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Curiosity Blog, Sols 4788-4797: Welcome Back from Conjunction

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4788-4797: Welcome Back from Conjunction

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Curiosity Blog, Sols 4788-4797: Welcome Back from Conjunction

An overhead, grayscale photo of the Martian surface shows a uniformly medium gray, flat, rocky area, where a few wide, shallow cracks on the surface are filled with small rocks. A drill hole, fully shadowed so you can’t see its depth, is in the ground near the center of the frame.

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Mast Camera (Mastcam); it shows the “Nevado Sajama” drill site from November, right next to the location of this weekend’s drill. The new drill site will be to the upper left of the existing hole. Curiosity captured the image on Jan. 25, 2026 — Sol 4789, or Martian day 4,789 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 19:20:37 UTC.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Written by Alex Innanen, Atmospheric Scientist at York University, Toronto

Earth planning date: Friday, Jan. 30, 2026

Mars has emerged from its holiday behind the Sun, and we here on Earth have been able to reconnect with Curiosity and get back to work on Mars. Our first planning day last Friday gave Curiosity a full weekend of activities, which wrapped up with getting us ready for our next drill. We checked out a broken white rock in the workspace with APXS, MAHLI, and ChemCam’s laser spectrometer and finished up imaging a sandy area we’ve kept an eye on during conjunction to see if we could catch any wind motion, before taking a small drive to our drill location about 2 meters away (about 6 feet).

This location may look familiar — our next drill will be only a few centimeters away from “Nevado Sajama,” which we drilled back in November. The reason we’ve returned here is to do a rare SAM experiment the instrument’s last container of tetramethylammonium hydroxide (or TMAH, for less of a mouthful). TMAH is a chemical that we can mix with our sample from Nevado Sajama to help identify any organic molecules. SAM had only two containers of TMAH (the first of which we used almost six years ago, so we want to be very certain that everything will go well with this experiment. As a result, we did a rehearsal of the handoff of the sample to SAM in Wednesday’s plan, before we drill this weekend.

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