NASA’s Curiosity rover is preparing to drill at a newly named site called Nazca, a few meters from the Chiu Chiu block, after finishing the Basque Lakes drill campaign, planetary scientist Lucy Lim of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center wrote in a mission blog dated for Earth planning on Friday, Oct. 16, 2026¹.

Chiu Chiu itself was not a good drill candidate, Lim wrote, but a neighboring block looked more promising and became the drive target in Monday’s planning¹. Close-up images after the drive showed the block packed with disc- and needle-shaped lumps like those at Chiu Chiu, and the geology and mineralogy team gave a science go-ahead to start drill preparations at Nazca¹.

One major hypothesis, Lim wrote, is that those shapes formed as crystals, or crystal forms, whose relatively large sizes at Nazca and Chiu Chiu may offer clues about temperature and the availability of salts and fluids when they grew¹. The modern composition may not match the original mineral if later replacement produced pseudomorphs that keep the first crystals’ shape¹.

As the rover prepared a drill preload test, the team planned extra MAHLI work: a Quantitative Relief Model of five overlapping images at slightly different geometries, plus extra frames at highest resolution by doubling focus-mechanism steps, to raise the resolution of three-dimensional models of the crystal forms¹.

ChemCam’s laser instrument was also set to run a depth-profile experiment on a nearby crystal-form-rich target named Toucan, concentrating all 150 laser shots on one spot instead of spreading them across a five-point raster, so the profile would penetrate about five times deeper than a typical 30-shot point¹. Lim wrote that the shots vaporize a small amount of rock into plasma, letting the team sample composition deeper inside the exposed crystal forms¹.

Sources

1. NASACuriosity Blog, Sols 5043-5049: Preparing to Drill at ‘Nazca’1:39 AM

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