PIA18597: Looking Up the Ramp Holding 'Bonanza King' on Mars


Looking Up the Ramp Holding ‘Bonanza King’ on Mars

Caption:

In this image from NASA's Curiosity Mars rover looking up the ramp at the northeastern end of "Hidden Valley," a pale outcrop including drilling target "Bonanza King" is at the center of the scene.

Curiosity used its Navigation Camera (Navcam) to capture this northward view during the 709th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's work on Mars (Aug. 4, 2014). At that time, Curiosity was on the sand-covered floor of Hidden Valley. Due to unexpectedly high wheel slippage in the sand, the rover team subsequently decided to drive Curiosity out of the valley, up this ramp, to a higher location for examining a possible alternative route.

The ramp area holds several clusters of pale rocks resembling paving stones up to about the size of dinner plates. The team chose one, dubbed Bonanza King, as a candidate for the mission's fourth drilling into a rock to collect a rock-powder sample for onboard analysis. The candidate target is in the patch of bright rocks between parallel wheel tracks in this image. For scale, the distance between the two tracks is about 9 feet (2.7 meters).

A map showing Hidden Valley is at PIA18408 .

Background Info:

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the project's Curiosity rover and the rover's Navcam.

More information about Curiosity is online at http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ .

Cataloging Keywords:

Name Value Additional Values
Target Mars
System
Target Type Planet
Mission Mars Science Laboratory (MSL)
Instrument Host Curiosity Rover
Host Type Rover
Instrument Navigation Camera (Navcam)
Detector
Extra Keywords Grayscale, Map
Acquisition Date
Release Date 2014-08-15
Date in Caption 2014-08-04
Image Credit NASA/JPL-Caltech
Source photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA18597
Identifier PIA18597