Sols 1148-1152: Driving and Contact Science
30 October 2015Apologies for the lack of an update on Wednesday this week! Lauren and I were both in a training class, and Ken was traveling so none of us were able to post here. That means that today’s post covers five sols of planning! The sol 1148 plan started off with a Mastcam observation of the… Read More
Sol 1146-1147: A View of Meeteetse
26 October 2015The weekend drive was successful, placing us nicely on an overlook of the “Meeteetse” area. The focus for Sol 1146 is to get some good color stereo images of the whole area, including “Big Sky,” “Greenhorn,” and “Meeteetse”. Mastcam will take a 16x3… Read More
Sols 1143-1145: Last observations at Greenhorn and driving away
23 October 2015After a successful investigation focused on alteration zones around fractures, it’s time to move on. We’re still chewing on data from the “Greenhorn” and “Big Sky” drill samples, but we can wrap up a few last observations in this area and drive away in… Read More
Sol 1142: Nighttime imaging
22 October 2015The Sol 1141 activities completed as expected, and the rover's batteries are charged up enough to allow both daytime and nighttime activities in today's plan. First, the unsieved part of the Greenhorn drill sample will be dumped onto the ground and Mastcam and MAHLI will take pictures… Read More
Sol 1141: Recharging batteries
21 October 2015There was a problem processing the latest data from MSL at the Deep Space Network station that received it, but the data are now available and confirm that the Sol 1140 activities completed successfully. As expected, the batteries need to be recharged after the SAM methane experiment,… Read More
Sol 1140: Zapping the drill hole wall
20 October 2015The ChemCam RMI images of the drill hole planned yesterday were successfully acquired and received, and were used today to plan 2 parallel LIBS rasters down the hole. The additional LIBS raster should be useful in measuring variations in chemistry among individual sand grains and in… Read More
Sol 1139: Another successful drill hole on Mars
19 October 2015Over the weekend Curiosity drilled another hole on Mars at the “Greenhorn” target. Everything went smoothly and we have another beautiful sample to analyze! Today’s plan is focused on transferring the sample to CheMin, followed by CheMin analysis of the drill sample.… Read More
Sols 1136-1138: Drilling at “Greenhorn”
16 October 2015Unfortunately the Sol 1135 bundles were not uplinked due to a DSN issue, so the activities that we planned yesterday never made it onboard. However, that meant that Curiosity spent the day resting and recharging in time for a lot of great science this weekend. Today’s 3-sol… Read More
Sol 1135: Sniffing the Martian air
15 October 2015The Sol 1134 mini-start hole on “Pilgrim” went well, as seen in the above MAHLI image. Side note: if that doesn’t look like a hole to you, try rotating the image (the hole is illuminated from the lower left, but the human eye generally prefers to see sunlight coming… Read More
Sol 1134: Mini-start hole at “Pilgrim”
14 October 2015Curiosity is currently investigating an alteration zone around a fracture, and the plan today is focused on what we call a “mini-start hole.” Before we do a full drill hole, we do a small test hole to make sure its safe. The target “Pilgrim” was selected for… Read More
