Tired but not out...

For some strange and unknown reason I feel exhausted today! Probably that pesky seminar paper summary I had to write on today. Any who, I am not leaving this blog's faithful readers without some reading material.

So I will start by first directing your attention to this link here which will take you to I think one of the best planetary science writers on the planet, Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society in Pasedena, California. She maintains the society's blog and has today a good summary of what Curiosity will be doing for the next few sols (Martian day) so check that out.

I did have time to listen in to the press briefing held today at 5pm GMT and there was interesting news (we don't expect anything less). Here is a point by point summary:

• Curiosity did in fact shoot a panorama with the Navigation cameras but they downlinked thumbnail images and not full resolution images since they are much easier to downlink (communication is still an issue as Emily explains on her blog). Two images were of full resolution and they are shown in a previous post.
• In the image below from the panorama I posted today you can see two shallow pits near the rover. These are areas where the descent's rockets/skycrane exhausts impinged on the surface. There are 2 on this side of the rover and there must be 2 others on the other side corresponding to the 4 rockets which were running at the time of touchdown.

Shallow pits dug out by the rover's skycrane highlighted by me in white (NASA)

• Those pits expose bedrock which is what the science team wants. Bedrock tells the geological story of the area and the regolith covering above it may be eroded material that most likely came from the distant crater's rim by virtue of the alluvial fans. 
• They also found the tungsten weights that were dumped during landing to help steer the rover. There are six 25kg pure tungsten weights and they found all of them near a mesa south of the landing site (I'll talk about that in another post).

That's all for today. It's now 5:00am in sol 3 at Gale crater and it's going to be another beautifully bleak morning at Curiosity's landing site! Simply smashing!