to each other. Such crossbedding is common in wind-deposited sandstone of the U.S. Southwest. An example from Utah is pictured here.
Credit: U.S. Department of the Interior/U.S. Geological Survey

As a comparison, there are look alike petrified sand dunes that are common in the U.S. Southwest.

“Geometry and orientation of the crossbedding give information about the directions of the winds that produced the dunes,” JPL’s Curiosity website adds.

This map shows the route driven by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity through the 1100 Martian day, or Sol, of the rover’s mission on Mars (September, 10, 2015).
Numbering of the dots along the line indicate the sol number of each drive. North is up. The scale bar is 1 kilometer (roughly 0.62 mile).
From Sol 1099 to Sol 1100, Curiosity had driven a straight line distance of about 108.47 feet (33.06 meters).
The base image from the map is from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment Camera (HiRISE) in NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona