Curiosity Blog, Sols 5016–5021: Fantastic Minerals and How To Detect Them

The item is a 3-minute read from the Mars Science Laboratory mission team, written by Lucy Lim, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, with an Earth planning date of Friday, Sept. 18, 2026, and last updated Sep. 30, 2026. Curiosity surprised the team at the beginning of the week with a change in rock texture: instead of the finely layered bedrock blocks seen in recent sulfate unit workspaces, the rover was suddenly looking at blocks covered—and likely filled—with a jumble of small, disc-shaped lumps. Similar features have appeared earlier in the mission, close to Pahrump Hills in the Murray mudstones, and are sometimes seen in Earth rocks, especially in settings where minerals precipitated from an evaporating fluid.

The disc-like shapes could be created by the growth habits of a specific crystalline mineral known to grow into similar shapes, or they could be bits of a harder rock layer that broke up and collected there. To investigate, the team planned Mastcam and MAHLI imaging for more morphological detail on the jumbled disc blocks ('Yungay,' 'Chiu Chiu'), as well as LIBS ('Puya Raimondii,' 'Liolaemus Tacnae,' 'Pisqu Warkatana') and APXS ('Salar de Vacas') to investigate their composition.

Ongoing long-distance imaging projects were furthered by ChemCam's long-distance remote imager (RMI) and Mastcam mosaics of the buttes on either side of Valle Grande. These 'cutaway'-view images of the strata above the rover will help map sedimentary structures in these upcoming units and understand how these rocks formed and eroded. Views of more recent erosional deposits will also help understand the formation of Valle Grande itself.

In order to identify minerals, Curiosity needs data from the CheMin X-ray diffraction instrument, which means a drill campaign. The rover has driven over a kilometer since its last drill site at Campo Marte, and this will be its first drill above the erosional supersurface. The Wednesday plan's drive brought Curiosity up next to a promising drill workspace a little beyond where the disc-shaped features were seen, which Mastcam imaged as 'Torres del Paine.'

Friday's planning included site characterization with instruments on Curiosity's arm ('Alberta Wild Rose,' 'Moonraker Mountain'), ChemCam LIBS ('Osoyoos'), and Mastcam ('Trincomali Channel,' 'Yellow Lady's Slipper'). The team also selected a specific drill target and planned a very short drive to bring it in range of the arm—first for contact science and then, if all goes well, for the preload test and drill. Lim said she would be back on planning on Monday as Geology and Mineralogy Science Theme Lead for Drill Sol 1 (Triage Contact Science) and the team would see how things go from there.