Sol 99 Update on Curiosity from USGS Scientist Ken Herkenhoff: ChemCam Team Meeting

15 November 2012

The ChemCam science team meeting went well, but we have a lot of work to do. Of course everyone knew this before the meeting, and now we are more focused on the most important tasks. We have a lot of excellent data, and the most important near-term goal is to broaden the range of rocks and minerals in the database that is used to match Mars spectra with known materials. We knew roughly what to expect before MSL delivered ChemCam to Mars, and built the database appropriately. But it is clear that expanding the database will improve the fidelity of the mineralogic modeling, so it must be done soon. I presented my work on RMI image compression testing, which is much less important but will allow us to significantly reduce the data volume of each image, in turn allowing us to acquire and return more images to Earth.