Sol 809-811 Update on Curiosity from USGS Scientist Ryan Anderson: Contact Science

With the weekend coming up, we are working on a three sol plan for sols 809-811. The main activity for sol 809 is using Curiosity’s arm to brush off the target “Mojave” followed by supporting images with Mastcam and MAHLI and measurements with APXS. On sol 810, Mastcam has two mosaics in the morning, one of which is a re-shoot of the “Pink Cliffs” mosaic from sol 808, but taken in the late afternoon this time so that the low angle of the lighting highlights the textures. In the evening there is another round of contact science. We will brush the dust off of the target “Potatoe” (which, despite what you may think, was not named by Dan Quayle), and do several APXS measurements along with MAHLI images. MAHLI will also take some pictures of the target “Pilot Knob Valley”. On sol 811, science mostly has the day off after a couple of late nights of APXS and MAHLI, and the main activity is an engineering test of the backup computer on Curiosity to make sure that it can be used as the primary computer if that ever becomes necessary.

Dates of planned rover activities described in these reports are subject to change due to a variety of factors related to the Martian environment, communication relays and rover status.