Curiosity Blog, Sols 4631-4633: Radiant Ridge Revolution

Written by Remington Free, engineer of operations systems at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA

Earth planning date: Friday August 15, 2025

Today, we have raised a three -soil weekend plan with many exciting activities – to support scientific and engineers!

While generally our scientific activities take the spotlight, we often do engineering maintenance activities to maintain the mechanisms and the Rover engineering health. On soil 4631, we have planned a maintenance activity for our battery control cards (BCBS) which are electronic control cards fixed to the Rover batteries and are what interacts with the batteries as required. This maintenance is carried out periodically to correct a drift on the BCBS at any time, so we are as precise as possible of the data.

On this soil, we have also dubbed all of our parameters – these are essentially defined variables on board the rover which serve as an entry to a variety of functions. Sometimes we return a list of all these variables to the ground so that we can check that they correspond as planned. We don’t want to have set a value and then forget it!

We, of course, have also done scientific activities on this soil. After completing our engineering activities, we started with a distant science; This included mastcam imagery and chemicam measurements of several interesting targets. These were chosen to assess the variability in the “Cerro Paranal” ridge in the view, and to document any overlapping or fracture in the rock. We then finished several ARM activities in order to obtain more information on these targets thanks to the use of our APXS spectrometer.

On soil 4632, we planned a distant atmospheric science, including a Dust-Devil Navcam survey, a Tau Mastcam (measurement of atmospheric opacity), atmospheric observations APXs and greater imagery of some of the targets of the crest that we have examined in the previous soil.

On floor 4633, we continued with more scientific imaging, including a horizon film using Navcam and a film of dust-repairing, before carrying out our reader. We planned a route of about 19 meters (about 62 feet) to the south, along the eastern border of Cerro Paranal. After the reader, it is then standard for us to have a new imagery of our new location. We are delighted to recover these scientific images and to hear how the disc took place when the team returns on Monday!