3 min readMars Science Laboratory Mission Team MembersJul 23, 2026 Article
Written by Lucy Thompson, Senior Research Scientist, University of New Brunswick, Canada
Earth planning date: Friday, July 27, 2026
As an APXS uplink lead and strategic planner, I have the privilege of working with the rover engineers most days that I am on operations. The APXS instrument measures the chemistry of rocks, unconsolidated materials and the atmosphere, and is situated on the end of Curiosity’s robotic arm. This means that any target of interest that we wish to analyze has to be safe to deploy the arm, APXS, and MAHLI (the closeup imager) to. We therefore rely on the rover engineers for their assessment and to sequence the arm moves to place us safely on the targets. Recently, our workspaces have been dusty with varied relief, but the rover engineers have successfully found areas that they have been able to brush and deploy APXS and MAHLI. This week was no exception, despite some of our workspaces appearing less than ideal upon initial observation. The team managed to find rock targets of interest (x5), which the rover engineers were able to safely place the arm on and brush so that we could analyze them with APXS and MAHLI. This ensures that we acquire high-quality compositional data and images as we continue our ascent of Mount Sharp, through rock layers of varying tone and texture, tracking potential changes in chemistry, and the depositional and alteration environment.
