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Wow, I'm super lucky! The #Curiosity mission delivers its data to NASA's Planetary Data System in large chunks three times a year (March, August, and December). The most recent release was YESTERDAY. So if I manage to finish my manuscript before the summer, all of the data that the book can cover is already out. It goes through sol 3644, early November last year. Woohoo!

The "mission overview table" is the first thing I download from the #Curiosity Analyst's Notebook, on the "Mission" Tab. It has one line for each sol, with a terse summary of the sol's activities, and importantly, the Earth date corresponding to the sol. I use this table a lot when reading papers -- I can search target names from papers, quickly find the corresponding sol, and follow the links in the table to where I can download the data & read mission manager notes.

The last thing I need to orient myself is a sense of the big phases of the mission. I'd already written down that sol 2302 was when the rover drove off of Vera Rubin Ridge, into the valley of clays that they named Glen Torridon. To figure out big "phase changes" on the mission, I head to the #Curiosity mission newsroom for the press releases. A release dated 19 Oct 2022 says they reached the sulfate unit with a drill site at a place named Canaima. https://mars.nasa.gov/news/9281/curiosity-mars-rover-reaches-long-awaited-salty-region/?site=msl

This week the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference #LPSC2023 is happening near Houston. It's the reason the data release is timed for mid-March, giving #Curiosity team members free rein to talk about the most recent data possible. I searched the abstracts there for the Canaima drill target, and found this one that tells me the mission considers sols 3052 to 3572 to have been spent in the clay-sulfate transition region. (PDF at link) https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2023/pdf/1662.pdf