Written by Alex Innanen, atmospheric scientist at York University, Toronto

Ground planning date: Friday, July 10, 2026

Curiosity had a successful long weekend and started this week ready to explore some more. We have been moving fairly quickly through different mapped “units,” or different geological areas of interest, visiting a different one at each of our three stops this week. The terrain around us can give us clues about Gale Crater’s past environment, and geologists can look at the different compositions and appearances of what may look like ordinary rocks to the rest of us, to infer how it was deposited and altered by its environment in the distant past.

Our three stops this week included contact science with MAHLI and APXS, as well as composition analysis with the ChemCam LIBS instrument. Mastcam and ChemCam also continued to study the broader context of this area with medium and long-distance images of the hills and other formations we see around us. Among the different layers and textures of the bedrock are features that were formed from some past erosion and we also observed different examples of these throughout the week.

While each rock Curiosity chooses to examine is special (that’s why we give them all names!), two in particular stood out this week. Monday and Wednesday’s workspaces contained rocks that were darker than those around them, so they may have been brought from somewhere else, or could even be meteorites. To help discover their stories, we enable LIBS to view their compositions.

Of course, we’re not just interested in observing Mars’ past: we also care about its current environment. As we approach the end of the Martian year, passing through summer in Gale Crater and looking ahead to autumn, the atmosphere almost seems to calm down. The change of year on Mars sees us move from dust season to cloud season, so we’re keeping an eye out for both dust and clouds. This time of year is the last gasp of dust season, what we call the “C” storm season, when medium-sized regional dust storms can form. So we keep an eye out for these signs with both Mastcam and Navcam. In addition to our dust and cloud images, we, as always, have our trusty suite of REMS instruments adding to our daily weather record of Gale Crater with regular measurements.