Curiosity in Isolation at Edinburgh and Glasgow

We have just snapped the Curiosity Rover with the HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.  Each of those pixels is  about 25 cm, so we can pick out the rover quite nicely in the centre of field of view. We have just completed a drill at a site we named Edinburgh and next week, when I am on operations duty, we will do a another drill hole at a locality we call Glasgow. Because of the lockdown even more of the rover operations is being done by staff working from home than usual. But after 8 terrestrial years, >3 martian years and 25 drill holes all is still working pretty well.

The HiRISE image covers a region called Greenheugh pediment, part of the lower slopes of Mount Sharp which we will be slowly driving up over the next 3 years of an extended mission. In this next part of the mission we expect to find a different sort of ancient environment to the earlier parts of the mission, with lots of sulphate minerals.