Unfortunately, our weekend drive stalled, so this morning we found ourselves still at Friday’s workspace. Fortunately, it was an understood issue… and this was a good place to spend some extra time and fill our science glass with amazing data!
This workspace (“Hartle Loup”) has examples of different textures, bands of “vuggy” (the little holes or pits that you can see in the above image) material and smoother material. On Friday, APXS and MAHLI had to make some hard choices between all our desired targets, and we opted to characterize some “vuggy” targets but were unable to also get the “smooth” targets.
So, in a sense, the drive stall worked in our favour, allowing us to get three “smooth” targets here. APXS and MAHLI will investigate “Broadfell” and a brushed target “Venlaw,” whilst ChemCam will use LIBS to target “Cleveland”.
Mastcam will take multispectral imagery (a further tool to help understand composition, often used for brushed targets) of Venlaw and were able to add a bonus multispectral image of the weekend DRT target (“Donkey Trail”) which we didn’t have time for on Friday.
MAHLI took the opportunity to slip in a six image mosaic (series of overlapping images) looking at the interaction between the two textures. ChemCam will also examine “Bowder Stone,” a bedrock target that was broken up by the wheels last week.
Mastcam has, as always, a very busy plan. They will document the ChemCam targets from this plan, recover an image from the weekend on “Burn Mouth” which didn’t complete and get some more images of the pediment landscape.
Mastcam will also aid the environmental group (ENV) in monitoring dust concentrations in the air, obtaining a crater rim extinction observation and a basic “tau” measurement, both of which are used to determine how much dust is the atmosphere.
Once we finish getting all this lovely bonus science at Hartle Loup, we will continue on our way, following the same drive path as we had planned to take over the weekend.
Related Links
Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory
Mars News and Information at MarsDaily.com
Lunar Dreams and more
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Sols 3422-3423 Studying the Silly Place
Pasadena CA (JPL) Mar 25, 2022
No, Silly Place hasn’t become a new place name, but I totally agree with Ryan, who was yesterday’s blogger, that this is not our usual terrain. Would I want to go for a hike there, if I could? Sure, but very carefully, because this isn’t a place to risk a fall. Too many pointy rocks, so, silly place certainly fits. The MAHLI image above is probably somewhere in the pile of rocks you saw under the turret in yesterday’s image. From up close, you can admire the nature of those rocks: broken up with sharp e … read more