NASA Curiosity Blog: Sols 5056-5062 Charging Back Up

Curiosity Blog, Sols 5056-5062: Charging Back Up!

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity completed a three-sol plan covering Sols 5060, 5061, and 5062, according to a blog post by Remington Free, Operations Systems Engineer at NASA-JPL. The Earth planning date was Friday, Oct. 30, 2026. The post was published on Nov. 9, 2026.

The rover is in the middle of a drilling campaign on a target called “Nazca.” The team has already drilled the hole, characterized the tailings from the drill hole with ChemCam, and completed several sample dropoffs to the SAM and CheMin instruments within the rover. Remaining campaign activities include another dropoff to SAM for a different kind of analysis and drilling cleanup activities.

One cleanup activity is called “RAGE” (Rotate to Agitate for Granule Expulsion), where the team shakes the drill to remove any remaining sample. The team also plans extensive imaging to document the drill hole and tailings.

Because these activities are power-hungry, the three-sol plan purposefully included few activities to allow for power-positive sols before returning to drilling. Each sol had a standard morning science block, with an extra activity on Sol 5061.

Remote science during the three sols included ChemCam active observations and Remote Micro-Imager mosaics on targets named “Titicaca,” “Pampas,” and “Salta.” The team also conducted Mastcam imaging of the calibration target and the drill target, several Navcam dust devil studies, Mastcam tau observations, and twilight imaging.

On Sol 5061, the team conducted a brand-new engineering activity to test parallelism over one of the rover’s downlink communications windows. As the rover gets older and power output slowly decreases over the mission, the team is looking for ways to execute activities with less power use. One strategy is parallelism—having two activities execute at the same time saves power because the rover is awake for less time. Pairs of activities must be vetted ahead of time to ensure they are safe to run together.

The test involved running the CheMin “Get Data” activity at the same time as sending data to one of the rover’s orbiters. CheMin Get Data is a high CPU activity that transfers science data from the instrument to the flight computers. The test seems to have gone well, but the team will wait to hear back from the engineering team to analyze the results.

Why it matters

• The three-sol plan was designed to be power positive before resuming the Nazca drilling campaign.
• The team tested parallel operations on Sol 5061 to reduce power use as the rover ages.
• Remote science included observations of targets named “Titicaca,” “Pampas,” and “Salta.”

Sources

• science.nasa.gov: Curiosity Blog, Sols 5056-5062: Charging Back Up! - NASA Science

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