Sols 2059-60, May 23, 2018, update by MSL scientist Mark Salvatore: This past weekend, Curiosity successfully drilled into the “Duluth” rock target, generating a beautiful pile of drill tailings! This is a very exciting time for us on the rover team, who have been waiting for quite a while to successfully drill into a target and to ingest samples into the rover’s analytical instruments.
Before we are able to use all of our instruments, however, we must first characterize the nature of the materials that were collected during the drill activities. So, on Monday, the science team planned for the characterization of three small portions of the collected sample that were to be dropped onto the surface in front of us so that we could image these materials at high resolution. While these efforts were not primarily driven by science (the rover engineers were more interested in the nature of the sample and whether there would be any difficulties in delivering the sample to Curiosity’s instruments), the science team didn’t dare miss an opportunity to make some cool measurements of the new materials… [More at link]