Dust Dynamics in Gale Crater Observed Using the Line‐Of‐Sight Extinction Through 3,663 Sols of the Mars Science Laboratory Mission
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Curiosity Rover has been exploring the Gale Crater using the on‐board Navigation Camera to monitor the line‐of‐sight (LOS) dust extinction within the crater. Previous studies of the line‐of‐sight extinction have shown an annual trend where a minimum in extinction occurs around L s = 100° and a maximum occurs around L s = 300°. However, past studies have been constrained to images acquired only between 10:00 and 14:00 local time, limiting our understanding of the variation of dust extinction in Gale Crater throughout the day. Here, using a method that corrects for variable lighting geometry, we reanalyze the line‐of‐sight images captured throughout the mission to include images acquired in the early morning and late afternoon. Additionally, we update the line‐of‐sight record to include over 1,000 additional sols of the mission through sol 3,663, which updates our record of extinction in Gale to the end of Mars Year 36—a period of almost 5.5 Mars Years. Using images taken throughout the sol, we examine the diurnal trend in dust extinction, where a maximum is seen around solar noon. This diurnal trend is observed throughout the year, with a larger diurnal variation observed during the southern summer. Additionally, the geographic homogeneity in dust loading is quantified, with higher dust loading observed in the western portion of the line‐of‐sight images, corresponding with the north‐western portion of the crater rim. These observations suggest that dust lifting from the surface and vertical mixing are factors in the diurnal, seasonal, and geographic dynamics observed in the extinctions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".