Written by Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, APXS Strategic Planner and Payload Uplink/Downlink Lead, University of New Brunswick, Canada
Earth planning date: Friday, March 13, 2026
We are in our final phase of the boxwork campaign, investigating the contacts between the boxwork unit and the layered sulfate unit. As my colleague Bill reported here, last week we crossed out of the boxwork unit back into the underlying layered sulfate unit and then back into the boxwork unit for our Monday plan. We are now driving southward across the uppermost portion of the boxwork unit. This unit is characterized by smooth bedrock where the boxwork structures are not as obvious as they were back at our “Nevado Sajama” drill sites, where we took our boxwork “postcard.”
This past week, our goal was to characterize as much as we could before leaving. On Monday, MAHLI imaged the targets (all named after geographic locations around the Andes in South America) “Piedras Bonitas” and “La Calera” — the latter was brushed bedrock also analyzed by APXS. On Friday, MAHLI and APXS analyzed a brushed, nodular bedrock at “Jaruma” and a larger nodule (or cluster of smaller nodules) at the unbrushed “Constancia.” (Click on the name to see the MAHLI images!)
Mastcam had a very busy week! Typically, as we come toward the end of a science campaign, the wish list of Mastcam targets gets very large, and the ending of this boxwork campaign is following that tradition. Mastcam acquired two mosaics on the southern contact between the boxworks and layered sulfate unit: an 18×1 mosaic (i.e., 18 frames along one row) on Monday and 19×3 mosaic (“El Misti”) on Friday. These will be key to helping us understa …