We received confirmation very early this morning that Wednesday’s planned SAM sample bake was successful. This weekend we will therefore continue with activities to further analyze the "Mary Anning" drilled sample. On the first sol of the plan we will prepare SAM for analyzing the sample in a slightly different way, and we are planning to do this supplementary analysis early next week. The second sol of the plan contains ChemCam analyses of two targets named “Clamshell Cove” and “Musselburgh.” We’ll also analyze the portion of the Mary Anning sample that was already delivered to CheMin for a second night. On the third sol of the plan we will measure the amount of argon in the atmosphere with APXS, collect more information about the walls of the drill hole with ChemCam, and image a small trough near Curiosity named “Upper Ollach.” Today was a very smooth planning day overall, which is always a nice thing to be able to say when you’re operating a science laboratory on another planet from your couch!

Today Curiosity will drop off some of its newly acquired "Mary Anning" drill sample to SAM for Evolved Gas Analysis (EGA). During EGA, SAM bakes the powdered rock sample at up to 900°C (1652°F). This releases, or "evolves," volatile compounds which are then measured. In addition, Navcam will image the area in front of the rover and look for dust devils, Mastcam will take two stereo mosaics of the surrounding countryside, and DAN, REMS, and RAD will continue to monitor the environment at this site.

Tonight, around 10 PM PDT, Curiosity will celebrate 8(!) years on Mars. Since Curiosity is turning 8, we expect that celebrations in Gale Crater will include games like "Pin the Mast on the Rover" and "Red Rover" ("Red rover, red rover, send Perseverance on over!") while enjoying treats from SAM's bakery!

Back on Earth, the MSL team is also celebrating with a retrospective in the form of 8 Martian postcards including the mosaic at the top of this post, a dust storm selfie, a descriptive tour of Gale Crater, a Martian cloud movie, and much more! You can see this cool selection of images from the past 8 years here: mars.nasa.gov/news/8726/.

Thank you for following Curiosity's journey for the last 8 years. We look forward to a ninth year and more of exciting exploration and discovery!

We are at the "Mary Anning" drill site, getting ready for the next experiment here at this exciting drill site. Yesterday’s plan saw some drill sample delivered to the Chemical and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument, and we are eagerly awaiting the first results of that analysis. Today we planned a Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) preconditioning activity to get ready for sample drop off to SAM and analysis later in the week, which will catalogue the composition and check for traces of organic molecules in these rocks. SAM is a very power hungry instrument, so we are budgeting most of our energy across this week around the SAM activities. As the “precon” activity takes up most of our available energy today, the geology theme group (GEO) limited itself to re-imaging the drill hole (shown in the cover image) using ChemCam, Mastcam and Navcam. This will allow us to refine targeting of the drill hole by ChemCam, APXS, and MAHLI in future plans, when power is not as constrained as it is right now! We squeezed every last bit of power available for today’s planning, so that the environmental theme group (ENV) were able to get in some monitoring activities, looking for dust devils and dust in the atmosphere, as well as standard REMS (weather) and DAN activities.

Today we planned a short and sweet single-sol plan, carrying on with our drill campaign at the “Mary Anning” site. The meat of today’s plan focuses on dropping off our powdered drill sample to our onboard CheMin instrument, which will tell us all about the mineralogical composition of our latest drill hole.

In addition to dropping off to CheMin, we planned about an hour’s worth of remote science activities in today’s plan to help document our surroundings. To kick off the science block, Mastcam will take a meaty 53-frame stereo mosaic pointed at the fractured intermediate unit to the southeast. This mosaic will document a large portion of our surroundings and will also help the science team plan our drive path once we finish up our drilling activities at Mary Anning. Next, ChemCam will shoot its laser at the target “Bishop’s Palace,” which exposes some nice small-scale layering and possible diagenetic features. ChemCam will also use its Remote Micro Imager (RMI) to take a long-distance mosaic of the “Maybole” target. Maybole is shown in the Navcam image above as a partially exposed, layered outcrop at the top of a nearby hill. In fact, we purposely planned for a few frames to overlap between the long-distance RMI and Mastcam mosaics so that the lighting conditions between the two mosaics match up. This overlap will allow for nice comparisons between the two mosaics to be made. Towards the end of the science block, Mastcam will take a documentation image of the ChemCam target Bishop’s Palace. We also planned several atmospheric monitoring activities with Navcam. Later in the sol, we’ll take a MARDI image to continue with our change detection campaign at our current location.

The end of July has been exciting for Mars and us Martians, with the successful launch of the Perseverance rover and Curiosity drilling her 27th drill hole on the “Mary Anning” target! At the start of planning, we were greeted by the always welcome sight of a drill hole surrounded by a pile of drill tailings (see image above). We learned from the engineering data that the drill cut through the rock like butter, mostly using the rotary-only mode with only low levels of percussion needed towards the end. It’s fascinating how just the act of drilling can tell you a lot about the rock composition before a sample is even fed to CheMin. The ease of drilling, plus the clumpy nature of the drill tailings, hints that the Mary Anning rock is fine-grained and potentially clay-bearing. Still, we need CheMin analyses to confirm the rock’s mineralogy so we are eagerly anticipating those results next week!

To continue our drilling checklist, Friday’s three-sol plan focused on portion characterization of Mary Anning. This step will drop some of the drilled powder onto the ground so that we can image the drilled sample and ensure that it is good to deliver to CheMin and SAM. We also planned ChemCam chemical measurements of the drill hole to document rock chemistry at depth. Mastcam multispectral and ChemCam passive observations on the drill tailings will also give us a complementary spectral assessment of the drilled mineralogy.

Multiple other observations rounded out the packed weekend plan. ChemCam will measure three bedrock targets, “Geikie,” “Fearns,” and “Great Trossachs,” some containing dark spots that may account for the variable chemistry we have been observing lately. Mastcam will also be taking two large mosaics to fill out our workspace imaging and image a long, prominent outcrop of the fractured intermediate unit in the clay-bearing unit. We also planned a MARDI image to continue change detection observations, which are focused on imaging the same location over time to observe grain movement due to winds. Atmospheric conditions will also be monitored with various atmospheric observations, dust devil surveys, and a SAM atmospheric measurement using the Quadrupole Mass Spectrometer (QMS) and Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS).

This past week, while Curiosity has been preparing to drill its next rock target, the Perseverance rover mission has been preparing to launch to Mars. We had expected to see the Mary Anning drill hole yesterday morning, but because of a minor issue with the rover’s arm, the drill sequence did not execute - so we are now expecting to see the new drill hole tomorrow. Perhaps Curiosity is just a humble, conscientious rover that did not want to steal any glory from Perseverance on its launch day.

For sol 2838, the re-do of the drill activities will use most of Curiosity’s available resources, but there is also some time available for atmospheric monitoring activities. These will include a Mastcam observation of the sky to observe the high levels of dust that are expected in this season on Mars. Looking up seems like the appropriate thing to on this day, as Perseverance starts hurtling towards Mars’ skies.

I have been reflecting this week about Curiosity’s launch, which was nearly nine years ago now, but still feels as vivid in my memory as yesterday. I was lucky enough to witness that launch in from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with the Mars Science Laboratory team – I was just a graduate student at the time. While I had only recently started collaborating on the mission, many of the colleagues surrounding me on the bleachers had been working tirelessly to design, build and test Curiosity for nearly a decade.

Imagine devoting so many years of your career to a project, and then strapping your delicate creation to a skyscraper full of explosives and pointing it towards the sky… that’s essentially what a spacecraft launch is! There was a palpable tension leading up to the final countdown. I remember a pin-drop silence as the clock reached 3… 2… 1… and then I was completely shocked at just how LOUD it was during liftoff. The Atlas V rocket seemed to shake the whole Earth, and I felt the sound hit my chest like a wall. But even more noise came from the screaming mass of scientists and engineers surrounding me, who were clapping, yelling, jumping and hugging. I tried to keep my eyes on Curiosity for as long as I could, but several times I had to look away because the flames were too bright - it felt like I was staring directly at the Sun. That sensory overload just doesn’t come across when you watch a rocket launch on TV.

For their launch this morning, the Perseverance team stayed home to keep each other safe during the present pandemic, and they watched the launch from many hundreds of individual screens. But their excitement was no less than what we felt in November 2011 – and their screams at liftoff, following that tense silence beforehand, reverberated through living rooms across the globe.

Safe travels, Perseverance! We can’t wait for you to join us on Mars!

A little inside joke among rover scientists, going back to previous rover missions, is the refrain "well, if we see a dinosaur bone, we'll stick around." While, sadly, there is (checks notes) zero chance of finding dinosaur bones on Mars, our search for Martian organics is something we're here to do! Following in the footsteps of the renowned paleontologist Mary Anning, we've been scouring the outcrop, like she did at the limestone and shale "Blue Lias" cliffs in England, and today will crack the outcrop with our 'rock hammer' (drill) and see what mysteries are captured within. As "Keeper of the Maps," I also get to add a dot on our drill targets map, which always makes my day.

After a short discussion about the results from our weekend observation on the target "Mary Anning," the science team concurred that this place is geologically similar to the "Glen Etive" drill location, and would be suitable for our next drilled sample. To help characterize the pre-drill surface, we'll take a full multispectral Mastcam image of the Mary Anning, as well as a ChemCam Z-stack and 5x1 observation. Two additional targets, "Ayton" and "Carriden," will be observed with ChemCam and Mastcam to characterize the outcrop. We'll also expand the Mastcam color imaging of the workspace in front of the rover, document two Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (AEGIS) targets with Mastcam, and a MARDI image of the surface.

During today's science planning, Curiosity rover geologist Dr. Rebecca Williams said, "We're drilling on Mars and launching to the red planet this week. It's all very exciting!" I can't agree more! When the new rover images come down tomorrow, I hope you find some exciting things in them. And if you see a plesiosaur tail or pterosaur wing-tip, please let us know.

Our drive in the last plan successfully placed at what we hope is our next drill site, the large, lovely, layered block in the image above. It is always exciting to name a new drill target, but the new name, "Mary Anning," is particularly special. Mary Anning spent her life scouring the seaside cliffs near Lyme Regis, along the southern coast of England, for fossils. She uncovered innumerable samples, most notably the first full Ichthyosaur and the first Plesiosaur. But as all too often occurs in society, Mary Anning’s gender and societal status led her groundbreaking work and discoveries to be dismissed by the scientific establishment or, worse, appropriated by men. Let Mary Anning’s name on Mars remind us to include everyone in the endeavor of exploration.

Fittingly, every team played a role in planning the five sols that will accomplish the work necessary to attempt drilling next week. ChemCam will measure the chemistry of both the primary and back up Mary Anning drill targets, in addition to “Carter Fell,” another target on the large bedrock slab we will drill. APXS will also analyze the chemistry of the primary Mary Anning target, MAHLI will image the target in detail, and then the rover planners will push the drill bit into the drill target to gauge its hardness and test its ability to withstand the force of the drill activity. Mastcam will acquire a 360 degree panoramic mosaic of our surroundings, which documents the context of our drill location within the Glen Torridon region and facilitates planning for more detailed imaging of the region. Since the workspace is obviously of interest, Mastcam will also acquire a detailed stereo mosaic that covers the workspace. CheMin will conduct an empty cell analysis and SAM will test out analysis techniques, each in preparation for analyzing the next drill sample.

Even as our attention is drawn to the rocks around us, dust storm season swirls about Curiosity, warranting our attention on the skies as well. ChemCam will turn its spectrometers skyward in passive mode to observe a wide area of the sky in order to measure concentrations of minor gases (especially oxygen and water) and dust. Combinations of Navcam and Mastcam will monitor the amount of dust in the atmosphere early in the morning, around midday, and later in the afternoon; Navcam will also look for dust devils around midday and clouds early in the morning. RAD and DAN will make dozens of measurements across four sols and while REMS will make regular measurements of Martian weather conditions throughout the plan, it is the lone star of the show on the final sol of the plan, dutifully working away as the rest of the instruments take a much needed break at the end of the long plan.

Our weekend observations of the target Breamish showed some interesting chemistry results (which always make our scientists exclaim “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”), so the plan on Sol 2829 starts off with some follow up observations: Mastcam will take a multispectral image of Breamish, and ChemCam will analyze it a second time. Mastcam will document the repeat observation of Breamish as well as the autonomously selected ChemCam targets from the weekend. Mastcam will also take a mosaic of an interesting cross-bedded block named “Mercat Cross.”

In the afternoon of Sol 2829, we will do a short drive or “bump” to our expected drill location called “Mozie Law.” From that new location, we’ll collect the usual post drive images, including a MARDI image of the ground beneath the rover and a Mastcam “clast survey” image of the ground nearby.

On Sol 2830, ChemCam will analyze two computer-selected rock targets and Navcam will take a look at the rover deck. Mastcam will look at the sun to measure the dust in the atmosphere, and the plan will wrap up with a late afternoon ChemCam measurement of the titanium calibration target on the rover to monitor temperature-related changes in the signal.

Curiosity has arrived near her next drill location and will spend the weekend analyzing a series of interesting targets in our workspace. The rover will also acquire a series of high-resolution color images, both to identify a suitable drill location in the near-field and to continue its characterization of other geologic units nearby and along the rover’s drive route. These imaging efforts will mostly take place on the first day of the three-day weekend plan. Overnight on the first night, Curiosity will make a series of APXS chemistry measurements on the target named “Breamish” (the rock just above Curiosity’s arm in the displayed image), a platy rock target with some interesting color variations. The second day will be dominated by SAM activities. As these activities are power-intensive, Curiosity will mostly be sleeping during its down time to recharge its batteries. The third day’s science block will include a series of ChemCam LIBS laser ablation measurements of different rock targets, including the Breamish target, a slanted platy rock named “Harthope,” and an effort to acquire evidence for chemical trends with depth on the target named “Back Bay.” Finally, the next morning, Curiosity will acquire some early morning environmental images to look for clouds and to measure the atmospheric dust content. That will conclude Curiosity’s science efforts for the weekend, and will prepare us well for next week’s planned drilling activities!