It has been a frustrating week for the Curiosity science and engineering teams. While we have a better understanding of how to recover the minor Remote Sensing Mast (RSM) issue that we encountered at the beginning of last week, we’ll need to try again before we can drive away. We are hopeful and quietly confident that perseverance will pay off and that we gain back full use of the RSM in this plan.
Although our weekend remote sensing activities did not execute, Curiosity collected more compositional and close-up imaging data of these interesting, resistant capping rocks with APXS and MAHLI. The APXS also analyzed the atmosphere, looking for seasonal changes in the Ar concentration, as well looking at its calibration target.
Because of the continued RSM problems we focused on recovering as many of the mast activities as possible during this single sol plan before hopefully driving away. ChemCam will analyze the chemistry of the “Cleveland” bedrock target. We will document the previous CCAM/APXS targets; “Braco,” “Burn Mouth,” “Donkey Trail,” and “Venlaw” targets with Mastcam. Mastcam will also image a block that Curiosity appears to have driven over and broken, “Bowder Stone” to look for fresh surfaces and textures.
Further afield, we will acquire a ChemCam RMI mosaics of the Gediz Valles ridge and Mastcam mosaics of ridges on the pediment, and the resistant rounded exposure, “Hartle Loup,” that we are currently investigating.
The environmental scientists planned several observations to continue monitoring changes in atmospheric conditions. These included: a Navcam dust devil survey, dust devil movie, a line of sight image and a sky flats observation; and a Mastcam basic tau observation. After our hopefully successful drive, we will image the terrain beneath the rover wheels with MARDI. Standard REMS, DAN and RAD activities round out this plan.
Sols 3432-3434: Let’s Try That One More Time…
by Abigail Fraeman | Planetary Geologist – JPL
Pasadena CA (JPL) Apr 04 – Curiosity’s stationary week on Mars continued because we weren’t able to uplink Wednesday’s plan. Fortunately, we are prepared for events like these. Our intrepid rover spent Thursday and Friday in “runout sols,” a term that describes the extra sols that are mostly empty of activity which we add to the end of every plan just in case we aren’t able to uplink new instructions.
Since we’d already discussed the observations we’d like to get at this location, the science team was in pretty good shape coming into planning this morning. Even though we want to simply repeat most of the activities we had planned to do on Wednesday, we still need to make a whole new plan because the orbiters we use to relay our data pass overhead at different times, and we’re also coming into the plan at a different state of charge than we planned on Wednesday. And of course – we have a three sol plan to make today instead of the two sol plan we made on Wednesday!
For our re-do plan, we’re going to try again to take a ChemCam observation of targets “Baa” and “Lewisian” described in Wednesday’s blog, as well as a new target “Cleveland,” which is a spot on a nearby rock that has interesting sedimentary structures.
We’ll also snap some RMI mosaics of Gediz Vallis Ridge and collect Mastcam observation of the ChemCam targets along with the same mosaics we’d planned for Wednesday.
MAHLI and APXS will get in on the science action with observations of “Blue Anchor,” and an additional MAHLI observation of “Baa.” (A “rinse and repeat” of what was planned Wednesday in the words of today’s APXS strategic planner Lucy Thompson.) Environmental monitoring and a drive round out the plan.
Related Links
Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory
Mars News and Information at MarsDaily.com
Lunar Dreams and more
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Out Like a Lamb for Sols 3430-3431
Pasadena CA (JPL) Apr 01, 2022
The rover engineers better understand the minor issue that occurred after our weekend activities. While we’re still in the same location, they can fix the issue in this plan. Our arm activities in the previous plan executed successfully. Today we focused on recovering the mast activities, as well as getting bonus, additional contact science at this location before driving.
The pediment capping rocks that we are currently investigating have revealed fascinating and varied textures and chemistry, wh … read more