We talked about this internally on Monday. The persistence of the dust plume for that long is quite unusual.

And it seems like gifs maybe don't work on Bluesky...

Hat tip to @dougellison.bsky.social and the rest of the Engineering Camera team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for helping us make so much science happen with cameras that were designed to just help the rover drive on Mars!

We also use Navcam to look at clouds above us (made of water ice and carbon dioxide ice). Sometimes these clouds cast shadows on the ground. @transmartian.bsky.social and Charissa Campbell have designed special movies to look for these shadows during the cloudier season on Mars.

Every other martian day ("sol") or so, we take a series of images with Navcam to look for dust being lifted off the surface. About ~half the time, these image sequences do see something!

Curiosity's first mission is to search for evidence of past habitable environments, but it's also done a lot of work studying the modern environment and climate! Nearly every instrument onboard the rover has contributed. Recently, most of my work has been with the Navigation Cameras.

agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

This thruster blast ("REST" maneuver) will inform us about Apophis' properties and inform future planetary defense strategies.

We'll study Apophis up close for the next 18 months, trying to understand how this close encounter with Earth might have affected it. We also plan to get very close to the surface at the end of the mission and blast the surface with our thrusters.

In April 2029, Apophis will pass extremely close to Earth and will be visible to the naked eye in Europe and Africa. An asteroid of this size passing this close to Earth is a ~1 in 1,000 year event! APEX will rendezvous with Apophis just after this Earth flyby.

After the OSIRIS-REx mission dropped off the sample from Bennu, we diverted the spacecraft past Earth and began our journey to the near-Earth asteroid Apophis: science.nasa.gov/solar-system...