And that’s clearly of great interest to the team in our quest to understand the environmental conditions at the time the rocks formed.

This could be a result of water-rock interactions depositing different minerals in different parts of these rocks. But those features are also very interesting as they often indicate a difference in hardness between different parts of the rocks. Of course, that makes it harder to place our contact instruments than a smooth surface would be. Coming back along memory lane from 2016 to today’s reality, we’ve got a busy two sol plan with some terrain features that keep the engineers well awake without the need of any caffeine!Ībove, you can see parts of the terrain in front of us: we have sand, and we have rocks that were described as ‘poky-sticky’ when describing all the little protruding features. Inspired by watching my colleague doing a great job, I went back through my notebook, and found out that one of the earliest sol plannings I have notes from are sols 14! What a nice coincidence, and looking back at Ken’s blog and my notes, those actually have the same target names all lined up.

I still remember my own training, as I wasn’t part of the initial cohort of GeoSTLs. It’s so amazing that we train the next generation, in year 11 of our mission. I am ‘shadow’ Geo science team lead (GeoSTL) today, helping a new colleague to learn the details of the role.

Own the wind kristen ashley