A mosaic of overlapping MastCam images processed by Kevin Gill provide us with a nice view of a small part of a huge field of polygons

Cropped from a mosaic of R-MastCam images acquired on sol 4922. We'll pass a little closer, but if they stick to the MSAR, they will not visit the butte

Processed by Kevin M Gill

15 overlapping frames assembled in MS-ICE

Southeast by ~36 meters in about 45 minutes. Full details are in the comments

This is a mosaic of 15 overlapping mages

Other images and drive data are in the comments

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NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image, the first color look of the “Campo Marte” drill hole, on May 16, 2026. The rover captured the image using its right Mast Camera (Mastcam) — one of a pair of cameras mounted on the head atop the rover’s mast — on Sol 4897, or Martian day 4,897 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission, at 18:05:49 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Written by Abigail Fraeman, Deputy Project Scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

Earth planning date: Friday, May 22, 2026

I spent this past weekend eagerly awaiting the downlink from Mars that would show us the results of Curiosity’s drill attempt at “Campo Marte.” A few weeks ago, when Curiosity drilled the “Atacama” block, it had been quite the surprise to see the post-drill images arrive on Earth that showed the rover picking up the entire Atacama block along with the drill. After freeing ourselves from this pesky passenger, the team carefully assessed all the telemetry and imaging data we had collected to understand why the entanglement happened and to mitigate the chance of it happening again. We concluded it would be ok to try another drill in this general area, and nearby Campo Marte looked like a great target because it had all the right geologic features and was significantly bigger than Atacama. What a delight it was to see images, like the Mastcam shown above, streaming down on Saturday that showed Curiosity had successfully retracted its drill from the rock and collected some sample to analyze this time around!

On Monday, the team looked at the pinches of drilled rock powder, or portions, that we had dropped as a test onto part of Curiosity, an element of our standard post-drilling activities. You can also take a look at what we saw — here’s a picture of the rover before we did anything, and here’s what we saw after we delivered the first portion, and then the second portion. Can you make out the little bit of powder that appears between the sample deliveries? This test is important to make sure we’ll provide good samples to the analytical instruments inside our chassis, CheMin and SAM. Beyond their science operations value, I also love seeing these images because they remind me how powerful our laboratory instruments are. With just a little pinch of powder, no more than tens of milligrams, these laboratories can reveal incredibly detailed information about the composition of Martian rocks and give us huge new insights into the planet’s past climate and habitability.

We concluded the portions from Campo Marte looked similar to the drilled samples we’ve previously analyzed, so we went ahead and delivered one portion to CheMin in Monday’s plan. We use the results from CheMin to tailor our analysis of the samples with SAM, so after we saw the first CheMin results in the middle of the week, we made decisions about how to run SAM and then planned to analyze four portions with that instrument in today’s plan. We think we’ll be nearly out of sample after that, but it’s hard to know for sure (we only drilled to a depth of 28 millimeters here, about 1.1 inches, rather than our usual 35 millimeters, or 1.38 inches). To learn more, in this upcoming weekend’s plan, we'll also repeat the sample drop-off test we did right after drilling, which will show us how many portions were left. We do a ton of testing with Curiosity’s twin drill here on Earth, but it's always insightful to see how our hardware performs on Mars under the unique geologic and environmental conditions of that entirely different world.

MSL - Sol 4904 De-Bayered R-MastCam - Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/fredk

Eroded fracture fills overhangs. Check out the shadows :)

2 days ago on Mars

Right-side Navigation Camera: Sols 4893-5-7

Features 3 images: 'Before - After DRT - After Drilling in a simple animated GIF.

Judging by the pile of tailings, it appears as though there was no damage to the drill :)

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/pixelart/p/2052875/uplifting-martian-rocks-now-are-we-curiosity

360 degree post-drive panorama from ~30 R-NavCam images. Roughly assembled using MS-ICE

Episode 266 At the end of April, Curiosity’s drill bit got stuck in a rock, leading to unprecedented efforts to free it and an unprecedented look at a surface hidden from view for millions or maybe billions of years. Spoiler alert: nothing crawled out.

This panorama was assembled from 29 post-drive NavCam images taken by Curiosity using its right-side Navigation camera on sol 4889

Here's the drive details

Assembled from 15 overlapping left-side mast camera images using MS-ICE. Note the nicely weathered rock in the center of the image. I'll share the close-up MAHLI mosaic of that in a separate post