13th February 2015 Sol 897

Now that we have finished drilling and analysing by APXS and ChemCam the Mojave2 drill tailings at Pahrump we have driven on or ‘bumped’ as we say to another target with a different composition determined on an earlier pass around Pahrump.

The documentation of the Curiosity tools continues .  This MastCam image shows how the sieve and scoop have still got a small amount of the Mojave2 drill powder within them.  Sieving the drilled material makes sure no large lumps get into the XRD CheMin or mass spectrometer SAM.  The scoop and sieve close together, then are rotated and the tailings fall through the sieve by gravity before being dropped into the solid inlets on the main body of the rover.