Sols 4913-4919: Planetary Explorers Head to Yardang

Written by Catherine O'Connell-Cooper, APXS Strategic Planner and Payload Uplink/Downlink Lead, University of New Brunswick, Canada

Earth planning day: Friday, June 5th, 2026

In a very broad sense, Curiosity has two modes of doing science - one centred around a defined science campaign (such as the recent boxwork campaign) and the other as we move between campaigns. During a science campaign, with a very defined start and end location, every image and every workspace is carefully choregraphed to make sure we hit all of our science goals for the campaign. This is a lot of pressure!

But in between campaigns, the emphasis moves to driving towards the next major campaign. Our next major stop is the yardang unit, a series of intriguing wind sculpted, pale coloured hills which you can just see in the distance in the cover image for this blog. The rover planners (RPs) sometimes make our drives as long as they can and we drive as far as we can go, other times we stop a little short to look at interesting looking workspaces as we go. As part of the APXS team, I loved being part of the boxwork campaign and getting all the information we needed there … but as a geologist, there is something very special about this kind of exploring, the sense of being a planetary explorer, ambling along to see what the rocks will show us.

So we continue southwards, trundling over laminated bedrock which varies from predominantly pale coloured laminated bedrock to bands with abundant thin flaky, darker coloured, layers and patches. Some of the rocks stick out at strange angles, which make planning drives more challenging. This past week there has been abundant dark layers interbedded with the more dominant pale coloured rock, both in place and in fragments around the workspace. APXS and MAHLI characterized some of this darker material, for 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 also analyzed both types of rocks along the way.

We are busily acquiring Mastcam and ChemCam LD-RMI ("Long Distance Remote Micro Imager") images of everything even remotely interesting - and there are lots and lots of cool features around here. The wide open landscape here allows us to image features from several different angles and distances, such as "Mira Flores," a small erosional outlier seen from a distance in this image and closer up here. Another great example is the "Kimsa Chata" trough which shows some amazing sedimentary structures, which may help us to determine if this was a desert or a lake or maybe something in between, such as a desert with some water moving through.

The Environmental Theme Group continues to populate each plan with environmental monitoring activities. Activities varied from dust devil monitoring in Gale crater to looking at levels of dust in the skies overhead. The weekend drive is planned to take us further into that drive distance shown in the cover image, to an area where the contrast between dark and light bedrock is more pronounced, and just beyond that, to an area which looks very smooth, with no jutting out blocks. From where we sit today, its impossible to say what it is but that is the fun of exploring - who knows what we will find? Stay tuned to find out over the coming weeks.