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Hi, I’m Ashwin Vasavada, the deputy project
scientist for the Curiosity rover and this

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is your Curiosity rover update.

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A lot of what this mission is about is figuring
out the possibility that ancient Mars was

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a habitable environment.

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But we’re also studying the present environment.

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Two instruments that help with that are the
RAD instrument and the REMS instrument.

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The RAD instrument is a radiation assessment
detector.

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It measures the high-energy radiation coming
up from the cosmic rays and the sun.

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That radiation is changed as it goes through
Mars’ atmosphere to where we detect it on

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the surface.

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By measuring the radiation at Mars’ surface
Curiosity is helping prepare for human missions

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to Mars.

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Another instrument that Curiosity has that
measures the modern environment is called

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the rover environmental monitoring station.

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It’s basically our weather station.

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We measure a lot of things including pressure,
and humidity, temperature and wind.

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It’s been seeing little dips in pressure
around noon that seemed like the signature

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of dust devils.

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Only thing is our pictures haven’t turned
up any dust devils.

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Spirit and Opportunity saw lots of dust devils
moving across the horizon.

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Our best guess at what’s going on is that
Curiosity is seeing dust devils go right over

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it, only thing is we’re not seeing the dust
devils.

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So what we think is happening is the same
sorts of vortexes, driven by convection are

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occurring on Mars at the Curiosity’s site
but just not picking up dust.

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Another thing that REMS has been measuring
is winds.

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Turns out we’re in a pretty interesting
place inside of Gale Crater.

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We’re right at the base of a 5-kilometer
high mountain to the south of us and then

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there’s a pretty tall crater rim to the
north of us and we’re sitting in kind of

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a flat depression between the two.

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The winds blow up and down the mountain as
the temperature changes during the day and

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up and down the crater slopes and then along
the depression where we’re at.

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So right now we’re trying to figure out
from the REMS data exactly which parts of

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that wind field we’re measuring.

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With Thanksgiving coming up we’ve been preparing
a few days worth of commands to send up to

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the rover to keep it busy while people here
take some much needed time off.

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The rover will be acquiring a big panorama
of our surroundings while we’re away.