During December 2020, Curiosity was making her way towards her next area of research on Mars, the “Sands of Forvie,” a large sand field observed on orbital images. This is an area of sand ripples from which NASA would like to collect samples.
Curiosity has a number of different cameras, with a generous range of spatial resolutions, one of which is the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). This camera is at the end of the rover’s robotic arm, and can be placed extremely close to the surface to render astonishingly high-resolution of the grains of sand (similar in size to sand on Earth).
Curiosity’s task is to take pictures of the sand grains; as on Earth, when wind blows sand around, it naturally sorts the sand grains based on size and weight/composition, so by studying the sand in different areas of the ripples (crest and trough), we can learn more about that sorting process, as well as the characteristics of the wind. MAHLI is able to resolve the color, shape and size of the individual grains of sand, some of which appear to be spherical in the latest photos.
