Scoping out Yellowknife bay

Curiosity has had a busy week of driving around Yellowknife bay, looking for a nice place drill. That would be yet another mission first and another historical first for interplanetary exploration which, by the way, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary 2 days ago with the flyby of Venus by the American spacecraft Mariner 2. You can check out the Jet Propulsion Lab's awesome video about Mariner 2's adventure. Go check it out here.

Now back to Curiosity, its now sol 129 as of this writing and has traversed more than 600m since landing day. Since leaving that outcrop last week (see this last post) called 'Shaler', Curiosity has ventured deeper into the bay which is actually a depression exposing about a metres worth of Martian layered bedrock. Here's a map of the recent traverses up to sol 123.

Sol 123 map. The inset shows the excursion at Yellowknife bay in detail
(NASA/JPL/UA)

Right now the rover is parked near a ledge to the North of it's sol 123 position which you can see in the map as a dark, straight line north of the area demarcated by the white box. The ledge is pretty flat and that is one of the factors the team has in mind for a place to drill. It also has to be pretty stable and not collapse under the weight and force of the driller itself. Some information on the unmanned space flight forum (see the sites list to your right for a link to the forum) indicates that we won't be seeing any drilling until after the holidays and and the whole thing may take many more than a month to complete. We can't rush history I guess!

Here is a navigation mosaic showing the view near the Ledge as I'll call it for now:

Sol 127 navigation view of the Ledge (NASA/JPL/mosaic by me)

The mosaic shows only part the ledge, its north-eastern part that is. The rest of it can be seen in this 360 degree panorama shot by Curiosity when it was farther away on sol 125:

Sol 125 navigation panorama. The Ledge is the dark line to the right in the distance where a mound can
be seen (NASA/JPL/panorama by me)

Its always nice to correlate what you see on the ground with high-resolution maps. Sort of adds more depth and regional context to the scene. A colour mosaic was also shot of the future sol 127 site on sol 125:

Sol 125 colour mosaic with the 34mm focal length (left eye) lens (NASA/JPL/MSSS/mosaic by me)

Good times! Now here, dear readers, I stop. But I'm leaving you with a surprise this time seeing that the holiday season is almost upon us and I'm feeling jovial myself. While on Google + I found a referral to a web-series (like a TV series except its on the web) that is absolutely brilliant! For all you hard sci-fi lovers, H+: the Digital series is the series for you. Checkout the first episode here. Hurry up, you've got 42 episodes to catch up with (each episode is less than 10 minutes long)! Plus don't forget to follow me on Google + while you're at it by clicking the 'add to circle' button in the upper right column of this page.