Sol 2006, March 28, 2018, update by MSL scientist Mark Salvatore: As of ~9:00pm Pacific Daylight Time this evening, Curiosity will have made three revolutions around the Sun while exploring Gale crater. Quite a feat, considering Curiosity’s primary mission was designed to last just one Mars year. Yet another reason why the engineers and rover and science planners are invaluable to our exploration of the Red Planet!
Because of some power-intensive measurements that will take place later in the evening (see below), today’s surface investigations will be fairly lean and will last just over one hour. Curiosity did not drive either yesterday or today, so we are still in the same location where we are hoping to identify the sources and nature of the strong iron oxide signatures observed from orbit. To start our investigation, we will be imaging the nearby surface to investigate how the observed iron oxide signatures change as a function of changes in solar illumination. This type of experiment and material behavior is known as “photometry,” and spectroscopists can learn quite a bit about surface properties based on these types of… [More at link]