Curiosity Blog, Sols 4788-4797: Welcome Back from Conjunction
Written by Alex Innanen, atmospheric scientist at York University, Toronto
Date of the earthworks plan: Friday January 30, 2026
Mars emerged from its vacation behind the Sun, and we here on Earth were able to reconnect with Curiosity and get back to work on Mars. Our first day of planning last Friday gave Curiosity a full weekend of activities, which ended with preparation for our next exercise. We checked an off-white rock in the workspace with APXS, MAHLI and ChemCam’s laser spectrometer and ended up imaging a sandy area which we monitored during conjunction to see if we could pick up any wind movement, before taking a short trip to our drilling location about 2 meters (about 6 feet) away.
This location may seem familiar to you: our next drilling will take place just a few centimeters from the “Nevado Sajama”, which we drilled in November. The reason we came back here is to do a rare SAM experiment on the instrument’s last container of tetramethylammonium hydroxide (or TMAH, for less than a mouthful). TMAH is a chemical that we can mix into our Nevado Sajama sample to help identify organic molecules. SAM only had two containers of TMAH (the first of which was used almost six years ago). So we want to make sure that everything goes well with this experiment. As a result, we did a rehearsal of delivering the sample to SAM in the Wednesday plan, before drilling this weekend.
