Written by Abigail Fraeman, Deputy Project Scientist at NASA JPL
Earth Planning Date: Friday, Dec. 5, 2025
Since we only had one planning day last week due to American Thanksgiving, this update covers both last week and this week of planning. And what a productive couple of weeks it has been! Last week I was busy on Earth tucking into turkey, gravy, and stuffing, but Curiosity was continuing to work hard collecting observations at the Nevado Sajama drill site. One notable activity was the collection of more frames for our mega 360-degree Mastcam stereo mosaic at this location. Usually when we take 360-degree mosaics with our color mast cameras, we only use the 34 mm (left) Mastcam, which has the wider field of view of the two mast cameras, so it can cover the entire scene with fewer frames. Since we knew we’d be parked in a single location for many sols during our Nevado Sajama drilling campaign, the Mastcam team proposed an ambitious plan to take a full 360-degree mosaic in stereo, using both the M34 camera but also our telephoto Mastcam 100 mm (right) camera, which has a smaller field of view but can capture more detail. There’s not enough time to collect t …