occasionally on curiosity ops we're treated to sweeping vistas. we'll often see outcrops from a distance, sadly noting that the rover doesn't have the time or ability to check them out up close. fortunately, we do have the next best thing: the chemcam remote microimager (or rmi for short). chemcam is the instrument that shoots rocks with lasers - it does so to turn a small bit of rock into a cloud of vapor. that vapor has emission lines from the various elements in the rock, allowing us to sample the composition of any rock within a few meters of the rover. that vapor cloud is tiny, and chemcam has a 110 mm telescope to collect the light to pass on to its internal spectrometer. the upshot is when the laser isn't using the telescope, we can point it at the landscape around us. this is incredibly useful, because the resolution of the telescope allows us to see anything within 12 kilometers of the rover at higher resolution than we can get from orbital imaging.
during science planning last weekend i requested that we point it downslope to a butte about 500 m away. this butte outcrops along the northern edge of a large fan-shaped deposit, the greenheugh pediment. curiosity brought in 2022 working down on the pediment, but we never had a good view of this particular rock exposure. a bonus is that in the background, we can see another butte. this butte, named "western butte" was visited by curiosity all the way back in 2019. we're now about 2000 m from the butte as the martian crow flies - impressive to see how far we've come and how quickly things recede in the rearview mirror.