Monday, 5 October 2026

Curiosity Blog, Sols 5022-5028: Cashing in at Cache Creek

3 min read

Curiosity Blog, Sols 5022-5028: Cashing in at Cache Creek

A close-up, overhead view of reddish-brown Martian soil taken by the Curiosity rover. In the center is a distinct, circular area where the top layer of rough soil has been smoothed or brushed away, leaving faint concentric ring marks. A small, elongated rock fragment is embedded in the very center of this circular patch. The brushed circle contrasts with the surrounding undisturbed surface, which is covered in loose, coarse sand and small, crumbly pebbles.

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image of the “Basque Lakes” drill site after the pre-load test, using its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), a close-up camera located on the turret at the end of the rover’s robotic arm. Curiosity acquired the image on Sept. 23, 2026 — Sol 5023, or Martian day 5,023 of the Mars Science Laboratory Mission — at 03:56:10 UTC.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Written by Lucy Thompson, Senior Research Scientist, University of New Brunswick, Canada

Earth planning date: Friday, Sept. 25, 2026

Before we landed, the area of Gale crater that we planned to explore was divided up into rectangular parcels with designated names. The names were chosen after small towns associated with significant geological features. Our selected targets (mesas, bedrock, soil, boulders, etc.) within those quads were then given unofficial names based on the theme of the quad. See the link here for more details on naming conventions on Mars. Curiosity has long since climbed above the quads that were selected before landing, and before her 14-year, 38-kilometer (24.6-mile) trek, which included more than 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) of elevation gain.

We recently entered the new Cache Creek quad, named after an area of geological diversity in British Columbia, Canada. The area in Canada includes exposures of oceanic crust, marine sediments, volcanic rocks, and glacial deposits, as well as being home to lakes with unusual chemistry that may be analogous to lakes that once existed on Mars. It also lies at the southern end of the 1860s Gold Rush Trail, where miners and prospectors flocked to this part of British Columbia in search of riches. This week we successfully drilled into our 48th rock target in Gale crater (“Basque Lakes”), from the Cache Creek quad. While we may not literally strike gold, we are all eagerly anticipating the outcome of the CheMin X-ray diffraction analysis of our drilled sample that will take place in this weekend plan. What gold mine of minerals will the sample contain? What can they tell us about the depositional and alteration history of this rock exposure — might there be similar minerals present as those associated with some of the lakes in the Cache Creek area of British Columbia?

As an APXS uplink lead and strategic planner this week I helped to plan the triage contact science on the potential Basque Lakes drill target and communicate the results to the rest of the team. We placed APXS in contact with the rock target to measure its chemistry, and the MAHLI camera to within 1 centimeter (about 0.4 inches) to examine in detail the textures. ChemCam also fired its laser at the Basque Lakes drill target to further characterize composition. MAHLI also imaged the target after the engineers checked the stability of the rock with a pre-load test. The results from all these activities helped to determine whether to proceed with drilling.

Despite significant power constraints associated with drilling and the accompanying analyses, as well as an aging rover, we were also able to plan additional activities. Mastcam imaged the surrounding terrain to provide context for our new drill sample. ChemCam was able to analyze the chemistry of another nearby bedrock target, “Peace River,” and use its imaging and passive spectroscopic capabilities to look at the new drill hole and surrounding tailings. ChemCam remote imaging was also used to examine an interesting-looking deposit of jumbled blocks at the base of a nearby butte, “Cordillera.”

We also utilized Navcam and Mastcam imaging in the continued monitoring of environmental and atmospheric conditions in Gale crater.

Analysis of the Basque Lakes drill sample should continue next week with delivery of material to SAM, which will reveal more nuggets of information regarding the history of this particular rock sample. Curiosity will likely be at this location for another week, before we dump the sample and drive away to continue our exploration of Mount Sharp and Gale crater.

Want to read more posts from the Curiosity team?

Visit Mission Updates
Want to learn more about Curiosity’s science instruments?

Visit the Science Instruments page

A rover sits on the hilly, orange Martian surface beneath a flat grey sky, surrounded by chunks of rock.

NASA’s Curiosity rover at the base of Mount Sharp

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

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Oct 04, 2026

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Mapping the Gaps in NASA’s Return to the Moon, featuring Richard Spolzino

“I want to be able to look at a rocket launch and say, ‘I touched a piece of this.’”

That’s how Richard Spolzino describes the thing he’s chasing. Not a title, not a specific mission, not even NASA itself, just the ability to point at something real and know his work made it possible. At NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, Spolzino works within Moon Base’s mission architecture and systems interoperability effort, helping identify what NASA still doesn’t know about the Moon and Mars, and making sure that missing information gets found before it becomes a problem.

Official NASA portrait of Richard Spolzino, aerospace engineer, in front of an American flag backdrop

Aerospace engineer Richard Spolzino

Credit: NASA

“For me, it kept coming back to where can I have the most impact? Where can my work touch the most things?“

From History to Aerospace

Spolzino didn’t set out to end up here.

He started college as a history major. He switched to a physics track at Santa Clara University, thinking he’d end up in astrophysics. A research stint at Lick Observatory studying interstellar dust polarization taught him two things: the work was fascinating and, “I don’t think the staying-up-all-night thing is for me,” he says.

Richard Spolzino stands with his research adviser and a fellow grad student on an outdoor walkway at Lick Observatory, hills visible in the distance.

Spolzino (on right) at Lick Observatory with his physics research adviser Dr. Kristin Kulas (left, front) and then-grad student Dr. Ilija Medan (back).

Credit: Richard Spolzino

After graduation, he started down the path of Officer Candidate School in the Navy, hoping to fly jets. It didn’t pan out, and that detour led him to a graduate program at the University of Houston, combining aerospace engineering and space architecture — not the habitat-design kind of architecture people usually picture, but the systems-level kind, where a lunar oxygen plant connects to the rovers that feed it, which connect to the processor, which connects to the user drawing down the resource. “I was always more attracted to how all the pieces work together than to any single piece,” he says.

Chasing Impact

Ask Spolzino if he dreamed of working at NASA, and the honest answer is no.

“I really admire people who’ve had that drive their whole life,” he says. “For me, it kept coming back to where can I have the most impact? Where can my work touch the most things?” A University of Houston program with strong ties to Johnson Space Center put NASA on his radar alongside other options in industry and government. What ultimately drew him in wasn’t the agency’s name, it was the scope of the problems and the direct line he saw to senior decision-makers shaping the return to the Moon.

That’s also, he adds, exactly why NASA is worth considering for people who aren’t sure it’s their calling yet. The culture rewards people willing to take on more than their assigned lane and gives early-career employees room to grow into problems bigger than their job description, something he says he might not have found moving up more slowly in industry.

Documenting the Missing Piece

Spolzino’s day-to-day work centers on a deceptively simple idea: the data gap.

“You can think of it as synonymous with a knowledge gap,” he explains. “It’s a way of documenting the thing we don’t know.” Take the geotechnical properties of lunar regolith — moon dust, essentially, but the specifics matter enormously. How much weight can it bear? What’s its shear strength? Answering those questions shapes everything from how far a rover can safely drive to whether a habitat’s foundation will hold.

A data gap lays that out formally: what we don’t know, why it matters, what we currently have that falls short, and, critically, a specific measurable target industry and international partners can aim for. “Once we’ve identified what’s missing,” he says, “our partners can look at that list and see exactly where their contribution would be valuable.”

His team started with roughly 25 published data gaps last year. They’re on track for 60 by the end of this year.

From Concept to Cargo

The concept only matters if it changes decisions, and Spolzino cites two recent examples where it did.

When the lunar lander company now known as Voyager (formerly Astrobotic) was preparing its upcoming Griffin-1 mission, the team didn’t help them figure out what instruments to fly since that was already locked in. Instead, Spolzino’s team helped them prioritize what data gets sent home first through a communication pipeline that can’t carry everything at once. “How do you prioritize all the things you say you want, and what gets sent back through that constrained pipeline?” he asks.

Artist's rendering of Astrobotic's Griffin Mission One lunar lander on the Moon's surface, deploying the FLIP rover, against a starry black sky

Artist’s rendering of Astrobotic’s Griffin Mission One lunar lander delivering the FLIP rover to the lunar surface. The mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative supporting future lunar exploration and technology demonstrations.

Credit: Astrobiotic

On the other side of the pipeline, Spolzino has spent recent months evaluating proposed instruments (spectrometers, sample collection tools, tech demonstrations) against the published data gaps to help leadership decide what’s worth flying. Some proposals map cleanly onto a documented need. Others don’t align with anything NASA has said it’s missing. “That’s used to filter down what gets pushed forward as a real candidate,” he says. Industry partners have taken notice, and leadership now asks companies pitching new instruments to show how their proposal maps to a data gap before the conversation goes any further.

Figuring It Out Takes Work

Spolzino admits the job reshaped an assumption he carried out of graduate school — that NASA had everything figured out, and that the agency’s reputation meant every question already had an answer somewhere inside its walls.

Three years in, he sees it differently. “Keeping the kind of reputation NASA has takes constant, deliberate work,” he says. “Everyone’s genuinely trying to pull in the right direction, but it’s not automatic.” That realization was clarifying for him. The agency runs on people figuring things out in real time, which means there’s room for someone early in their career to contribute meaningfully, rather than just executing someone else’s playbook.

His advice to students considering NASA is practical, not sentimental: Grades matter less than people think. “The projects you work on, and the results of that work, are what people look at first,” he says. His advice is to join clubs, take on real projects, and build something. “It’s less about credentials and more about giving yourself something to show up with.”

On Spolzino’s Sci-Fi Shelf

The Three-Body Problem trilogy by Liu Cixin

Spolzino was already deep into the second book, The Dark Forest, on a flight from New York to Houston when the plane was diverted to San Antonio. “I did not care that I was three or four hours late,” he says. “I had that book, and I was just devouring it.”

Kerbal Space Program

An older game, but a formative one. Spolzino credits it with cementing his interest in space before college even started. “It’s a space program simulator where you build rockets piece by piece, and the physics are simplified but accurate enough that you’re doing a lot of the same math as an actual mission design tool,” he says. “That really had a huge impact on me figuring out that space was the thing I wanted to do.”

Part of the Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate at NASA’s Langley Research Center.
Learn more about our work by visiting our website.

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Sunday, 4 October 2026

APOD: 2026 October 4 – Supernumerary Rainbows over New Jersey

APOD

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

The top of a house is shown beneath a dark and cloudy sky. Many rainbow stripes are seen above the house.

Supernumerary Rainbows over New Jersey

Explanation: Yes, but can your rainbow do this? After the remnants of Hurricane Florence passed over the Jersey Shore, New Jersey, USA in 2018, the Sun came out in one direction but something quite unusual appeared in the opposite direction: a hall of rainbows. Over the course of the next half hour, to the delight of the photographer and his daughter, vibrant supernumerary rainbows faded in and out, with at least five captured in this featured single shot. Supernumerary rainbows only form when falling water droplets are all nearly the same size and typically less than a millimeter across. Then, sunlight will not only reflect from inside the raindrops, but interfere, a wave phenomenon similar to ripples on a pond when a stone is thrown in. In fact, supernumerary rainbows can only be explained with waves, and their noted existence in the early 1800s was considered early evidence of light’s wave nature.

Your Sky Surprise: What picture did APOD feature on your birthday? (post 1995)
Tomorrow’s picture: open space

Date	October 4, 2026
Credit & Copyright	John Entwistle
Authors & editors:	Robert Nemiroff, Jerry Bonnell, Cecilia Chirenti, Keighley Rockcliffe
A service of:	ASD at NASA / GSFC, NASA Science Activation & Michigan Tech. U.

Yesterday’s Image

APOD: 2026 October 3 – Selfie at Vera Rubin Ridge

Tomorrow’s Image

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Saturday, 3 October 2026

APOD: 2026 October 3 – Selfie at Vera Rubin Ridge

APOD

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

Fisheye wide-angle image of the Curiosity rover on Mars.

Selfie at Vera Rubin Ridge

Explanation: On sol 1943 of its journey of exploration across the surface of Mars, the Curiosity Rover recorded this selfie at the south rim of Vera Rubin Ridge. Of course a sol is a Martian solar day, about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day. Curiosity’s sol 1943 corresponds to Earth date January 23, 2018. Also composed as an interactive 360 degree VR, the mosaicked panorama combines 61 exposures taken by the small car-sized rover’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). Frames containing the imager’s arm have been edited out while the extended background used was taken by the rover’s Mastcam on sol 1903. At the top of the rover’s mast, sitting above the Mastcam, the laser-firing ChemCam housing blocks out the distant, 5 kilometer high peak of Mount Sharp. On Earth date August 26, 2026, Curiosity marked an total elevation gain of 1 kilometer in its trek from the floor of Gale Crater up the slope of Mount Sharp.

APOD’s email for image submissions has changed. Please see: APOD Submissions.
Tomorrow’s picture: Sunday’s Childe

Date	October 3, 2026
Credit:	Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS – Panorama: Andrew Bodrov
Authors & editors:	Jerry Bonnell, Cecilia Chirenti, Robert Nemiroff, Keighley Rockcliffe
A service of:	ASD at NASA / GSFC, NASA Science Activation & Michigan Tech. U.

Yesterday’s Image

APOD: 2026 October 2 – The Complete Sharpless Catalog: 313 Nebulas

Tomorrow’s Image

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NASA’s DAVINCI Probe Can Stand the Heat

An engineering model of the DAVINCI descent probe.

An engineering model of NASA’s DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) descent probe passed a key test that ran from Aug. 28 to Sept. 10, showing it can survive the extreme temperatures of Venus.

NASA/Mike Guinto

The engineering development unit for NASA’s DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) probe is photographed prior to a major thermal evaluation.

The DAVINCI team put the yoga ball-sized vessel into a ceramic-lined chamber with heat-scorched walls and ratcheted up the temperature to 869 F, or 465 C, over the course of about an hour — the same pace the probe will heat up during its descent to the surface of Venus.

DAVINCI will study the origin, evolution, and present state of Venus in unprecedented detail to help determine whether it was once wet and habitable, like Earth.

Friday, 2 October 2026

Rains Swamp the Gandak River

September 20, 2026

September 29, 2026

A false-color satellite image shows the Gandak River before the flooding on September 20, 2026.

NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

A false-color satellite image shows the same area during the flooding on September 29, 2026. The river appears much wider.

NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

A false-color satellite image shows the Gandak River before the flooding on September 20, 2026.

NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

A false-color satellite image shows the same area during the flooding on September 29, 2026. The river appears much wider.

NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin

September 20, 2026

September 29, 2026

Storms drenched Nepal’s mountainous Lumbini and Gandaki provinces with waves of torrential rain between September 24 and 27. The deluge, arriving late in the monsoon season, triggered landslides and pushed the Gandak River, also called the Narayani, to record levels in both Nepal and India.

With runoff streaming into the braided river system, water overtopped and breached embankments in several areas, inundating farmland and settlements along the river for hundreds of kilometers. As authorities assessed the full extent of the damage, news reports indicated that flooding and landslides had affected hundreds of villages and displaced thousands of people.

Images captured by MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites on September 20, 2026 (left), and September 29, 2026 (right), show the extent of the flooding. The false-color images combine observations of infrared and visible light (MODIS bands 7-2-1) to make it easier to distinguish the water. Floodwater appears blue; vegetation is bright green; clouds are light blue.

In many areas, water inundated seasonal fields on low-lying deposits of sand and silt within the river’s channel, called diara, where flooding is expected. However, it also breached embankments and flooded several settled areas, including parts of Bagaha, Areraj, and Fulia Khand.

Data from Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology indicated that a gauge in Devghāṭ reached as high as 11.94 meters on September 27, the highest since measurements began there in the 1960s. According to news reports, gauges in India along the Gandak that set new high-water marks included Bagaha, Dumariaghat, Rewaghat, and Lalganj.

NASA has several tools and datasets available for tracking rainfall and flooding. Among them are Worldview, FLOOD Viewer, and the GPM IMERG Global Viewer.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Adam Voiland.

Downloads

September 20, 2026

JPEG (1.22 MB)

September 29, 2026

JPEG (1.98 MB)

References & Resources

DD India (2026, September 29) Gandak River reaches record 91.25 metres at Bagaha gauge in Bihar. Accessed October 1, 2026.
Dialogue Earth (2018, October 1) The silt farmers of the Gandak river. Accessed October 1, 2026.
The Hindu (2026, September 30) Distress and panic in Bihar’s West Champaran district as Gandak river floods. Accessed October 1, 2026.
The Kathmandu Post (2026, September 27) Relentless rain triggers floods, landslides across Nepal. Accessed October 1, 2026.
The Kathmandu Post (2026, September 26) Incessant rains trigger widespread flooding in Tarai, disrupt key highway links across Nepal. Accessed October 1, 2026.
National Herald (2026, September 27) Narayani river crosses danger level in Nepal, posing risk along Gandak. Accessed October 1, 2026.
Nepal Red Cross (2026, September 27) Monsoon Update. Accessed October 1, 2026.
News on Air (2026, September 30) Flood Situation Worsens In North Bihar Due To Continuous Rainfall In Nepal; Over 200 Villages Affected. Accessed October 1, 2026.
Online Khabar (2026, September 27) Narayani River reaches record water level of 11.94 metres. Accessed October 1, 2026.
The Times of India (2026, October 1) Gandak breaches two more bunds in Saran, Muzaffarpur, IAF joins relief operations. Accessed October 1, 2026.
The Print (2026, September 30) Gandak sets new flood-level records at four gauge sites in Bihar. Accessed October 1, 2026.

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Monday, 5 October 2026