As the APXS strategic planner today, I requested the brushing of the rock prior to analysis with APXS to improve the quality of the data. Thankfully the rover is parked in a safe and stable spot, and we can unstow the arm, brush the dusty surface and place APXS and MAHLI in close proximity to the rock (“Cana”), as well as get Mastcam imaging and ChemCam LIBS before we drive away. We drove away into a slight depression, and found ourselves in a very different looking, dusty and soil covered terrain. We did manage to get MAHLI images from a safe standoff and the “Acara” image is one of these. We are hoping to drive back this way and will try to place APXS on these fascinating rocks to get bulk chemistry that we can compare with the underlying rippled rocks. Unfortunately, Curiosity had one wheel slightly elevated on a rock, and it was not safe to place the turret on the surface, so we were not able to get compositional data with the APXS instrument. We observed possible ripples in the marker band and the relationship between these and the overlying rhythmically layered rocks is important to investigate with the full instrument payload. The marker band has been mapped from orbit and appears to be a relatively continuous feature around Mount Sharp. This bedrock was exposed just above the marker band that we had been investigating for several sols prior. ![]() ![]() The term rhythmic is used to describe fine scale, repeating layers that exhibit a uniform spacing and thickness. Curiosity was parked amongst beautiful, rhythmically layered bedrock in our previous workspace.
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