Curiosity Blog, Sols 4668-4674: Winding Our Way Along

Written by Alex Innanen, atmospheric scientist at the University of York

Earth planning date: Friday September 26, 2025

We continue through the boxwork region, taking a winding path of the ridges (many of which are conveniently the size of a curiosity). One thing that we keep an eye on the next drilling location in one of the hollows. Our most recent journey put us in the middle of two of these hollows, which we named “Laguna Escondida” and “Laguna Socmpa”. While we keep an eye on a good place to drill, we always use our normal instrument sequence to continue our investigation into boxwork structures.

This week, we had six scientific contact targets along the peak top, which gave Mahli and Apxs a lot to do. Chemcam and Mastcam also took care of each other, with several measures of Libs of Chemcam and the mosaics of the two targets from near and far. We are not only interested in imagining the hollows to extend our next drilling site, but also to continue to study the structure of the ridges and to look further on the more distant boxwork structures and buttons around us.

On Monday, I was in the quarter of its role as manager of the scientific theme for the group of the theme of environmental sciences (ENV). We arrive at the end of the cloudy season in just over a week. Consequently, we have drawn the best party from the clouds while they are always there with our suite of cloud films – the shorter Suprahorizon and Zenith movies, which we use to watch the properties of the clouds directly above and just on the horizon; An investigation to see how the brightness of the sky and the clouds changes with the direction, which consists of nine films of clouds all around the rover; and the observation of the altitude of the clouds, which uses shadows projected by clouds to, as its name suggests, deduce the height of the clouds. Once the cloudy season has exceeded the number of water ice clouds, we see above the scab crash decreases considerably, we have therefore put the two longer observations for another year and simply use the Zenith and Suprahorizon films to monitor the activity of the cloud.

The end of the cloudy season causes the start of the dusty season, where more dust is raised in the atmosphere and the beautiful view of the crater rim that we appreciate becomes a little dynamic. We monitor this with our regular observations of the aim of the aiming and tau line. We also tend to see more brightness activities, such as Dust Devils, that we keep an eye with 360 -degree investigations and dedicated films. With the constantly evolving atmosphere, there is always something to do to approx.