Written by Alex Innanen, Atmospheric Scientist at York University Earth planning date: Friday, Oct. 9, 2026 Happy New Mars Year! We mark the start of a new year on Mars at the beginning of the northern hemisphere spring, or the vernal equinox. We then keep track of the seasons by counting degrees of solar longitude […]

Written by Alex Jones, Ph.D. candidate at Imperial College London Sept. 29, 2026 After spending the last six months exploring “Lac de Charmes,” a region of ancient rock beyond Jezero crater’s western rim, Perseverance has stumbled upon a vast field of light-toned rocks peppering the Martian surface.  Light-colored rocks are a strange sight on Mars, […]

Written by Lucy Thompson, Senior Research Scientist, University of New Brunswick, Canada Earth planning date: Friday, Sept. 25, 2026 Before we landed, the area of Gale crater that we planned to explore was divided up into rectangular parcels with designated names. The names were chosen after small towns associated with significant geological features. Our selected […]

Written by Lucy Lim, Planetary Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Earth planning date: Friday, Sept. 18, 2026 Curiosity surprised us at the beginning of the week with a change in rock texture — instead of the finely layered bedrock blocks we’ve been seeing in our recent sulfate unit workspaces, suddenly we were looking […]

Written by Athanasios (Thanos) Klidaras, Ph.D. candidate at Purdue University  Sept. 21, 2026 After a long hiatus, the Perseverance rover updates page is back. A lot has happened on Mars in the meantime, and with regular updates now resuming, there is plenty to catch up on — Perseverance has been busy. The rover has spent […]

Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, APXS Strategic Planner and Payload Uplink/Downlink Lead, University New Brunswick, NB, Canada Earth planning date: Friday, Sept. 11, 2026 This week we had two planning days (Tuesday and Friday), as Monday was Labor Day in North America, where many of the Curiosity team are based. Labor Day (the first Monday in September) marks […]

Written by Benjamin Tutolo, Professor, University of Calgary Earth planning date: Friday, Sept. 4, 2026 Curiosity has marked several huge milestones (14 years on Mars; 5,000 sols on Mars; 1 kilometer of elevation gain since landing) over the past several weeks, and the team has duly celebrated these remarkable achievements. These celebrations punctuate the rover’s […]

Written by William Farrand, Senior Research Scientist, Space Science Institute Earth planning date: Friday, Aug. 28, 2026 The span of sols spanned by this blog post is noteworthy in several ways. First, Curiosity became a world-class (for Mars at least) mountaineer by passing the 1 kilometer mark of elevation from its landing site on the floor […]

Written by Michelle Minitti, MAHLI Deputy Principal Investigator Earth planning date: Friday, Aug. 21, 2026 After Curiosity’s 14 years on the surface, Mars continues to surprise. Both of our workspaces this week contained features unlike quite anything we have seen in the past — broad, shallow pits (like the one in the image above) dotted […]

By Allison Dries-Padilla, Missions Operations Specialist at Malin Space Science Systems Earth planning date: Friday, Aug. 14, 2026 This week of Curiosity Mars rover operations takes us back to our “regularly scheduled programming.” After taking a slight detour to investigate the “erosional surface” we are back on course to ascend Mount Sharp. As we transition […]