Curiosity recharges before resuming Nazca drilling
2 min readNASA said Curiosity spent 3 sols recharging before returning to normal drilling activities at the Nazca target. The Earth planning date was Friday, Oct. 30, 2026. The plan covered sols 5060, 5061, and 5062. The rover team intentionally limited the plan because activities needed to finish the drilling campaign were power-hungry.
Curiosity had already drilled the hole and characterized its tailings with ChemCam. It had also made several sample dropoffs to SAM and CheMin inside the rover. Remaining work included another dropoff to SAM for a different kind of analysis and drilling cleanup activities. One cleanup task is called RAGE, meaning Rotate to Agitate for Granule Expulsion. It shakes the drill to expel remaining sample.
Over the 3 sols, Curiosity conducted remote science with ChemCam active and Remote Micro-Imager mosaics on Titicaca, Pampas, and Salta. The rover also collected Mastcam images of its calibration target and drill target, conducted Navcam dust devil studies and Mastcam tau observations, and took twilight images. Each sol included a standard morning science block.
On 5061, Curiosity tested parallelism during a downlink communications window. The rover team said running two activities at the same time can reduce power use because the rover stays awake for less time. The test ran CheMin Get Data at the same time as Curiosity sent data to one of its orbiters. CheMin Get Data transfers science data from the instrument to the flight computers and was described as a high CPU activity. The rover team had vetted the pair in advance for safety. The test seemed to go well, but the engineering team still needed to analyze the results.
NASA said Curiosity would shake the drill during RAGE to get remaining sample out of it. The team also planned to continue documenting the drill hole and tailings through imaging. The report said the campaign was in progress and that Curiosity would return to normal drilling activities after the recharging sols. It was written by Remington Free, Operations Systems Engineer, NASA-JPL, and published Tuesday 10 November 2026.
